Teaching Science

Tony Liversidge, Matt Cochrane, Bernard Kerfoot, Judith Thomas

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781446245439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Enseñanza de ciencia y tecnología

Reflective practice is at the heart of effective teaching, and this book helps you develop into a reflective teacher of Science. Everything you need is here: guidance on developing your analysis and self-evaluation skills, the knowledge of what you are trying to achieve and why, and examples of how experienced teachers deliver successful lessons. It includes advice about obtaining your first teaching post, and about continuing professional development.

The book shows you how to plan creative lessons, how to make good use of resources and how to assess pupils? progress effectively. Each chapter contains points for reflection, which encourage you to break off from your reading and think about the challenging questions that you face as a new teacher.

The book comes with access to a companion website, www.sagepub.co.uk/secondary, where you will find:

- Videos of real lessons so you can see the skills discussed in the text in action

- Links to a range of sites that provide useful additional support

- Extra planning and resource materials.

If you are training to teach science this book will help you to improve your classroom performance, by providing you with practical advice, but also by helping you to think in depth about the key issues. It also supplements guidance on undertaking a research project with examples of the research evidence that is needed in academic work at Masters level, essential for anyone undertaking an M-level PGCE.

1	WHAT IS SCIENCE TEACHING? WHO ARE SCIENCE TEACHERS?
	Bernie Kerfoot

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This chapter:

• considers the nature of science and the implications to science teaching
• attempts to justify science as a core subject in the National Curriculum
• examines the changing roles of science education and science teachers in England and explores the drivers for this change
• examines the typical motivations of science trainee teachers at the start of their career and describes some the challenges to science teachers
• discusses the strategies that novice teachers use to acquire subject knowledge competence in a multidisciplinary subject
• reflects on what is perceived as good practice in science teaching.

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WHAT IS SCIENCE AND HOW DOES SCIENCE WORK?

I think it is fair to say that up until the introduction of the National Curriculum for England and Wales (1989) many practising 11–16 teachers of science did not feel the necessity to reflect too long over the nature of science, that is, ‘what science is’ and ‘how scientists work’. Some school teachers would have worked in the wider scientific community in previous careers and would have had a subjective awareness of a scientist’s role. This absence of reflection changed in 1989 with the introduction of the statutory National Curriculum (1989) when in the 17 sections labelled ‘Attainment Targets’ (ATs) was enshrined a commitment to allow children to ‘explore science’. They were to use the vehicle of scientific investigations to develop their knowledge and understanding of the ‘ways in which scientific ideas change over time’ and the ‘social, moral spiritual and cultural contexts in which they are developed’. The science teacher was now responsible for addressing issues other than the straightforward teaching of the body of knowledge that has been classed as science.

Even when the National Curriculum was revised in 1991 and again in 1996 most 11–16 science teachers tended to be too busy teaching the key scientific facts and key concepts to spend long hours exploring the link between the ‘real’ science that has been happening, I would argue, since the appearance of humankind, and the activities that teachers were asking pupils to do in the classroom.

The National Curriculum for Science (DfES, 2004b) placed greater emphasis on the way scientists work and how the body of knowledge that can loosely be labelled as ‘science’ moves forward, and by 2007 in the revised National Curriculum for Key Stage 3 (QCA 2007b) you can see that attainment target 1 on p214 is titled ‘How Science Works’. This has targets for pupils that include, amongst others, the development of the key concept of the fair test, Also the QCA suggest that pupils need to develop the skills and attributes of a scientist. These include observational and measuring skills, also the abilities to select and use resources, analyse data, spot patterns if they exist and then communicate their findings to others effectively.

Described on p208 are the Key Concepts that straddle science and are linked to How Science Works. For example, in the scientific community theories are generated to explain phenomena. There is also the idea that the scientific community ‘shares developments and common understanding across disciplines and boundaries’. In short it is as if the knowledge and understanding broadly described on pages 210 and 211 are the vehicle to deliver the skills of the scientist and an insight into how the scientific community works.

At Key Stages 1, 2 and 3 in the 2004 National Curriculum Science document we see the latest ‘scientific enquiry’ strand forming what has been commonly known to science teachers since the implementation of a National Curriculum for science as ‘Sc1’. It consists of two interrelated sections that are found in all Sc1 sections in all key stages.

In one section there are descriptions of the practical and investigational skills that you are generally led to believe are intrinsic to scientists and as science teachers we need to develop. At Key Stage 4 these are the ability to

• plan a testable idea
• observe and collect data
• work safely autonomously or with others
• evaluate methodology.

Some science educationalists, for example, Millar, 1989) point out that, first, these skills are not unique to science and, secondly, that they are extremely difficult to learn. Like all skills they have to be practised to get any better and are in fact linked to what is now being called higher-level thinking skills. How many times do you think science teachers go into lessons with their primary objectives skill based? Consider ‘today children I am going to give you the opportunity to develop your planning skills’. As an outcome of this ‘you will be slightly better at planning testable ideas’.

If we consider the first section we see the instruction that ‘teachers should ensure that the knowledge, skills and understanding of how science works are integrated into the teaching’. So pupils should be taught (and I paraphrase):

• how scientific data can be collected and analysed
• how data can be creatively interpreted and how it can provide the evidence to test ideas and develop theories
• how scientific ideas and models can explain phenomena
• that there are some questions that science cannot currently answer and some that science cannot address.

Later on we see that pupils should also be taught about the applications and implications of science (and I am careful not to paraphrase here!).

a. About the use of contemporary scientific and technological developments and their benefits, drawbacks and risks.

b. To consider how and why decisions about science and technology are made including those that raise ethical issues, and about the social, economic and environmental effects of such decisions.

c. How uncertainties in scientific knowledge and scientific ideas change over time and about the role of the scientific community in validating these changes. (DfES, 2004b: 37)

The science content in the latest version of the National Curriculum (2007) shows wholesale revisions to the Key Stage 3 programme of study and attainment targets (QCA, 2007a). We see that Mick Waters’s curriculum development team (Mick’s role at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority is Director of Curriculum) have cut content substantially. Their aim is ‘to develop a modern, world-class curriculum that will inspire and challenge all learners and prepare them for the future’ and in doing so they have reduced the content from 94 statements of learning to 14 (http://www.qca.org.uk/qca8665aspx). The themes are constant but the specificity is gone. The team see this content as being relevant and the driver underpinning the key concepts that all pupils have to understand. These key concepts are:

1. Scientific thinking (developing models to test phenomena and theories).
2. Applications and implications of science (link between science and technology).
3. Cultural understanding (science is rooted in all societies and draws on a variety of approaches).
4. Collaboration (developments are shared across the scientific community).

Gone are the old divisions that labelled the knowledge as chemistry, biology and physics. Now we see the breadth of subject that teachers should draw on as very loosely defined. Just one example ‘energy, electricity and forces’ has three broad statements of what might be taught. The first states ‘energy can be transferred usefully, stored or dissipated but cannot be created or destroyed’. The second statement leads us to teach about ‘forces are interactions between objects and can affect their shape or motion’. Finally, we see that ‘electric current in circuits can produce a variety of effects’.

Also at Key Stage 3 the pupils have to develop the ‘skills and processes in science that pupils need to make progress’. Section 2 (2.1, 2.2, 2.3) is a reworking of the 2004 National Curriculum, and indeed previous incarnations, as it recognizes the skills intrinsic to the scientists but throws an increasing emphasis on risk assessment, group working and using secondary sources, and asks pupils to communicate by way of presentations and discussions, again mirroring how scientists work. In Chapter 2 we see the Every Child Matters (ECM) agenda hard at work. Pupils should be allowed to develop skills of discussion, research, creativity, enterprise and communication, as well as a recognition that science occurs in the work place.

In short the National Curriculum for Key Stage 3 for implementation in 2008 seeks to use a science education to develop a well-informed, globally aware, confident, critical audience. They need good communication skills to express this awareness and criticality. They also need an appreciation of how scientists work and the limitations of what science can do. There is an implicit belief that the development of the higher-level skills that science can hopefully develop in children can be used in the wider work place. That is the challenge to you as new science teachers in the coming decade and beyond.

So this ‘how science works’ strand in the National Curriculum describes a way of working that is indicative of the way that scientists work and it invites pupils to become scientists in school science and mirror the way that real scientists work. As a consequence they might gain an insight into the scientific way of working and the consensual way the scientific community collectively operates.

Perhaps at this point it is worthwhile very briefly reflecting on the observations of two twentieth-century scientists who are acknowledged as insightful and analytical observers of the way scientists and the scientific community works.

Karl Popper was an Austrian who later became a British national. He was born at the turn of the century and died in 1994. Popper argued that the theories and explanations of observable phenomena undergo over time a sort of evolutionary process similar to natural selection. A ‘best fit’ model exists at any one time (Popper, 1959).

Are there implications for you as a science teacher teaching Year 8 set six ‘the things plants need to grow’ or at post-16 ‘the functions of the Golgi apparatus’ of Popper’s ideas about science? Certainly if you are doing a class practical with Year 7 or Year 10 and eight of your groups find that their resistors fit Ohms law but two groups find that their data does not fit in with the rest, then is this not an ideal opportunity to explore a ‘best fit’ approach – the consensus? Might you then explore how the scientific community works? How do they deal with this type of data? Might you ask ‘Shall we do it again and see if we get same, similar or different results?’ Can you see that Popper’s ‘take’ on how science collects theories and models, is found in the ‘applications and implications of science, section C’?

Thomas Kuhn was a physicist who became Professor of the History of Science in 1961 at the University of California. He later went on to work in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1962 he published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1970). Kuhn proposed that most scientists work within an accepted ‘paradigm’. A paradigm is a generally accepted set of shared ‘beliefs’ about a particular model that can be used to explain phenomena. Most scientists busy themselves with simply enlarging the data bank that supports this accepted model. Kuhn points out that eventually anomalies will begin to show then slowly accrue – they will build over time. What is vital to Kuhn’s analysis is that with every model, theory or explanation this inevitably happens. As the anomalies begin to stack up, the scientific community will reach a crisis and accept a new set of beliefs – a new paradigm emerges. This may seem pretty obvious but again it is built into ‘how science works’ and you have to teach it in some shape or form.

If you consider the current case of carbon dioxide-led global temperature rise, we are looking at a classic case of a legion of environmental scientists beavering away inside a commonly held model that attempts to explain an apparent climate change. Yes, I would agree that there is data linking rising carbon dioxide levels with a rise in global temperature but is it conclusive? Have we assessed the phenomena over a timeframe that allows a degree of certainty? If a scientist provides data that suggests an alternative model (for example, solar cycles, c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• How to use this book
• 1 What is science teaching? Who are science teachers?
• 2 What are you expected to teach in a science lesson?
• 3 Planning to teach a science lesson
• 4 Elements of a science lesson
• 5 Managing learning in science
• 6 Managing learning; measuring learning
• 7 Teaching different abilities; teaching different pupils
• 8 Teaching different ages: Key Stage 3 to post-16
• 9 Science teaching issues: science for all
• 10 Creativity and innovation in science teaching and learning
• 11 Science outside the classroom
• 12 Reflective practice and professional development
• Bibliography
• Index