Teach Now! Science

The Joy of Teaching Science

Tom Sherrington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317664895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Being taught by a great teacher is one of the great privileges of life. Teach Now! is an exciting new series that opens up the secrets of great teachers and, step-by-step, helps trainees to build the skills and confidence they need to become first-rate classroom practitioners.

Written by a highly-skilled practitioner, this practical, classroom-focused guide contains all the support you need to become a great science teacher. Combining a grounded, modern rationale for learning and teaching with highly practical training approaches, the book guides you through all the different aspects of science teaching offering clear, straightforward advice on classroom practice, lesson planning and working in schools.

Teaching and learning, planning, assessment and behaviour management are all covered in detail, with a host of carefully chosen examples used to demonstrate good practice. There are also chapters on organising practical work, the science curriculum, key ideas that underpin science as a subject and finding the right job. Throughout the book, there is a wide selection of ready-to-use activities, strategies and techniques to help you bring science alive in all three main disciplines, including common experiments and demonstrations from biology, physics and chemistry to engage and inspire you and your students.

Celebrating the whole process of engaging young people with the awe and wonder of science, this book is your essential guide as you start your exciting and rewarding career as an outstanding science teacher.

1 The joy of teaching science

DOI: 10.4324/9781315767925-1

I love teaching; I love being a teacher; I love working in schools. I especially love teaching science.

I initially entered the profession with some trepidation, unsure of where it would lead, but it has proven to be a highly rewarding occupation, offering boundless opportunities for personal development and enjoyment. I’ve found that teaching science can be, in turn, intellectually stimulating, creative, experimental and highly rewarding in terms of developing relationships with students.

It’s just wonderful to be the one who gets to introduce a class of young people to the idea of natural selection and reveal the extraordinary story of evolution; or to excite students by making their hair stand on end with a Van der Graaf generator, bringing the theory behind electricity off the page; or to be the person who makes the carbon ooze out of a flask of sugar with concentrated sulphuric acid to show how extraordinary chemical reactions can be.

There really is no job quite like it. Of course, it isn’t always easy; in fact, sometimes it can be really tough. But, with the right spirit and the right tools, for the most part, the rewards are enormous, and teaching science is a great joy.

Teaching is also learning

A recurring theme in this book is that the ideas that make up the subject of science are at the heart of the joy of teaching it. I have found, over the years, that teaching has deepened my understanding and my passion for science, often in ways that have surprised me. In my own specialist area, physics, I have learned so much about gravity, waves and fundamental particles through teaching. As a general science teacher for many years, I’ve had to learn a lot more about genetics and evolution than I’d covered in my biology O level, and, in chemistry, I now have a much more sophisticated understanding of the link between chemical structures and material properties and the range of chemical reactions that can be performed in a school laboratory.

The process of continuing to learn the subject is a passion that most science teachers share. For example, at a recent physics department meeting at my school, we were trying out some new experiments to show our students.

One was a slow-motion camera that could shoot 1,000 frames per second. We used it to film a balloon filled with water at the moment of its being burst with a pin. The result was fabulous to see: the rubber balloon parts flew off, leaving the water in a completely formed balloon shape, before, eventually, it fell apart. This illustration of intermolecular forces in water was fascinating, fun to produce and completely new to me.

We also looked at a large-scale capacitor made from two layers of unrolled aluminium foil, about 1 m long, separated by a thin plastic sheet and attached to a high-tension (5 kV) supply. The result was a series of high-voltage discharges through the plastic, accompanied by some impressively loud bangs. In my subsequent lessons, the students found these demonstrations extremely engaging: they generated a wide range of interesting questions, and we all learned something and had fun in the process. For me, this is the joy of teaching science, and I hope it will be for you too.

The learning obviously isn’t confined to the content of the subject; it is also the professional learning that goes with being a teacher. Over time, new pedagogical ideas emerge; there are all kinds of fads and trends and new directives, but, even without all of the circus hoop jumping that goes on in schools, there are still so many different ways to explain ideas and to make connections between theory and practice.

As the book develops, I hope you will be able to explore your own ideas about some of the fundamental concepts in science and how they all fit together, in some kind of order that will allow you to make sense of it for your students.

It is likely that any group of science teachers in a school will have arrived via different routes, with different degrees and science specialisms. Depending on your school’s structure and philosophy, it may be that you only teach physics, chemistry or biology. Certainly, it is very common for teachers to teach just one of these subjects to A level; it is also very common up to GCSE. However, at Key Stage 3 (KS3) and very often at GCSE, teachers are expected to share the teaching of science, irrespective of their degree specialisms.

I have argued in the past that a strong general science teacher is far more use to a student than a weaker specialist. However, subject knowledge certainly does make a difference in drilling down to the deeper concepts at the highest attainment levels. In writing this book, I am going to attempt to strike a balance by addressing issues relevant to all teachers of science in general, with examples and specific ideas from physics, chemistry and biology woven in.

To get you thinking about what you know, here are some questions. Think about what a one-line answer would be, and then what a ‘four mark’ answer might be. Go deeper and deeper – asking ‘why?’ – until you just don’t know:

Activities

If you are unsure about any of these answers, do some research, talk to colleagues in your school and develop your own scientific knowledge and understanding. It is so much easier to teach a topic where you feel really confident in the subject matter.

All science teachers have areas of relative strength and lots of gaps. Work out what your gaps are and start to fill them!

Science is all about posing good questions and searching for the answers.

• Why do magnets attract or repel each other?
• Why does your heart beat faster during exercise?
• How does a rainbow work? And what about a mirage? What is that?
• What exactly does double-glazing do?
• Why is a hypothermia blanket shiny on both sides?
• Why is diesel fuel less flammable than petrol but doesn’t need a spark plug to ignite?
• Is it true that whales and hippos are closely related? How is this possible?
• Why are spiders so clever, the way they spin those webs? (Trick question)
• How do we get iron from rocks?
• Why do we bend our knees when jumping down from a wall?
• How do plants know what the seasons are?
• Why do astronauts seem weightless in a space station, when they are still in orbit?
• How far is it to the next nearest galaxy? How do we know?
• Why is graphene so flexible and strong, when it is only one molecule thick?
• Which way do the electrons move in a bolt of lightning?
• What is fire? Exactly . . .
• Why is potassium metal so reactive in water?

Scientific thinking: thinking like a scientist

Another of the pleasures of teaching science is the opportunity to engage with the ‘real’ science community, past and present, both experimental and theoretical, involving students in the process of thinking like a scientist.

This takes many forms. At a basic level, there is the ‘how stuff works’ dimension: this applies to the properties of everyday materials and machines, cooking food, plant responses, diseases, teeth, ears, the heart, magnets, motors and the weather. How do they work, and how do we know that?

Then there is the ‘fundamental truth’ dimension – the big existential questions. How did life on Earth develop? How are living things connected, and how has that changed over time? What is energy, what is matter made of, and how does it all hold together? How can we get a sense of the scale of the subatomic world and of the universe, both in space and in time, and how does the living world interact with the physical world that it inhabits?

Of course, then we have the measurement and verification dimension. How do we construct experiments that allow us to measure variables in a controlled, systematic fashion, such that our analysis can lead to valid conclusions? Having the opportunity to work through all of these questions with a class of young people is wonderful.

The traditional and modern scientific approaches that have been employed over time are a constant reference point for gaining a perspective on the development of scientific ideas. The personal triumphs, disasters and accidental discoveries by scientific figures offer a dimension to the study of science that really helps to bring it alive. Whether we’re talking about Galileo and the great ‘ball drop’ experiment, the painstaking work of Darwin and Wallace in arriving at the idea of natural selection, the arrangement of the elements by Dmitri Mendeleev, or more recent breakthroughs with the human genome and the Higgs boson, the people are part of the story, alongside their discoveries and ideas.

Of course, one of the great assets to teachers of science faced with a cohort of teenagers immersed in social media and the latest technology is that our subject is continually being updated. Science is simultaneously timeless and cutting edge. Scientific ideas are in the news every week, and a great science teacher will find ways to weave the newest events and breakthroughs into the curriculum, to keep it alive, fresh and of the moment. Science doesn’t stand still.

Science is multidisciplinary

For a lot of science teachers, one of the greatest joys is the massive variety of activities that you can engage in during lessons. Although there is a lot of time spent with theoretical concepts, thinking and writing answers to problems and performing calculations, much as you might do in many other subjects, science is also a practical subject, with a major ‘hands-on’ element.

As we will discuss later, it is really important to know how the practical work and theory work together – not all experiments help to explain basic concepts; they can actually make things a lot more confusing, because real life is messy. However, very often, the practical lessons and demonstrations are the best bits – and are certainly the things students remember long afterwards. As a science teacher, you have the opportunity to create some big bangs and blows – igniting the perfect oxygen–hydrogen mix in a balloon or methane bubbles in detergent; you can experience the messy but fascinating process of dissecting an eye, a heart or a set of sheep lungs; and, my personal favourites, you get to make motors and create all kinds of mischief with sound and light.

At a fundamental level, scientific thinking is all about matching theory with experiment, and we have ample opportunity to do this in the school laboratory. We can tell the story of our understanding of light as a wave and a particle and the development of our knowledge of fundamental particles through the perspective of the history of ideas needing experimental verification and experimental discoveries looking for a theoretical underpinning. This applies to the story of natural selection and genetics and our observations of materials in all their glorious diversity, despite being made up of only a few common building blocks.

Of course, science is also an academic discipline that requires us to use research skills, to have the power to write explanations in good English and to produce an analysis of data using graphs and calculations. As teachers, these elements of the role are really important, not least because these skills are those that are relied on heavily during formal exams. Mainly, we need them to share our ideas within the class. There is a level of rigour required – accuracy and precision – alongside a certain flair and imagination.

We need to develop skills for using a range of weird and wonderful apparatus, and this takes time to master. From simple clocks, ammeters and voltmeters to baffling oscilloscopes, tricky microscopes and fiddly bits of glassware, there is a lot to learn. However, with technicians and teacher colleagues to support you, it soon becomes one of the pleasures of the job. Every year that I’ve been a science teacher, I’ve learned something new about a piece of kit or I’ve found a new way to measure something.

So, a science teacher needs to be a thinker, a mathematician, a writer, a technician, a storyteller, a historian – a veritable polymath. If you’ve never thought of yourself as a multitasker, you’re about to be amazed.

Autonomy

Teaching wouldn’t be fun at all if every lesson was prescribed, and you had to do exactly what you were told by someone else. We haven’t come this far just to be vehicles for transmitting information. We’re here to engage our students in a rigorous learning process, but also to make sure we are getting a lot out of it too. The more motivated and enthusiastic you are as a teacher, the more likely you are to transmit those things to your students and to sustain yourself as a professional when things get tough. In this context, teaching science is brilliant, because, to a large extent, you have a high degree of autonomy.

Of course, there is a syllabus – and we will deal with planning a curriculum later. But, for any given idea or topic, there are hundreds of ways to organise a lesson to make things interesting and to suit your personal style.

In terms of autonomy, this means that, from day to day, you are doing what you decide to do. You might want to do a practical with all the students, or show a video clip you found, or run a demonstration. You might want students to work on their own, or to collaborate in pairs or groups; you might want them to produce a piece of extended writing or a multimedia product or simply to give extended oral presentations. You can use textbooks, some resources you have designed or borrowed or interactive online materials, or you can make up questions as part of an extended question and answer exchange.

Some methods might work better than others, and there are some important elements of pedagogy that you’ll want to embed into your daily routines – aspects of formative assessment and questioning – but there are so many options, and you have the freedom to choose. If anything, the choice can be overwhelming, and, to begin with, you may start out with a solid borrowed framework that you embellish in your own way later on.

However, as many teachers will tell you, one of the aspects of the job that sustains them is the joy of closing the door and having a space where they can create whatever they want to with their students. As I always say: you don’t need permission to be great!

Going off piste and being agile

Agility is the word I use to describe a key characteristic of a great teacher. It’s all about the ability to adapt, to change course, to respond, to deal with multiple simultaneous demands, to keep up with all the individual students’ learning needs, to be spontaneous and flexible and to think on your feet; ‘thinking on your feet’ is a hugely important teacher skill.

I think it is s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series editor's foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The joy of teaching science
• 2 How science works
• 3 The science curriculum
• 4 Planning for differentiation
• 5 Managing behaviour and building relationships
• 6 Classic teaching modes
• 7 Science as a practical subject
• 8 Formative assessment
• 9 Getting your first job
• Bibliography
• Index