Archive for science

Why we’re trying twitter

04/02/2012 active learning, cfe, change, science 8 comments

I mentioned on #PedagooFriday…

Been experimenting with the use of twitter in the classroom this week! #PedagooFriday #plbio
03/02/2012 8:50 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@fkelly
Fearghal Kelly

Some folk were asking for a blog post on this, so I thought I’d try my first ever screencast!

The very helpful post I mentioned is here.

Update

As we’re part way through this topic now, I decided to take some time out last week to reflect on our progress. We did a “table mat” activity where I got the pupils to reflect individually on the positives and the difficulties and then they had to come up with possible improvements as a group. I then summarised all of this for each class. You can see one example of the sort of reflections they were coming up with, and the summaries for each class in the presentation below.

Both classes were quite anxious regarding how much they’re learning. To help them with this I used Flubaroo to create a little check test for them to show how much they are learning, and I’ve printed off a sheet for them to record their progress for them to stick into their jotters. I’ve also given them more help in terms of the websites to use for research, and the sort of activities which they could plan for the lessons.

Everyone’s finding it challenging, but I think more are beginning to get used to this way of working…I’m really pleased with the sorts of positives which they came up with already!

Making Learning Real

10/01/2012 cfe, change, science 4 comments

I’m quite inspired by Ewan’s idea of a problem finder curriculum, but I’m not entirely sure how to get there to be honest…however it has encouraged me to persevere with trying to give my pupils’ greater ownership over their own learning, and making their learning more real.

I know it’s nowhere near the idea that Ewan’s proposing, but I have made a couple of recent attempts to use the web to make learning a little more real in my classroom. The first was with an Intermediate 1 Biology class who were about to learn about body temperature. As a parent, I felt that the learning might seem more relevant if the pupils were to produce a website on body temperature for new parents – something I remember being quite anxious about first time round. I knew I’d use Google Sites for the actual creation of the sites, but I didn’t feel that the pupils would buy into this completely with the horrific URLs which Google Sites uses. So I bought a domain name to try and help with this…mybabystemperature.info

You can view their sites by following the link above. The pupils really engaged with the task, many of them taking the responsibility of producing a real website with an actual audience quite seriously.

I’ve since followed this idea up with something similar, but this time the site can be used with a wider range of classes: biologyrevision.info

As you’ll see, I’ve already begun to use this with Standard Grade classes as well as Intermediate 1. Once again, the pupils seemed to really enjoy producing something which is “real” and has an actual audience. And the beauty of Google Sites is that they can collaborate and review in private and only publish once they’re happy with it.

I’m looking forward to finding better and ever more challenging ways of opening up learning in my classroom…

Inquiry Based Learning in Science

05/01/2012 science, speaking No comments

I thought I’d celebrate the resurrection of my blog by sharing a wee video of me talking about inquiry based learning in science. This was recorded following the PISCES module I helped develop and deliver as part of the STEAM project.

Do the project first!

30/09/2011 active learning, cfe, change, science 2 comments

In June of this year I was lucky enough to attend the Cramlington Learning Festival, something I’ve already mentioned on here.

One of the sessions I attended was led by the inspiring Darren Mead, who shared his Project Based Learning mantra with us: “Do the project first”. In other words, if you’re going to set a project for students to complete then we as teachers should be trying it first and showing this to the students at the outset. Darren showed us one he’d done. Whilst it was impressive that he’d gone and spent all that time making his project, one of the things that really surprised me at the time was that it wasn’t perfect – at one point his young son was doing the camera work! On reflection, I think this is fantastic. It would be potentially devasting to show the students unobtainable perfection and then ask them to try to do their own projects…

As we’re redesigning our S2 courses currently, we’ve been trying to diversify the opportunities for learning and assessment – and using these to help engage the students in the topic. For example, in our new Genetics & Reproduction topic we’re planning to ask our students to produce a documentary aimed at couples who are planning to try for a baby at the end of the topic. We’re going to share this task with them at the start of the topic, but use this to structure the actual lessons:

The six questions in the list slide provide the titles of each of the lessons in the topic. But, since Darren’s session I’d been thinking…should we be trying this first? Should we have a go at producing the documentary and ask the pupils to assess it before we start the topic…so a colleague and I went for it – remember, it’s a long way from perfection – but deliberately so…

We’ll let you know how it goes…

A Healthy Heart

10/08/2011 active learning, cfe, change, Featured, learning cycle, MEd, science No comments

Following from my previous post, I’ve been preparing the lessons for the class I’m going to using the learning cycle with – one of my S3 Intermediate 1 Biology classes.

We’ll be learning about the heart when we return after the summer break, and so I’ve been trying to use the learning cycle to plan the lessons, and then producing a powerpoint to accompany this. It’s been surprisingly tough going – mainly due to the amount of time it takes. I am also finding it fun though. It’s liberating to plan without such a focus on the textbook and I’m looking forward to seeing how the lessons go next week…

Firstly the planning…
http://fkelly.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Healthy-Heart-Lesson-Plans.pdf

And here’s the powerpoint…
http://fkelly.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/HealthyHeart.pdf

And some other associated files…

Striving for Excellence

24/06/2011 change, Featured, reflection, science 2 comments

Cramlington Learning FestivalI’m just in the door from my first visit to the Cramlington Learning Festival, and my head’s still swirling. Although this was my second visit to the school, it was still mightily impressive.

There are so many things to be impressed and inspired from today, that it’s hard to know what to reflect on and what I’ll do as a result. I attended five sessions today – the two keynotes and three workshops – all of which were quite different.

We started off the day with Alistair Smith, a long time friend of the school. We received a free copy of his new book in our conference pack and he spoke mainly around the ideas which have arisen from his discussions with leaders of successful schools which have formed the basis of ‘High Performers’. He talked a lot about the fabulous work of Carol Dweck and introduced quite a few new concepts to me, but unfortunately he had to speed through some of the more unfamiliar stuff. At least I can check it out in the book!

The second keynote was from David Price. He was both very entertaining and inspiring talking a lot about the idea of schools as learning commons. I definitely need to check out his blog!

As inspiring as these keynotes were, the really good stuff was the workshops. My first was with Darren Mead, who it was great to finally meet. He shared how they’re embedding both enquiry and project based learning into their year 7 & 8 science curriculum. I then heard how the key stage 4 science team have been developing a new GCSE science module from scratch based on a combination of backwards design and pathway approaches to curriculum development. My final workshop was on how CPD is led at Cramlington.

Whilst all of these workshops were on relatively different subjects, I’m thinking there was a common feature which really impresses. They keep trying things out, based on evidence and reflection, in a relentless pursuit of excellence. This is a school who I think has had straight outstanding inspections from OFSTED on the last three occasions, and yet they’re not convinced they’ve got it right. In fact, for every couple of examples they give of what’s working well, there seems to be another example of an improvement they’ve got in the pipeline. They seem to actually fully embody journey to excellence in a way I’ve never encountered before.

If there’s anything which inspires me most about Cramlington, it is their seemingly endless desire to improve to provide the best possible outcomes for the young people in their care.

The risk paradox

10/06/2011 cfe, change, Featured, learning cycle, reflection, science 7 comments

We changed our timetable this week and have made start on 2011/12, which means I got to meet my new classes and get going on their new courses. This is such a crucial time. Somehow, you’ve got to find the balance between setting the right tone with your new classes and the inevitable wind down towards the end of term. Two of my classes are making a start on their Intermediate 1 Biology courses and I’ve been fighting the strong urge to play it safe. I’ve decided to take what feels like a risky strategy, but why do I think it’s risky…?

To give a bit of context, this course kicks off by learning about the nature of health in terms of physical, mental & social health and then moves onto considering how physiological measurements of health can be taken. In the past, I wouldn’t have given too much thought on how to approach this…draw the health triangle…complete a worksheet on staying healthy…draw a table of methods of taking physiological measurements…and so on. My assumption had been that I would employ similar methods this time around, but I really didn’t want to. This was not the tone I wanted to set with my new classes and felt that if I started in this rather predictable manner, then I would struggle to ever break out of this in the future. Despite this strong desire, I was worried about taking a riskier approach. What if it didn’t work? What if the behaviour was awful?

The strange thing is, my old method wasn’t terribly successful. The pupils tended to find the content quite boring and would soon start playing up. Even worse, they wouldn’t be able to remember any of this particularly well in a few months time. So why on earth would I consider this approach to be the safe one? Is it because it resulted in a relatively quiet classroom with me in control? Or perhaps because it generated jotters filled with notes? Or maybe I just feel it’s what everyone, including the pupils, expect of me? It’s surprising how hard it is to break out of these drivers!

Anyway, despite this strange internal pressure, I managed to resist. I kicked off with some circle time to discuss how we should approach learning as a class. I followed this with a group challenge to draw the health triangle based on short 10 second individual opportunities to view one copy of it at the front. We then made a video of the whole class acting out the health triangle which we watched next lesson before designing posters for doctors’ surgeries to promote all three aspects of health. My plan for the next lessons was to break the groups up into expert teams to research and present on each of the four physiological measurements they need to know, but one of the pupils in one of the classes has suggested we make health promotion adverts instead so we’re going to do that first…

And the result? The pupils’ behaviour has been outstanding – they’ve been much more engaged and motivated so far than I would’ve anticipated from my old approaches – and more importantly, they’re really learning it. But why would I doubt that? All my experience and reading in the last few years emphatically point to these sorts of strategies being significantly more successful, but for some reason when faced with the reality of 40 new S3 pupils it still takes a bit of a leap of faith to take what feels like a risk, but really isn’t at all.

What is knowledge?

22/02/2011 change, Featured, reflection, science One comment

Academics often have a real knack for hurting your head. They can take a word that you use every day and turn it inside out, upside down and really challenge some of the most fundamental assumptions. I had one of these very experiences this week at the first of the University of Stirling‘s ESRC Seminar Series entitled ‘Curriculum for the 21st Century’. The focus for seminar one was ‘Knowledge and the Curriculum‘ and the word which had some serious analysis was knowledge. It’s a word we use a lot in our profession, but what do we mean by it? How we view this word can have a massive influence on our approach to curriculum.

Although Michael Young couldn’t make the seminar due to illness, we were treated to presentations from Mark Priestley, Gert Biesta and Laura Colucci-Gray on this topic followed by opportunities to question each of them in small groups. All of the presentations and discussions were very stimulating, but it was Professor Biesta who really got my brain working, as demonstrated by the following tweet:

Gert’s presentation was heavily influenced by the work of Dewey and I am clearly going to fail to summarise what he was saying here. So I’m not really going to try to do that. I’m instead trying to summarise what I took from his presentation. During his presentation I had four inter-related recent thoughts swimming through my mind…

  1. Mark concluded his presentation by pointing out that although school subjects were derived from the disciplines, they were not in themselves disciplines as such…
  2. This then got me thinking about a post I wrote once on teaching science…
  3. This in turn reminded me of another post I wrote on teaching doubt…
  4. This then linked to something which occurred on Sunday at an SQA CfE QDT [acronym triple point score!] meeting when a teacher suggested that we needed to include the definition of species into the National 5 Biology content to general approval in the room – except from one member. He represents a University and asked to be informed exactly what the definition of a species is once we’d worked this out [if you're not a biologist, have a look at this].

Gert was using pragmatism to resolve the objectivism vs relativism debate – which focuses on the existence of knowledge as either fixed truth, or subjective to each individual. This notion of objectivism stems from a philosophical position that the mind is immaterial so cannot therefore ever contain the material world – there will always be a gap between the two. Apparently Dewey stated that this is the wrong starting point for the discussion. The mind and world are not separate. We interact with the world and change it. At its most fundamental, this could be exemplified by breathing – but extends to knowledge also.

From this starting point, Gert led us to a point whereby that it was ok for all knowledge to be socially constructed and subjective and any gap between knowledge and truth is temporal – between current actions and future consequences. The only problem arises is when we have to work with others and we all have our own subjective knowledge. In order to get round this, we develop an inter-subjective, shared, coordinated world.

So what does all this mean for education? Gert stated that as a result of these ideas, the key process for learning is experiences, or transactions. It’s only by doing and undergoing can we develop our understanding of the world. I think that it’s also clear here that even though we can view knowledge as inter-subjective, this does not decrease its value. Curriculum can still include knowledge, and in fact must, if future generations are going to be part of this shared understanding of the world.

It does however mean that we need to constantly remind ourselves that we are not imparting truths, but sharing our subjective understanding of the world. We need therefore to provide learners with the opportunity to learn the limitations of our models and encourage them to question – which relates back to my teaching doubt post.

This then caused me to reflect on my own understandings of knowledge. Whilst I was at school I accepted knowledge as truths and did my best to regurgitate these on the lines and in the boxes provided to me in large silent halls. By the time I finished my degree however I realised that there was no such thing as proof and that we were all just slowly collaboratively constructing best fit models to explain the world, some of which we all agreed upon and others less so.

Somehow however after eight years of teaching I’ve somehow reached the point where it seems acceptable to state that students need to know what the definition of a species is – even though ten years ago I would’ve strongly questioned this. This in turn leads me back to the difference between school subjects and the disciplines.

It feels as though I should now be reaching for some sort of conclusion to this blog post, but I’m not sure what the conclusion is quite at this point. I think I know what this means for my own practice as a teacher, but what impact this should or might have on the curriculum is another question…?

EDUtalkr: Delivering excellent Science education

30/01/2011 cfe, change, science, speaking One comment

I was invited to discuss science education in Scotland as part of the EDUtalkr panel series on Scottish Education last week. We had a great discussion and the hour flew by.

Click here to have a listen…

Teaching Doubt

16/01/2011 assessment, change, science 8 comments

There’s a cracking little piece in yesterday’s Guardian regarding scientific doubt. Click here to have a read.

The article states that…

the public often misunderstands the scientific process and the nature of scientific doubt. This can fuel public rows over the significance of disagreements between scientists about controversial issues such as climate change and vaccine safety

This comes as no surprise to me. As a science teacher I rarely discuss doubt with my pupils. Information is presented to them very much as fact. Given that top scientists would like the public to “learn to love uncertainty” why do we spend so little time on this in schools? I’m not sure. My guess is that uncertainty is hard to assess, difficult to control and time consuming to study…none of which are very good reasons for us to avoid it altogether given its importance to the discipline.

The one thing I do know is that it’s not impossible to devise a school based qualification which embraces uncertainty and develops higher order scientific thinking skills…it’s called Higher Psychology. Having taught sections of this course I’ve been blown away by its much more challenging approach to knowledge. If, for example, I was teaching ‘memory’ in biology I’d probably ‘teach’ them one model and present it as fact. In psychology they learn a number of models and have to be able to make the case for and against each of them based on evidence.

I know when I’m back in school I will have confidence in my own values and practice to spend more time on these sorts of thinking skills – particularly in S1 to S3. However, as long as our qualifications are based around the assumption that biological models are fact and students don’t need to be able to evaluate the evidence which support these models, we will always be restricted by what we can achieve in S4 to S6.

Unless of course you choose Higher Psychology…

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