Teaching Secondary Science

Constructing Meaning and Developing Understanding

Keith Ross, Liz Lakin, Janet McKechnie, Jim Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317564072
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The fourth edition of Teaching Secondary Science has been fully updated and includes a wide range of new material. This invaluable resource offers a new collection of sample lesson plans and includes two new chapters covering effective e-learning and advice on supporting learners with English as a second language. It continues as a comprehensive guide for all aspects of science teaching, with a focus on understanding pupils' alternative frameworks of belief, the importance of developing or challenging them and the need to enable pupils to take ownership of scientific ideas. This new edition supports all aspects of teaching science in a stimulating environment, enabling pupils to understand their place in the world and look after it.

Key features include:

• Illustrative and engaging lesson plans for use in the classroom
• Help for pupils to construct new scientific meanings
• M-level support materials
• Advice on teaching 'difficult ideas' in biology, chemistry, physics and earth sciences
• Education for sustainable development and understanding climate change
• Managing the science classroom and health and safety in the laboratory
• Support for talk for learning, and advice on numeracy in science
• New chapters on e-learning and supporting learners with English as a second language.

Presenting an environmentally sustainable, global approach to science teaching, this book emphasises the need to build on or challenge children's existing ideas so they better understand the world in which they live. Essential reading for all students and practising science teachers, this invaluable book will support those undertaking secondary science PGCE, school-based routes into teaching and those studying at Masters level.

Part I
Science and Why We Teach It

Introduction to Part I

Science deals with ideas about our environment. These scientific ideas must be tested against our sense experiences. Progress in science happens when our existing ideas are challenged and we have to invent new theories that deal with the anomalies better. Thus germ theory deals with transmission of diseases better than traditional beliefs, yet science has a lot to learn from traditional medicine. Newton’s ideas about gravity have been superseded by Einstein’s theory of relativity, but there are still inconsistencies between relativity and quantum mechanics. Scientific ideas are never complete or absolutely true.

In the same way, young children build up pictures of the world in their minds. Simple pictures that help them make sense of the data they receive from their senses. Babies soon recognise ‘down-ness’ as they look for their dropped rattle on the floor – they don’t look for it on the ceiling! But these naïve ideas get replaced as children need to make their mental models more widely applicable, as ‘down-ness’ transforms to notions of ‘gravity’.

As science teachers we must understand some of these naïve ideas and help children develop alternative, more powerful, scientific ways of interpreting their environment that can go alongside their ‘everyday’ beliefs. Children need time to reconstruct their ideas to take account of the scientific theories that we presently hold, and to appreciate that they will change over time. They also need to appreciate that the process by which the ideas came into being, the very process of being scientific, forms an important part of their scientific education.

A single teacher works with approximately 30 pupils at a time, many of whom need to be convinced that their time in school is worthwhile. Good science teachers understand how to create a simulating and pleasant working atmosphere in lessons, where pupils feel safe, where the science they are studying is relevant and useful to them and where they are challenged to do their best.

These two facets – teaching science and teaching pupils – are at the heart of being a successful science teacher as a result of which the pupils in our charge can come to enjoy, understand and use the scientific way of viewing their world.

In Chapter 1 we start by looking at how a good science teacher might achieve this. In Chapter 2 we explore the way science works, and in Chapter 3 we visit the real world of our pupils: their environment and their future. They will need a deep understanding of the need to make this a sustainable future.

Chapter 1
What Makes a Good Science Teacher?

Chapter overview

Good teaching involves many different aspects: planning lessons so that pupils are motivated to learn; evaluating and reviewing; taking risks to experiment with new ideas; developing a positive classroom climate; fostering a rapport with the pupils that rewards their effort rather than their attainment. The additional demands on a science teacher include developing expertise in a subject they may not have studied since GCSE level, planning for the scientific misconceptions held by pupils and supporting pupils as they develop their understanding of very challenging concepts.

Rewards of teaching

The rewards of teaching science are many: the enthusiasm of pupils learning how their world works, especially important as we work towards developing a sustainable future for the planet; the fun of problem solving; the satisfaction of hearing pupils argue enthusiastically about different theories; the pupils’ fascination with hearing the stories of scientific discoveries; their enjoyment of a wide variety of practical and project work – above all there is the stimulation of guiding and supporting pupils as they develop their ability to reason, explain and argue.

Personal statements on application forms show that many prospective science trainee teachers believe teaching consists largely of ‘passing on’ information and understanding about scientific ideas. Of course when they start training, they quickly realise that this is very far from the truth. Traditional ‘explaining’ is an important, but relatively small, constituent in the complex and varied diet demanded by today’s pupils, and required by the National Curriculum and exam specifications. This complex and varied diet, which we develop in the chapters that follow, is based on the outcome of research into how children learn.

To be successful, teachers of all subjects have many aspects of teaching to consider – just study the list in Box 1.1 for a few moments. Just managing all of these requires detailed planning, constant checking and honest evaluation. The effective teacher needs a toolbox of imaginative and effective strategies, needs to take risks and be prepared to fail, and must be prepared to change (see Chapter 18 on Planning). Only complacent teachers expect the same thing to work the same way on successive occasions; every class responds differently and this necessitates changing the structure and focus of the lesson, even if some of the resources can be reused.

Box 1.1 Some of the many aspects of teaching and learning for all teachers

Every Child Matters Exam board specifications Personal Development Curriculum (PDC) Learning styles Literacy Active Learning Building Learning Power . . . and many more

National Curriculum Assessment for Learning Classroom climate Higher order thinking Health and Safety Misconceptions Learning Skills

SEND Behaviour for Learning Differentiation Numeracy Questioning Independent Learning Pedagogy

Demands made on science teachers

In addition to the generic demands of teaching, science teachers have additional pressures and issues.

• First, take the issue of the range of subjects; science teachers are most likely to have a degree-level qualification in one science (often biology based, chemistry based or physics/engineering based). In most schools, they are expected to teach all three curriculum sciences at junior secondary level and sometimes also at senior secondary – there is plenty of overlap of skills, strategies and language but less overlap of subject knowledge and understanding. Compare this with a language teacher – a specialist in German for example is unlikely to be expected to teach Mandarin.
• Second, consider the issue of pupils’ prior knowledge and understanding: from a very early age, children have been making sense of their world using their common sense and ideas from parents and teachers. When they enter secondary school, they have already reconciled thoughts and observations in their own way – this prior knowledge often contains misconceptions (see Chapter 5 Elicitation) and science teachers must acknowledge these in their teaching or risk having the more scientific models and theories rejected in favour of the more familiar ideas. Compare again with the teacher of German: most pupils start learning from a completely empty base line and do not need to reconcile new ideas with their naïve, everyday ideas though obviously there will be linguistic links.
• Third, many scientific ideas, theories and models are complex and require the pupils to sustain their concentration at a high level for prolonged periods; they must invest much and be prepared to be patient for the delayed gratification of that ‘ah ha’ moment of deep understanding.

So how does a science teacher incorporate all of these considerations and teach good lessons? And if they manage it, how do they know it is a good lesson? The answer is simple: focus on the pupils. Are they interested, excited, focused, engaged, stimulated to ask questions – or are they bored, passive, accepting or, even worse, disruptive? Of course, this is also dependent on the nature of the pupils in the class, but if you plan lessons to engage and stimulate at the appropriate level as well as allowing pupils to take ownership of their learning (see Chapters 6–10), then at least you know that the few pupils who do refuse to engage are doing so because they have personal issues that cannot be solved by one teacher alone (see Chapter 20 for discussion of management of pupils in science lessons).

The ‘eureka’ moment

To illustrate, here are three different versions of the same junior secondary lesson. As you read them, reflect on how you want your own lessons to be received by the pupils.

To set the scene: the pupils have already learnt about density; they know that 1 cm³ of different materials have different masses (as weighed on a top-pan balance); they can calculate the density of rectangular blocks of different materials. They have discussed the answers to questions such as ‘Which is heavier, wood or paper?’ and ‘Which is heavier, a ton of feath...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Front_other
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• PART I Science and Why We Teach It
• PART II How Pupils Make Sense of Their World
• PART III Knowledge and Understanding: Difficult Ideas
• PART IV Planning, Assessment, Teaching and Classroom Management
• PART V Professional Values and the Wider World
• References
• Index