Variety is the spice of life... /Exit tickets 2

http://geordiescience.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/exit-ticket-afl.html
I have written before about exit tickets. I have been using them once per week for my GCSE classes. the current year 11 took to them well, and the current Year 10 have been happy to do them too.

I find it very useful. While I mark them formatively, I do record a brief mark I think they would get into my mark book and through last year I noticed an increase in the scores that I was awarding. More than that though it helps the students to consolidate disjointed ideas within a topic. And I learn a lot about where the students are going wrong with ideas and exam technique.

These are my resources for OCR Gateway:

P1:
http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Exit-Tickets-for-OCR-Gateway-2012-P1-module-6344086/
C2:
http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Exit-Ticket-Worksheet-C2-OCR-Gateway-2011-12-spec-6319894/

However, despite this success, I am concerned that overkill with exit tickets will damped their positive effect if students get bored with them. I fear this because I want to introduce them to my department as a positive activity.

How else can I present 6 mark style questions without calling them such? I don't want to have to mark them out of six and I don't want student to fear them on the exam paper making them a big mental block. Not much to ask?


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Location:Rudgleigh Ave,Bristol,United Kingdom

Destroy Enrichment

During the summer Rachel Jones challenged me and Karen DW to try and be more creative by setting up a 'destroy' homework. Please do look at her ideas and work here: http://createinnovateexplore.com/learning/destroy-homework/

Karen and I both agreed that we could do famous scientists related to our topics.

I did think that I would set this as the first homework of the year for Year 10 to introduce them to some of the scientists they would come in contact with during their GCSEs. However, in my school we have to teach Saturdays, so last Saturday I decided to set this activity as work for year 10 to do during the morning session instead.

To introduce the topic I showed them a video of Rankin's 'destroy' project for Youth Music to give the students the idea. http://www.youthmusic.org.uk/rankin/home/ Then I showed the students some images I found by searching on google, such as this image of Kylie.

The first thing the student did was research a famous scientist. One from a list or one of their own. I offered a concept map containing a list of who, what, where, when, why, how, questions on it to help structure ideas and condense them from Wikipedia!







The students printed images they found on the Internet that they could cut up later and destroy.











The students has access to printable transparencies, coloured sugar paper, plain paper (A2/3/4), pencils, felt pens, foil, string, cotton wool, glue and scissors. The printer is a colour photocopier, so they could use colour.















The students had about two hours to create the images you see above and below. Some didn't finish and have taken them home to complete.





























The students were asking why science lessons were not like this all the time!






Overall, a great experience. I would reccomend this as a way of creating images and posters that tell you something, but do not involve much writing. The students did learn about the scientist and enjoyed themselves too.

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"We already do that" and "Teacher Proof"

I am 56% of the way through Tom Bennett's book teacher proof.

I have to say that I am feeling smug. It seems to me that I have been a teacher the same length of time that he has, give or take. However, as a member of a science department I have never found myself taking on board any of the ideas Tom is dismissive of. Mainly thanks to cynical heads of department and lack of enthusiasm once part of the science teachers (including me).

Imagine the science staff meeting.
"Is everyone here?"
"Angela hasn't got her cup of coffee yet, she's coming though"
"I'll start without her, she'll catch up. I have been asked by the deputy to add initiative X to the agenda, but I think that we already do that".
"Yeah, coz we do practical work so do learning styles/group work/multiple intelligences"
"We definitely do the nature multiple intelligence because in year 8 we go outside and count daisies."
"And we do data logging, so we already get students ready for the 21C"
"We do CASE" *furtive look as we no one actually does the CASE lessons* "so we are doing thinking skills and learning to learn".
"So what about thinking hats?"
"I wrote it into the lesson about whether we should build a nuclear power station in the middle of town, so we have it in a scheme".
"Right, so I can tell the deputy that we do all this stuff?"
"yes", "definitely", "yup", "yes".
"Great, carry on as normal".

And we did. It seems to me the "we do practical work" defence has protected many science departments from trying to implement a terrible initiative.



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I am a science teacher, I have joined twitter, now what?

You've signed up to an account.

Choose a @ name that isn't too long. And get a twitter app on your mobile device.

Now follow some people. I recommend @viciascience, @needhaml56, @lgolton, @kdwscience, @a_weatherall @bio_joe @asober @DrDav @agittner @cleverfiend @stuartphysics @lornamonroe @MaryUYSEG @teachingofsci and @mrsdrsarah as a starting point. Also follow organisations like @theASE @tesScience and @ITEfaraday

There are some lovely people like @hthompson1982 @natkin and @teachingtricks who will do what they can to help other teachers too.

Now start tweeting. But what can you tweet?

Links would be the first suggestion: to an interesting science or education story, to a great website or teaching resource, to a blog post, or just anything that you find interesting.

Photographs and images would be my next suggestion. A funny or interesting science image or cartoon. A photograph of your students work, a display you have made, a slide from a PowerPoint you are proud of. Be wary not to post photographs of your students if you are unsure the school has the relevant releases from parents.

A comment on an incident that has happened to you, particularly if it is positive. A comment on a news story.

Another thing to realise is that you are connected to a network of around 700 UK science teachers and even more abroad as well as numerous science and science education organisations you can ask a question or for help.

And lastly, of course you can retweet the tweets of others and reply to their tweets.

If you want your tweet to have a wider audience than just your followers then include a hashtag in your tweet. I recommend #asechat #scichat or #ukedchat then people who filter ALL tweets by hashtags will be able to see what you have to say.

Do set up saved searches of hashtags like #asechat so you can browse them yourself. You can find new people to interact with that way too.

Welcome to the world to the UK science teacher community on twitter.

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Location:Rudgleigh Avenue,Easton-in-Gordano,United Kingdom

Using a Stick to Make Changes in Education

When it looked like 100% of the assessment of GCSE science was going to be examination based I was dismayed. "Science is a practical subject and we will lose that if the assessment doesn't reflect this".

In 2005 I went to an event for all the science teachers in Dudley and Wolverhampton LAs. I didn't make notes, but I do remember it was someone from York as the National Science Learning Centre was mentioned a lot. The speaker said that assessment is what drives the taught curriculum and that there were issues in how to assess 'how science works' part of the upcoming GCSE science. (The 2006 GCSE where double science was split to core and additional and 'how science works' was introduced). *at least this is what I remember hearing.

I found this quite powerful, and it did/does reflect my practice. I teach to the test. To this day I teach to the test: why would I not look at the hoop my students have to jump through and aim them as clearly as I can in the right direction?

However, it also made me feel like a tiny cog in the wheel. What I do, how I do it and what my students get out of it, is dictated by the skill of exam writers.

At the end of June I went to the ASE celebration conference in Hatfield. As part of that I attended two sessions host by AQA. We were looking at threats and possible solutions to science education in the next ten years. The audience had to suggest policies to address these threats. The topics picked were linked assessment and STEM. As part of the discussions there were suggestions put forward of how to 'encourage' schools to adopt the policy ideas being proposed: the responses were 'ofqual', 'league tables', 'ofsted' etc. All the things that are used as a stick against schools.

So I go back to my considerations about practical work. Is the call for there to be a practical aspect to the GCSE science assessment because it is a genuine skill that scientists need to be ready for a job, university or college? Or is it simply that we are proud in the UK of our practical science culture and want to maintain it through using the stick of assessment. Do either of these reasons really require that we examine practical work?

I would really like to see a culture where we didn't need the stick to enforce a certain type of practice. If it is good for the students then that should be enough reason to do it.

It all comes back to the professionalism of teachers: do we deserve it? Should we be given the responsibility and see if the 'profession' can rise to it?Would practice actually improve for the better because we would be adding things to both to school life and to lessons that would have an impact that is not possible to measure in exams, but will benefit the adult that child will become and the society it will live in.

But, my thoughts always come back to the probability that teaching to the test is so ingrained in teachers that "Science is a practical subject and we will lose that if the assessment doesn't reflect this".


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Accountability and The Problems Line Managers Cause

I am accountable to myself and I like it.

In my current school I have not had a performance management meeting, targets or a even mentor assigned to me.

I have no direct line manager: I am accountable to as an individual as far as I can tell. As I am a curriculum leader I deal with the assistant head teacher for teaching and learning related issues and the director of studies (who is also the deputy head), for matters involving students. I don't find this a negative, these two members of management are accountable for all the exam results and as a result can be fair when dealing with individual subjects. They are also very understanding and supportive.

I am solely responsible for science, so I don't have someone who doesn't understand what is involved teaching science, or even what is involved in running a faculty, trying to effect the decisions I am making about the running of the faculty.

I have been in post 14 months now and for the first few I was waiting for others to tell me what to do. Nervous that if I made a change I should run it by someone else first. That someone would want to know what I was doing and why I was doing it and then ask me to submit forms. Don't get me wrong there's paper work to do, but I feel that I have autonomy that I have never experienced before.

Another head of science colleague of mine told me about her previous line manager. The manager was quite determined to make decisions that wold help improve Science, but these changes were structural or curriculum based and didn't move the department forwards. Her line manager was constantly asking her to change the make up the groups, mixed ability to setted and back again, change the timetables so new staff were teaching groups, move students from BTEC to GCSE and vice versa and enter students for exams, do mock exams, withdraw students from exams, change the way she was going to do controlled assessment and a variety of other hands-on decisions. Meanwhile the head of science was left spending her time making changes she didn't believe in rather than doing what needed to be done to improve the teaching skills of the teachers.

It is possible to argue that my colleague was not managed correctly. I would agree. But I also can understand why the manager would be so desperate to interfere as she too was accountable for the science department and being able to show the head what was done is always preferable on a personal level to saying we did nothing and we still got the same outcome.

I found the line managers in my previous school frustrating to some degree, but not to the same extent as my colleague.

As Head of Physics my line manager was the Head of Science and also an Assistant Principal. He struggled to balance the two jobs. Having no line manger himself he put in pace crazy schemes and methods of teaching. We rearranged the key stage 3 curriculum into nonsensical order and called it "innovative". The knock on when those students reached year 10 was a halving of the numbers doing triple science. We scrapped Core and Additional GCSE pathway, forcing all students who want to do art or media to choose BTEC, in the end a student was unable to get into her Primary education course because she didn't have GCSE science. Those are examples that spring to mind, there were an awful lot more. Most were not instigated by the Head of Science/Assistant Principal, but by a strong head of biology/key stage 3 coordinator who left before the damage was discovered; however the Head of Science/Assistant Principal tried to make the bad ideas work to save face.

In the school prior to that we all lived in constant fear of our line managers. Bullying was a problem from the very top of the school. I say we all live in fear, when we got a new head of faculty he took a much more relaxed view and was very honest and empathetic with the teachers and post holders in the faculty. He managed by not managing. He let us run with ideas and see where they took us. I imagine he took at lot of flack for not having us on a tight leash.

I appreciate that I am the expert on science education in my school and I am trusted to do my job.

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The aims of the science national curriculum (ks3)

Again I am looking at the proposed changes to the science national curriculum at key stage 3.

My previous blog post on the aims is here: http://geordiescience.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/comparing-aims-of-science-national.html

There has been changes from the February document to the current one.

In February this paragraph was written under the title 'Purpose of Study':


The current draft is exactly the same, however it misses the last sentence.

I still don't like the first sentence of the purpose of study. I think it was wise not to call the separate sciences biology, chemistry and physics as the lines are very blurred, and I think it marginalises geology, astronomy, ecology etc as specific disciplines.

I am also left wondering about the omission of the last sentence. Is it irrelevant as we would teach lessons in the context of application anyway? Or has it be omitted because the wording isn't great: "the specific applications", which specific applications? I do think that it is important that in science lessons we are teaching students about the links between science and their lives, without this we are not preparing them for the science based decisions they may have to make.



The aims of the science curriculum have not changed at all.

In the light of the aims, my concerns about the omission of the last sentence of the purpose seem unfounded as preparing students for a scientific and technological world seem linked to the third aim of the curriculum here.

I think that I would have liked to see 'curiosity' in the aims. Students should not just answer questions, but learn to ask them too.

As key stage 3 is not assessed by an exam the aims do not need to be restricted to things that can be assess using a written exam.

I still like the aims of the 2008 PoS best:


I agree they are wooly, but they are admirable.


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