“With great power… comes great responsibility.”

Background

I’m a little late to the party, but I wanted to follow up the recent dispute about Michael Gove’s comments about history teaching. This was spurred by a twitter conversation with @oldandrewuk where it became clear that we disagreed vigorously about Gove’s approach. It seemed to me that I wasn’t explaining myself, something I shall happily blame on trying to fit my thoughts into 140 characters. Of course, this is why I have a blog, so I told Andrew I’d blog my point of view and look forward to reading his perspective. [EDIT: his post has been up for a few days - clearly much more efficient than I am - but I've yet to comment on it.]  Here we go…

Gove (mis)used some examples of what he saw as poor history teaching and quoted some surveys to make political points, in a speech at Brighton College  and a Daily Mail interview. His comments about the Mr Men revision activity – not used for initial teaching, but to encourage students with a good understanding to rephrase and transform their knowledge for younger classes – have been expertly answered by the resource creator, Russel Tarr. A retired teacher with a Freedom of Information request demonstrated that ‘survey after survey’ was, perhaps, overstating the evidence. Ironically, both suggest that Gove has failed to grasp the importance of context when giving evidence to make a political point.

Power and Responsibility

Let me be clear about something. Gove has every right to have strong opinions about teaching. In fact as the Minister responsible, you could argue that he has an obligation. He has the power to change the education system, subtly or greatly. He can influence funding, celebrate the best of us and condemn the worst. But as Uncle Ben (more or less) said, this power is accompanied by responsibility. And this is a responsibility which is easy to put into words.

What he says must be based on facts.

He doesn’t have to be right every time. He doesn’t have to be popular (which is probably a very good thing). He doesn’t have to be perfect, and to be honest I wouldn’t expect his grammar to be flawless; he’s human after all.

But his opinions are not those of a private citizen when he is speaking or writing about education. He speaks and writes as a government minister, the Secretary of State for Education. Which means he has a responsibility to his government, to his colleagues, to his teachers and most of all to the young people he effectively works for. A responsibility that, by the way, we as teachers share. A responsibility not to spread bullshit.

His Job

Gove’s role is to set policy. It’s to hold us to account. It’s to set national aims, priorities, deadlines. I might disagree with his policies and those of his party, but that’s how politics works. Tell your elected representatives if you don’t like what they’re doing. If you object strongly enough, vote against them next time. If ideas are based on ideology or personal belief, not observable facts, then elected politicians must have the courage and honesty to say so.

His job is not to decide classroom methods, any more than a Health Minister would advise surgeons on the best way to transplant a kidney. The professionals work out the best way to achieve the aims, as defined by the government. If politicians care, they allocate cash for the research to happen. They quote the data – selectively, I’m sure – which supports their opinions and, hopefully, those of their constituents. But they don’t get to make things up. If they over-rule the experts – as is their right to do so, hopefully with a good justification – then they must expect to be challenged.

Gove’s job, and that of every politician, is to find the best people to do all the other jobs. I’d love to think he appreciated my workload through personal experience, but the truth is that doesn’t matter. Instead he needs to know what he doesn’t know, and stay out of it. It would be naive for us not to realise that his speeches and interviews are intended to support the policies he chooses to promote, to encourage validation of his ideas. But if his opinions are intended to justify policy decisions, curriculum changes and funding cuts, then they are government business and so must expect the same scrutiny as formal documents from the Department for Education. Bring facts, Mr Gove, or stay quiet.

What’s concerning with Gove’s curriculum reforms, which seem rushed and ill-considered to many, is that he’s ignoring those people who know what they’re talking about. Last year BERA responded to his wholesale refusal to listen. Subject groups, including the Historical Association and the ASE, have concerns with their specific areas. The related exams review even concerns Ofsted, who called it ‘challenging’ and ‘ambitious’. These are the people who mediate between political hopes and classroom reality. And they’re being ignored or, in many cases, ridiculed.

Sadly Gove has not always responded reasonably to requests for clarification or explanation, let alone to direct challenges. He and his team have even attempted to hide their email conversations from FOI requests, conceal their identities when making political claims (@toryeducation anyone?) and sometimes even let others do their dirty work. Changing this approach would, of course, earn respect from all quarters. Fingers crossed…

Our Job

This isn’t just a political rant, although my apologies if it comes across that way. My frustration is that Gove – like, I’m sure, many other politicians – seeks to move beyond policy (telling us what to do) into professional methods (telling us how to do it). One example I’ve mentioned before is the inclusion of one specific technique, synthetic phonics, in the Code of Practice. Does the Hippocratic Oath specify the one true method to remove an appendix?

Classroom methods are our department – but we equally have a responsibility to base what we do on evidence. We need to use techniques that have been shown, as much as possible, to work. RCTs may not be the only answer but a general aim to improve the quality of evidence can only be a good thing. The next step is to make sure it’s shared much more effectively, something the EFF is hopefully going to make progress with. We need to question our own professional practice and be prepared to defend it when justified. But like Gove, our determination can only be respected if we are prepared to change what doesn’t work.

Anecdotes and value judgements have their place in the classroom, but not at the expense of better evidence. We can use personal stories or topical examples from the media to illustrate our points, but must be prepared to explain why they matter if challenged. For example, using nonsense like BrainGym to justify giving kids water bottles in class devalues us and our professional perspective. Like Gove, we must expect that if we fail to pay attention to details then we will be mocked for our mistakes.

Teachers have great power in the classroom. We are the people tasked with turning children into citizens. We’re certainly the ones who get the blame when it doesn’t work out, despite the wider context! Teaching, like being a parent, is a big job. Our students trust us to tell them the truth, which makes developing scientific models challenging, to say the least. But I hope my students know that I’ll be straight with them, that I won’t use nonsense to back up what I tell them. Because if I did, and they figured it out – which they would – then they’d lose faith in everything else I tell them. Like Gove, we rely on our reputations to have credibility.

With great power comes great responsibility. Politicians have power over government policy, which means they have a responsibility to show they are taking it seriously. Maybe Gove needs to remember that.

PS To those who realised that despite me not changing my avatar to ‘Mr Chalk’ I’ve used this post to reference a different cartoon, well done. And before you accuse me of dumbing down, I’d argue that every kind of popular culture (including Shakespeare) has been looked down on by those referecing their own favourites of the past.

Getting on for 200 tweets from a small (but dedicated) group of Science teachers, with some tentative conclusions as Storified elsewhere. Although participants commented on the weak results from the case study – unavoidable with small groups on a single site – it certainly seemed interesting.

Could we show improved understanding, and hence achievement, by moving away from HSW skills integrated with content, and instead start KS3 by teaching these skills discretely? Enquiring minds want to know. If only there was a way to expand an interesting case study to get more reliable and/or generally applicable results. If only there was a general move towards gathering more evidence at a classroom level that could be widely shared in the profession…

“Hang on, fellas. I’ve got an idea.”

 Where We Are

An interesting case study has found a benefit from one approach (discrete teaching of Sc1 skills at the start of KS3) over another (gradually introduced over the year). A small sample was involved at one school.

What We Could Do Next

As several people pointed out, we need more data before proceeding to a full trial. The next step would be collecting information about schools which use these two approaches and how well they work. How do schools assess students’ understanding of the language and methods? A Googleform or similar would be an easy way to acquire the data without a high cost at this stage.

Trial Design

I should possibly leave this to the experts, but the whole point of this teacher-led approach is to get us involved. (Alternatively, the DfE could press release a huge study but not tell us what they’re actually investigating.) As I understand it, we’d need to

1. Get an education researcher to co-ordinate design/timetables/data analysis.
2. Produce standard resources to be used either all together (discrete unit) or spread through the year (integrated learning) – this could be based on CASE or similar approaches.
3. Design outcome measure, ideally something cheap and non-intrusive.
4. Recruit participant schools.
5. Visit schools during trial (in both arms) to observe delivery, consider deviation from ‘ideal script’, and also raise profile of organisation/idea.
6. This provides good ‘teacher/researcher’ links and could be used as a way to observe CSciTeach candidates perhaps, or at least accredit ‘teacher-researchers’.
7. Collect data on outcomes for both groups. Tests need to be blinded, ideally marked externally or by computer. Workload!
8. Data analysis – which approach gives the best results? Is this correlated with some characteristic of the schools?
9. Share results widely, provide materials and best practice guidance based on evidence.
10. Plan the next RCT, perhaps looking at the materials used.

Funding and Support

I’ve a few ideas, but they’re probably way off. I don’t know how much it would cost, either in terms of money or time. The EEF is focused on attainment of particular groups, so I don’t know how relevant it would be to their aims. (But their funding round closes in October.) The ASE, I suspect, would have the organisational skills but not the money. Might the Science Learning Centres have a part to play, if we consider this from the point of view of teachers developing themselves professionally while conducting research? It would also nicely complement some of the aims of YorkScience. And we shouldn’t forget the original author, Andrew Grime, although I don’t think he’s on Twitter. (We probably should have tried harder to get in touch with him before the Journal Club session, come to think of it…

I’m sure there are many other questions that could be answered in UK Science classrooms. But the question should be, which one shall we try to answer first? Instead of complaining from the sidelines, teachers should, ideally through coordinated projects and their professional associations, get involved. This seems like an ideal chance to make the most of the Evidence-Based Teaching Bandwagon and could perhaps be launched/discussed at ResearchED2013. If we want to make something of it.

Do we?

An apologetic postscript: sorry to followers of the blog who got spammy emails about a post which wasn’t there. This was because I hadn’t read the fine print on Storify about not being able to embed the material on a WordPress.com blog.  It’s the same Storify I link to above, now happily live at the SciTeachJC site.

I know of several students in each of my classes who have tutors; I’m sure there are more who haven’t mentioned it. There are no doubt a range of reasons and a range of benefits, but I can’t help wondering if the parents are necessarily doing the right thing.

In some cases – hopefully none of mine! – parents are trying to make up for a perceived inadequacy in the classroom. This could due to a teacher, concern about numbers or a child who is being missed. In others, a child is being tutored to try and boost them above an important threshold. The focus in schools is often seen as being about the C/D borderline, so parents may feel that if their child is being neglected then extra time is worthwhile. Parents who are hoping for a particlar school place, scholarships or an 11+ exam would fit into this category.

For many, I suspect the real value – whether this is made explicit to the student or not – is that they have a structured time to work, with guidance. And by this, I mean to make sure the kid does some work, at some point. Many teens struggle to focus when there are so many distractions. Knowing that on Wednesday evenings between 5 and 6 they will have to ask and answer questions on an identified weak area probably helps concentrate the mind. And when the sessions are one-to-one, there’s the chance for personalised revision tips, extra examples or quick tests. This might particularly apply to students who are easily distracted in school, for whatever reason.

Of course, in some cases tutoring is a waste of time. I’ve had students who have been taught material at home that’s wrong, or pitched at too high a level. I had one kid who had been taught all the topics in advance, jumped in with all the answers during discussions yet hadn’t practised the things they needed help with. Other times, pupils have clearly rehearsed the general ideas but not applied them in any kind of a useful way. And to be honest, it’s frustrating to have homework handed in which is clearly above the ability of the student. This wastes my time as well as theirs, seeing as when it comes to the test the scores tend to be a better reflection.

The real problem

I don’t want my kids to need a tutor. They already pay for one – me. I promise my students at the start of the year that I’ll always be around if they need support. They write down where to find me at break and lunch. As long as they don’t mind me eating a sandwich or drinking coffee while I talk, I’ll help them whenever I can. I’ve not often turned kids away – but they’ve not often come asking either. So whose fault is it if pupils don’t ask me for help and their parents end up paying someone else instead?

Hypocrisy

The thing is, I’ve tutored before and probably will again. I don’t advertise, I’m not with an agency and I don’t tout for business. Obviously I don’t tutor children from my school, unless you count lunchtime revision sessions put on by the department. So does this make me a hypocrite? I guess it does. The truth is that any child will benefit in some way from having an extra session a week on a subject. It might be about confidence, it might be a concept they struggle with, it might just help them organise their revision. But there will be something. Personally – and I’ve said this to parents of pupils and tutees – I think that it’s not very cost-effective. But I suspect many parents would either feel they wouldn’t be confident with the content or value a neutral adult who can support a struggling teenager. I’ve never been asked to provide inappropriate support with coursework and I’ve never done a kid’s homework for them; at most I’ve given similar examples and worked though some equivalent problems with them. My conscience is clear. But I’m still a little uneasy.

An Alternative

This is basically why I’ve been putting together – slowly, painfully and missing every deadline I’ve set myself – a secondary blog. It’s studenttoolkit.co.uk and it uses some of the same ideas I promote in class. It’s not science-specific, so the ideas can be applied in any subject. It’s careful not to blame teachers or pupils for difficulties. It doesn’t suggest there’s a quick fix – in fact, I should add a version of this post to make clear tutoring is not a simple solution. Instead it provides resources, ideas and suggestions to make it easier to succeed in schools.

I’d value any suggestions about it, as well as comments on the ethics of tutoring itself. Do you tutor, or do you hate the idea? How do you feel when you find one of your students pays for a personal replacement for your help? Am I being overly-sensitive?

Answers on a postcard…

Most of the hyperlinks are to my own posts, because I could find them quickly. I’d love for comments to be added with more/better stuff, so please do!

Active Revision inc MORSE

I like the acronym MORSE, standing for

• Mnemonics (Yes, I know, relatively small benefit, but can’t miss it out)
• Organisation (links between concepts, not remembering your calculator)
• Rehearsal/Repetition (ideally using the ideas behind ‘spaced revision’)
• Simplification/Summarising (key words, lists, page to paragraph to sentence)
• Extension (applying facts to new situations)

I presented on this ages ago at a TeachMeet, but it’s continued to be useful when working with my students. It’s a straightforward checklist to make sure that whatever they’re doing, it’s active rather than passive. As I explain to my classes, although there are some surprises, most revision advice is simple. Like healthy eating, it’s not about mysterious secrets, but about willpower.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Michael Pollan, 2007

Active revision isn’t a complicated idea. It’s about doing something. Writing, not reading. Describing or thinking or explaining, not just watching or listening. It’s quite telling that when I asked a student how they had revised for a recent test, they told me they’d “looked at the revision guide.” Not even read the revision guide, you notice. Have you seen that students seem to treat revision guides like gym memberships? Owning them is enough to ensure the result you wanted, apparently…

Anyway. I like to get students:

• using past papers in loads of ways
• writing revision notes as summaries from a range of sources
• producing mindmaps/revision cards then using them
• asking and answering questions with peers
• rote learning definitions using cover/write/check
• linking concepts with examples and consequences for the 6 mark questions.
• advantages/disadvantages, comparisons with linked ideas/examples (eg the Five Cs format)
• practising mathematical situations, both clear and challenging

..and of course much more. I’m constantly behind in updates to my student-focused site, studenttoolkit.co.uk, which has a revision category. New ideas, contributions, referrals all welcome of course!

AQA-Specific Links

Booklets for students to complete, with checklists. These are all in .pdf format.

• B1 Revision Summary
• B2 Revision Summary
• P1 Revision Summary
• P2 Revision Summary

Nothing for Chemistry, on account of me being a Physicist who can also teach the squishy stuff, but is more likely to blow himself up accidentally rather than on purpose.

Hope some of the above is useful – please met me know what you think, whether positive or negative.

Related articles

• Secret Teacher: where do teachers draw the line in helping students achieve? (schoolsimprovement.net)

B2 summary activity as .pdf

Anyway, you could simply hand it out and ask them to start by filling it in. Let me know how it works out and if you want an editable version (in .docx format) you’ll have to leave a comment. I’ll aim to email it out by… say Wednesday 24th? Seems fair.

Related articles

• Revision Lessons Don’t Have to Be Boring – Some Ideas to Spice it Up! (makinglearningeasier.wordpress.com)

The powerpoint refers to desk signs; these are a good way to define pairs of students, check names if working with an unfamiliar class and also give students some vocabulary that might be useful; this can work as a good starter activity.

There – my shortest even blog post! Please feel free to leave long and detailed comments, though…

Herd immunity is a simple idea; if most of the population are protected against a disease, then it is much less likely to spread and so even those unvaccinated are effectively protected. Scientific views about the precise percentage that need to be immune vary, but it’s certainly well above the current proportions, especially for MMR. This can be blamed on the media, who gave headlines and airtime to Wakefield (struck off for poor ethics, not to mention falsifying data) and many of the anti-vaccination groups. Some organisations, like the BBC, say they need to provide ‘balance’. Others know better but seem to like the increased sales the scare stories bring in.

Anyway, enough ranting. Back to herd immunity.

Some people aren’t vaccinated yet or their vaccinations, for many reasons, have resulted in them being less than 100% protected. This group includes young babies, the immune-suppressed and so on. This is less than ideal but unavoidable. Others remain unprotected because they or their parents believed the media intead of the science. There’s some interesting research to show that people feel more guilt when they have acted to cause a problem, than when their inaction causes an equivalent problem. I just can’t find the link – anyone?

If you never meet anyone who can pass the pathogens on to you, then you won’t get the disease. It’s simple. So more people protected means less chance of bumping into someone who gives you horrible germs. Yes, I’m simplifying, partly because I’m a physicist and partly to put this in classroom-suitable terms. This is herd immunity, where the whole population is effectively protected because enough of them are actually protected. (It has the additional benefit that by removing possible reservoirs there’s less mutation and outbreaks tend to be less severe.)

Herd Immunity as a pdf

The above worksheet gives students a chance to see why even those who are unvaccinated get protection. You’ll need to give them the background, or send them off to research it. Hopefully not just on Wikipedia.

Finally, some extension questions:

• should immunisation be compulsory when medically possible?
• should vaccination be required before starting school (true in some parts of the USA)?
• is it unethical to rely on herd immunity if you are not prepared to risk the small but measurable (millions to one) possibility of adverse effects of a vaccination? (I mentioned this in a guest post for NoodleMaz in January)

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.

I Want To… But I’m Lazy

There’s a lot of evidence to keep up with. A lot of teachers are still being told that learning styles are useful despite a lack of supporting data, and a recent Guardian article shows this also applies to the infamous Myers-Briggs ‘test’. This means that we as teachers aren’t accessing old research, let alone new material. This is hardly surprising when you consider the cost; joining the British Educational Research Association costs £89, for which you get 6 issues of the BJER each year, and four issues a year of the Curriculum Journal will set you back £135. There’s also the lack of time teachers have when constantly rewriting schemes of work to suit the latest national qualification change, of course!

I do my best to keep up, but I’ve only so much time and money. I pay for my own membership of the ASE. I buy my own books. I spend my own time developing what I know and what I can do. I make it to TeachMeets when I can, join in with #asechat and #SciTeachJC, read and try out in school and reflect afterwards. But the situation we’re in makes it difficult.

Of course, what makes it even more frustrating is when individual teachers know the research and want to make decisions about teaching based on evidence, but aren’t allowed to. It’s important to recognise that schools may have perfectly valid reasons for not following suggestions from research, and cost is obviously often high on the list! But we need to accept that sometimes we are not getting it right on an institutional level, and this needs to change. If it doesn’t change from the bottom up, it will inevitably – and probably slowly and painfully – happen from the top down.

What’s Already Available And Where From

Every school should have well-thumbed copies of Petty’s book Evidence-Based Teaching and Hattie’s Visible Learning.  In my opinion – as a classroom teacher, not a manager – schools could do a lot worse than spending half of every inset day applying just one of the ‘best-value’ concepts in every relevant department. The constantly updated research by Marzano in the States examines a wide variety of teaching methods in terms of their success against measured criteria. The database is freely available and there are materials to explain effect size.

The British Educational Research Association (BERA) and the Specialist Schools Attainment Trust (SSAT) spend time and money looking into the effectiveness of eduication policies and methods; the latter works primarily with schools. The Evidence for Policy and Practice Information (EPPI) unit based out of the Institute of Education looks interesting, but not exactly accessible for those of us in the classroom. The GTC produced some research summaries with the title Research for Teachers (RfT) but I don’t know how well they were accessed; the group behind the summaries, the Centre for the Use of Research and Evidence in Education (CUREE) is still active. There’s the National Education Trust. And of course the Times Ed now has a weekly article bridging the gap between research and classroom practice, but I can’t find it online. There’s lots around, some free and some not so much. Some is purely academic while other groups attempt to translate it for classroom use.

The Education Endowment Foundation looks particularly at techniques to support those from disadvantaged background but their EEF Toolkit is generally useful, ranking interventions in terms of ‘value for money’. The difficulty with this approach is that it ignores the cost in terms of time and pressure on teachers, something I am sure they are aware of. It is the limited time of individual teachers which means centralised research is so necessary. As of 22^nd March they have a vacancy for a Senior Analyst, if you’re interested…

There are some smaller groups in the UK; the Evidence-Based Teachers’ Network grew out of training sessions and has some useful summaries. There are many practitioners active online, for example @teachitso on Twitter (Dr Mark Evans IRL) who has some useful summaries on his site. There’s also several (competing?) groups such as the Guild of Teaching and the Teacher Development Trust with a small impact so far.

What We Need To Do Better

Much – but not all – of the current evidence is based on action research. This means a practitioner decides to try an intervention, does so and records any measurable change in results. This could be exam scores, recruitment rates for post-16 courses (I did that) or something else. It tends to be small samples and a snapshot in time. Think of them as case studies. Useful because they’re a step up from staffroom anecdotes, but more a starting point than gold-standard data.

Ben Goldacre, following the paper he wrote on RCTs for social issues that we discussed in #SciTeachJC, was asked to consider the use of RCTs specifically in education. The report has now been published and has stirred up a lot of debate. He wrote an article about it for the Guardian, and it’s noticeable how conscientiously he’s engaged with those commenting. I’d recommend reading the paper itself, of course – unlike some of those commenting. I like the idea of getting more teachers involved in research, obviously, but many seem sceptical. From a teacher’s point of view, the main issue is getting hold of the information afterwards. But it’s okay, the government has a cunning plan…

From this announcement, the EEF will be one of six centres, alongside NICE, tasked with gathering and disseminating evidence on social issues. It deliberately follows the NICE model where the evidence is analysed independantly of government, which would then (hopefully) consider the results and implications. A big issue I see here, of course, is that we seem to be moving away from a centralised education system where new knowledge would result in new systems for all. But we’ll see how it works.

What I Would Like

I’ve said before – like many others on Twitter, and I’m sure I wasn’t the first – that we need a National Institure of Education Excellence. An organisation committed to performing more meta-analyses of research, like the Cochrane Collaboration, and then making sure everyone else knows. For this to work effectively, there are several things the system needs.

Information needs to be effectively free at the point of use. Schools won’t pay for what they think they can get for free elsewhere (even if they’re wrong) and if we say all teachers need the information, it seems odd to expect them to pay for it when they’re cutting our pay in real terms.

The research cannot be politically driven. Some of the answers will go against current government policy. Some of the research will show MPs or Ministers to be wrong. That’s how evidence works and they’re going to have to be prepared to accept the consequences. But we can’t expect Gove to follow the evidence if we don’t do what we can to (a)collect it and (b)use it as soon as we know.

Interventions will have different relevance to different people and institutions. I tend to think of strategic choices at national level (such as exam specifications), tactical choices at a school level (such as behaviour and homework policies, setting and ICT provision) and choices of technique in a classroom (such as how to make group work most effective). I’m sure it’s more complicated than that, but you get the idea. We need to get the right information to the right people.

We need a wish-list, as Ben puts it, of questions we want answered. Set up a Google form and let any of us suggest something to investigate; shortlist and vote every six months. Personally, I’d love to see a comparison between students taught to use Blooms’ and those who are exposed to SOLO. Is there a difference? Does it depend on the students? If so, which method should we teach to which kids?

Teachers should have the opportunity to build up their skills as researchers. If they are needed to do more than send a copy of the results their class got following intervention A/B/C (delete as applicable) then the chance to get involved in data analysis will make it more likely they put the results into practice.

Get current researchers involved in designing the interventions. Of course this might be difficult if they feel the Secretary of State for Education is dismissive of their views or their motivations. We need better links between academics and full-time practitioners (or more people who do both, like the wonderful @MaryUYSEG). Maybe BERA could offer discounted memberships to the data-collectors?

Share the results widely in a format that means it can be used immediately. Imagine a magazine format, published electronically every month in three sections; strategic, tactical and techniques. The summaries link to journal articles, which are made open-access for the month so we can all see how well the synopsis matches the evidence. And each month three case studies show how the evidence from six months was put into practice at all three levels.

Next

There’s lots of groups talking about doing the same thing – linking research to practice. And despite having been in post for nine years, with a strong interest in science and evidence, I found half of the links in this post today for the first time.

Surely we can do better than this?

EDIT/UPDATE: It looks like something is happening rather quicker than we might have expected, thanks to the efforts of Tom Bennett. Check out the new blog for this September’s suddenly planned conference, ResearchED2013.

Related articles

• The Evidence for What Works in education (wellcometrust.wordpress.com)

This is intended for those of us who teach GCSE Science with AQA, to help with the joy of an ISA. Of course we’ve no idea what format this will take once Gove’s messed around with it, but I can be fairly confident that even he couldn’t make it any worse. I’ve blogged before about the weaknesses I see with the current model, and what I’ve done to address them. Here’s the resources I’m currently using to try and help my classes. They should work, with tweaking of course, for any variant of the AQA Science courses. Click on the image for the presentation:

I found that my students, despite having been shown the sample exam papers while they researched, struggled to include all relevant information on their Research Notes sheets. My solution was to produce an extra sheet with more detailed prompts, similar to those in the presentation above, which they could fill in. I had them keep the exam paper and markscheme open in an extra tab, and annotate their sheet with the linked question numbers for each fact. They then transferred their messy information to the official sheets, which of course acts as another rehearsal before the exam.

ISA preprac as .pdf

Please let me know what you think, good and bad. The ‘post-prac’ equivalents should be up by the end of halfterm, subject to the usual caveats.

Objectives

• Recap key facts
• Improve structure of answers to 6 mark questions
• (Appreciate that it’s hard to write good 6 mark questions and markschemes)

Starter

Question on board, set timer running: “You have 6 minutes.”

I do it, We do it together

Ask what they think the aim of the lesson is.

6 mark questions may require explanations, examples to illustrate a specified concept, judgements of advantages and disadvantages, a description of a process or an experimental method. Marks are awarded for scientific content and the quality of the writing. This means key ideas must be clear and the explanation must make sense, the points in a logical order. Most students lose marks because their answers lack sufficient detail eg scientific vocabulary or because their answer is rambling or confused. Markschemes will usually include graded answers (low=1-2 marks, 3-4, 5-6) and examiners will decide which description fits best, then award the higher or lower score depending on the quality of writing. Aim for between 4 and 6 scientific points or steps in a process; if opposing viewpoints are needed include points for and against, or examples of plants and animals etc.

Introduce method:

• Bullet point ideas
• Number the points to give a logical sequence, adding or removing points.
• Use this order to write coherent sentences.

Model with a new question, ask students to consider how they would structure their answer, show numbers, ask them to discuss possible sentences based on these points. Compare with each other, pick up on details needed by examiner.

You do it together

Give them more questions, have them discuss one in pairs while they attempt it. Collaboration should be about making suggestions and producing two different answers which can be compared, not one identical answer. You could give a choice or set it by rows. Go through example bullet points, discuss gaps, additions and exclusions. Elicit possible/useful connectives.

You do it alone

Attempt a question in exam conditions, following method. Compare to markscheme (ideally this one should be a past or sample question with specified allowed answers) and make specific improvements. Return to the original Starter question and annotate their answer, explaining why they would change various parts.

Extension

• Have students write their own questions and markschemes for specific points in the syllabus. Linking this to higher order tasks via Blooms or SOLO may be useful.
• Use the questions to play consequences where one student writes a question, one writes bullet points, one sequences and a last writes full sentences. This will end up with four complete answers which can then be discussed.
• Give sample answers and have students mark them, first with and then without a markscheme. What do they forget? What level of detail is required?

Thoughts?

UPDATE: A useful approach from @gregtheseal via twitpic, and I like the ‘CUSTARD’ mnemonic shared by @IanMcDaid. Thank you!