Developing teachers and curriculum in science
We wanted to create a curriculum that allowed students to get better at science, but also would help new staff develop as teachers. The focus of this blog is on staff development.
We want new staff to quickly understand some of the underlying concepts at the heart of our ideas about teaching and learning, but more than anything we want their teaching to reflect this understanding (we don’t want staff to understand it but do nothing about it). We have tried to sequence some of the ideas from cognitive science, psychology, and education in general so that staff can work through them, and be resourced within the curriculum to demonstrate them as they do so.
The rough sequence that we want staff to approach Teaching and Learning ideas in is
- Our working memory is limited – the basics of cognitive load theory
- The importance of practice for forming memories
- Forgetting is a natural process (the Ebbinghaus version) – the need for retrieval practice
- The harder to define bit – you might call this “flexible knowledge” or “making meaning” or “understanding” or “being able to apply their knowledge” or, to a lesser extent, “transfer” (note: the quotation marks aren’t pejorative). I usually group this into the idea of ‘schema’ but know some people would debate that — it’s just a simple shorthand for a complicated idea.
- The need to check for understanding to see how students’ schema are developing.
A note on our scheme of work
Our scheme of work comprises of two parts per unit – a booklet and an accompanying PowerPoint. Things that can be more “fixed down” – sequence, practice, notes, core knowledge etc are in the booklet, more dynamic things like teacher explanations, checks for understanding or prior knowledge etc. are all in the PowerPoint.
The booklet is designed to be for the students. The PowerPoint is designed to be adapted by the teacher to create their route through a topic.
Also, our booklets have written explanations of all the content in them – BUT THIS ISN’T HOW THE CONTENT IS FIRST DELIVERED. The written explanations are there as a plan B in case a teacher explains something, checks students understanding and realises that something has gone wrong. Teachers might use the ideas from the booklet to plan their explanations, but they’re not teaching directly from the booklet. Equally, these written explanations are for students to look over and revise from at a later date.
The following is how we use our resources to support staff as they develop (this might be trainee teachers, teachers new to us who are starting their journey into our way of thinking, or even experienced teachers – I’m not drawing any distinctions between them here) and they’ll work through these ideas at their pace.
Our CPD program in science will constantly refer to our own curriculum to show how we can embed new ideas within our teaching.
1 – Our working memory is limited
The booklet for each topic is broken down into episodes (named so that it’s clear they’re not lessons and won’t take 55mins each). This is an immediate way in which we take into account the limitations of working memory. Different classes won’t master an episode in the same amount of time as they’ll need different amounts of time to get to grips with the components of each episode.
Within each episode, the PowerPoint and the booklet have components/chunks that have broken down the material into what we’ve deemed manageable bits. We first want staff to appreciate the need to break things down quite considerably for novices (we’ll come back to how to piece them back together later).
For each component, staff will explain and check for listening. Students will then have time to rehearse an idea and “get their heads around it” (we loved this idea from one of Jo Castelino’s blogs). We do this via Stop and Jot pages (which we’ve totally stolen from TLAC and then changed beyond recognition). This is a page of the booklet at the start of an episode with basic activities or note taking activites that focus students on the prescient information of each component (and they transition over time to more free notes). Given students have limits to what they can keep in working memory, we need to spend time trying to ensure they’ve thought about each bit in an attempt to move it to somewhere deeper (much more on this later).
2— The importance of practice
Staff then do a Check for Understanding (suggested questions in the PowerPoint but staff are free to alter and adapt them) to see how students have got on, rehearsing and “playing with the idea”. If students show understanding, they do some Quick Consolidation questions that test this component and the basic ideas of any related components.
This is our first stage of practice — consolidating the new idea. This will often be practice that is quite ‘blocked’. Practice of that one new idea and the most closely related ones but not much more than this.
At the end of each episode, there is a significantly more involved section of practice, that we call Practice Makes Permanent. This interleaves old topics but through scenarios or problems that naturally bring together ideas from different topics — more on this later.
3 – Teaching for long-term memory
Within each episode, there is a section of the Core Knowledge (written as questions, diagrams, and worked examples). These are not to be learned “by rote” as the students' first experience of each new idea, but they act as a summation of what they should have learned (I’m actually beginning to think we should put these at the end of the episode).
For staff, this list of core knowledge is the minimum requirement for what students should know from an episode and so gives focus to lessons (and allows staff some autonomy to deliver things around this core knowledge). But this is the stuff we don’t want students to forget.
These questions form one of the parts of our homework structure by getting students to quiz themselves on the core concepts after they have been taught them.
4 – Teaching for something deeper
This section is something that we are working hard on this year. When separating a topic into teachable ‘chunks’, it is tempting to never bring the chunks back together to make a cohesive whole.
Having read Sarah Cottingham’s book about Ausubel over summer, I really liked the suggestion of Ausubel that new meaning is created when new ideas assimilate with existing ideas (called meaningful learning). And its obviously important to remember that meaning is made in the mind of the students and not the teacher.
There are three ways we try to create something more in students learning than lots of chunks.
- We check for prior knowledge (via suggested questions in the PowerPoint) which allow our explanations to build upon knowledge that students have (or teach this missing knowledge).
- Our Practice Makes Permanent questions at the end of each episode have all been written to interleave lots of old content, in relevant ways. For the most part, they’re not random retrieval, but different ideas that we want students to link together by thinking about them at the same time.
3. The least developed idea of the scheme, and one that I’m working on this year, is the idea of Advanced Organisers (maps of the knowledge in a topic and how the knowledge links to other things). This would be a place where we could occasionally ‘zoom out’ and explore the relationships between the ideas that they’ve learned in smaller chunks.
Having made the below one for Energy, I think I’ve come to realise that it’s probably worth having a few smaller ones rather than one big one. And that it would be better accompanied by some questions to test that students understand the links from one concept to another.
5 — The need to continuously check for understanding
As students knowledge grows/their schema develops/whatever your favourite turn of phrase is, we want to continue to check on this. Over time, our checks for understanding will need to become more involved as we’ll not be testing for discrete units of knowledge, but larger understanding. This is another area of development for us over the coming year(s) — how we go about this. As you can see from the slides below, we have lots of opportunities for staff to Check For Understanding, but they are still quite ‘chunked’ right now. I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this
I’d appreciate any constructive comments/feedback/questions on anything we’ve been working on!
