Hexagons

I got this idea from @totallywired77 over on twitter.  He has this thing called SOLO learning that I've not got to grips with yet, but I did see this activity with it, so I borrowed it to try out.  This is part of what my top set year 7s did for revision on the topic of "Aliens" (basically space and forces).  They had to come up with a list of key words about the topic, which I did by standing the whole class up, getting one pupil to name a word and then asking them to "bounce" it to another pupil.  The last pupil standing got Vivo Miles (our reward scheme...) to offset the possible "left-out" feeling, and to make up for the fact that words were running out by then so it was harder.


The class then cut out their own hexagons from a template (I'm going to get loads made up and laminated next half term so I can reuse them and save some time), and working in ability pairs, selected the words they wanted to use.  Then they arranged the hexagons so that if the words touched they could explain a link between them.  This gave me lots of opportunities to ask open-ended questions and the quality of their explanations were excellent.  The class also got to go and visit other groups' patterns and question each other about the links.  What was surprising was how some pupils were putting words down to fill in the gaps, so they were having to come up with even more key words.


It was a fun lesson, and I enjoyed it so much that year 10 separate biology also did it for their revision on hormones and the menstrual cycle (it really helped them to sequence their ideas and then link it into the nervous system), and year 12 biology used it for key words about DNA and genetics.


Recommended.

My classroom, or lab.

I've been very lucky for the last few years in that I've had my own lab/classroom.  This means that as well as avoiding being a mobile teacher (with all the delayed starts to lessons and wondering where that piece of paper went that comes with that), I've been able to add things to the walls and ceilings to get pupils interested.  I decided today to take a load of photos and share them. Sorry some are a bit blurry, I was using my mobile phone... Is there anything I need to add?

There's an ever changing selection of pupils' work on the wall, or hanging from the ceiling.  Here you can see year 10's celebrity/cartoon offspring, year 11's guide to active transport, diffusion and osmosis, a carbon cycle mobile and some of the "science in the news" stories I've collected.

Big cupboards at the back of the room. One has different textbooks in that
pupils are welcome to use to help during lessons.  

The Learning Wall.  As donated by @teachingofscience. My year 12 and 13 are working on the Four Bs currently. Year 10 love the Carl Sagan quote.

The Blob Tree.  This is stuck to the back of my classroom door.  Every so often I ask pupils on their way out of the lesson to reflect about how well they did in that hour. Their honesty is sometimes surprising and it allows me to get into a conversation with them about why they think they are where they are, and how they can improve. It also really helps with confidence boosting when I can tell a pupil that they are really higher up than they are.  I have a Blob Classroom too - great for allowing pupils who struggle with behaviour to recognise problems that might have arisen.

The Twitter Challenge. A great plenary to really get pupils thinking.  I have pre-printed grids to help them keep count, and I've found that higher ability pupils like to try and get 140 characters exactly.

I have A, B, C and D corners in my lab.  These get used for  AFL activities during the lesson. If you have Boardworks then they're great for those summary questions at the end, and I've also used them for multi-choice exam questions.  They're very engaging as pupils have to move to the correct corner to give their answer - they don't follow each other as often as you think! It's also good for leading into questions such as "Why have you picked that answer?".  The traffic light is one of three (there's an amber and a red too). I use them right at the end of a lesson (or midway through if they're a fidgety class) to see if they have achieved the lesson objective/outcome.  Again, they're a bit more active than using coloured card or cups.

The "What I learnt today" area.  This is an easy plenary, just hand out some post-it notes and let them loose!  It's also a nice one for those pupils who just need to get up and move around.  I tend to make the post it notes into little booklets towards the end of the topic, so they are there for classes to look at as revision.

Placemats

I've been trying to add something new to my teaching every fortnight this academic year.  It works well in this time frame as my school operates on a two week timetable, so I tend to see KS3 classes six times, KS4 five or six times and KS5 four or five times.  The last couple of weeks I've been doing the Marketplace activity (see below) pretty successfully.  Year 13 Human Biology taught themselves homeostasis, year 11 (target grades C-G, and all boys) did really well with radioactivity revision (they amazed themselves with how much they learnt in the space of an hour, and enjoyed how quickly the lesson went) and I combined revision and new material for top set year 9 about hormones and IVF (for an observed lesson, rated "good"!)


This week I have been using placemats, aka a template for pupils to write their own notes into. They were recommended to me, and as I've spoken to colleagues who trained since me, it seems to be something they knew about all along.


The format I've been using is with a topical photo or picture in one corner, along with a title, then a series of boxes/shapes with levelled/graded questions in, usually based on the syllabus.


My first attempt was with year 13 who used them as a bit of a quick test - could they fill in the boxes with things they remembered about homeostasis.  It was a nice followup lesson to the Marketplace, allowing them to put notes on paper (this seems to reassure them, even though they have a textbook). Year 10 Biology liked the outline about smoking, again done along the lines of "Describe...", "Explain...", "Analyse data about..." to differentiate.  They also used them to show progress by filling in what they could at the start of the lesson and then adding to it in a different colour at various mini plenaries during the lesson.  I could also see them being used to share information with others as they move between groups.  Again, my year 11 pupils really took to them when we did about the doppler effect and red shift today.  They decided to draw diagrams to explain what the doppler effect is rather than write something - this is something they've learnt to do from the Marketplace activity.


I'll need to be careful using placemats I think.  They take hardly any time to prepare, and mean that I can leave some classes to research material rather than me being more involved in questioning and showing them demos or doing practicals.


I would be interested to know if anyone else uses anything like this.  Do they count as active learning or lazy teaching?

ASE Conference 2012

After being a member for a few years, this year I finally got the opportunity to go to the annual conference.  Luckily I'm only a couple of hours away by train so I planned to go on the Friday just for the day.  As others have said, this is great CPD - I wish I'd known exactly how it works before I went so I could've planned my time there better and maybe stayed for another day.  I really want to go to next year's now, I know I could get a lot more out of it.


I spent a fair bit of time in the Exhibition Area, yes collecting free pens, but also talking to people from the Science Museum, the Met Office, the RHS and various exam boards and publishers about the resources they have for teaching science.  There were plenty of places to spend some serious money (new lab benches, fume cupboards and glassware...), and there was a lot of technology on display (it seemed that every stand had at least one iPad...)


I was able to meet up with some of the great people from Twitter too.  They've provided me with help, ideas and support for a year or more, so it was good to put faces to names and have a chat about how teaching is the same and difference in FE, and in other areas of the country. Thank you!


After lunch I went to a talk about Active Learning for post 16, mainly to get some reassurance that the things I have been doing with my classes have value and to get some new ideas too. I've always loved the idea of encouraging independence in 6th form pupils, after all if they plan to go onto higher education then they need to know how to study for themselves.  Unfortunately, all too often, year 12 and 13 become all focused on exam results and just want the information they need to pass handed to them.  Some top tips were:

• Don't read practical instructions to pupils.  Make the method available to them before the lesson (via homework or moodle for example), and then they arrive at the practical ready to start.  This leads onto the next one...

• Let the pupils fail. They learn from this, they'll read the instructions the next time

• Encourage pupils to buy science dictionaries, or make their own.

• Develop self and peer assessment

• Brainstorming sessions - a pupil writes down what they know and this is passed to another pupil to correct and add to, before being passed on again, and so on.

There was a bit of discussion about entering year 12 pupils for exams in January.  There's the idea that they don't know how to learn at that stage of the course, so underachieve versus the wake up call they can get from a poor result.

I also liked the self-evaluation form - I scribbled down the main headings for this, so I'll get that up here as soon as I put it into a document.

Other active learning ideas included:

• Making models, eg of muscles and cells
• Dominos with question and answers.
• Matching cards
• Sequencing cards, eg the cardiac cycle
• Finding a picture or diagram and getting pupils to write about it
• Marketplace

The Phillip Allen book, "Friday Afternoon Biology" was recommended as it has many of these activities already prepared, as was "The Teacher's Toolkit".

Overall then, I'd absolutely go again because I got so much out of it, even in a few hours. Thanks to the ASE for organising this great CPD.

Other people have also blogged about the things they did:

@teachingofscience - here

@Bio_Joe - here

@hrogerson - here

What's in the box?

I saw these at the ASE Conference and whilst chatting to the lovely people I was with, and the person manning the stand, I could see how they could be used in a "How Science Works" lesson.  I could also see that they could be home-made so I asked the science technicians at work what they could do. This is the result:

As with the set you can buy, I have no idea what is inside the boxes - only one of the technicians knows, and he isn't saying!

This video has given me some idea of how to use the boxes for more than a starter in a lesson.  A colleague also suggested that the pupils could design further experiments to provide more evidence, for example, finding another one of the suggested object and weighing it to compare.  I plan to at least give them to year 13 to have a play with at the start of a lesson, and they'll be great for that class where only half ever appear on time.  I definitely want to have a go at a whole lesson, maybe with year 7, this week.

Year 8 homework - volcanoes

This is some of the homework my year 8 class did.  We're doing a topic called Catastrophe, lots of things about how volcanoes are formed, how scientists can predict lava flow and how rocks are made.  These are some of the highlights (sorry the formatting is rubbish)

 

 

Still to come this week - year 9 are going to write CVs for the hormones in the menstrual cycle!

Active Learning, post 16

On my flying visit to the ASE Conference I went to one of the seminars/talks about active learning for post 16 students.  This is something I've been interested in for a while - we have a course at KS3 (Upd8 Wikid/Segue) that uses a lot of class discussion, peer assessment and working in groups, and some of these skills have been carried forward to KS4.  It seems that once the kids make it to KS5 they become so focused on passing exams that they demand their teachers stand and lecture them so they get the information they need to pass their exams.


Unfortunately for the classes I teach, that isn't my way.  I expect pupils to engage with the material and will set homework that requires them to make a presentation to explain something to the rest of the class.  I've had a lot of success with class-made revision guides or "Everything you need to know about parasites" booklets...We all know that research shows that we learn better if you do something with the material rather than passively sit and have it spoon fed to you.


The ASE talk referred to an activity called "Marketplace", found in "The Teacher's Toolkit" (p122 if you have it handy!) Today I tried this for the first time, with my year 12 biology group.


It took me about 15 minutes to prepare for - I wanted to get them started on Unit 2, the parts about DNA and meiosis, so I pulled the key facts out of that section of the (AQA) syllabus, and turned them into 12 questions.  There were basic themes: structure of DNA; function of DNA; replication and meiosis - I colour-coded the questions, and pre-typed them onto an interactive whiteboard page. The questions were displayed for the first 10 minutes or so of the lesson (as the class arrived and got themselves organised...). I didn't refer to them until I was explaining what they were going to be doing.  The second slide of the chart was a basic list of instructions about how the lesson would flow.  I managed to differentiate by appointing a team captain for each group, basing this on how taxing that theme was.  I let the team captain pick three other people for their group. In future I would control the groups more, two pupils struggled as they ended up in the more complicated topics.


The activity gives the group 15 minutes to make a poster about their topic, without having the questions to look at.  They can only use 10 words and that frustrated and amused them in equal parts.  They used their textbooks and some other A level books I had in my room to carry out research, and one enterprising pupil used his smart phone!  I used groups of four and this worked well - one pupil seemed to do all the writing, one did the research and the other two swotted up on things they might be asked by the others in the group.


The part where they moved around went ok, some made decent notes and were able to teach this to the others in their groups when they returned.  The stall holders could only answer questions and this mixed ability group struggled at times to know what to ask and understand the answers they were getting - they need more practice.  The teaching was variable too, in future I'll send some off to see the other posters and swap them over with the stallholders, and then give them group discussion time.


The sneaky bit of the lesson is the return of the questions from the start of the lesson in the form of the quiz at the end - they all got more right at the end than they said they would've done at the start. There were a couple of good explanations of how DNA replicates and why this is important.  I'm counting this as a result.  I also had some past paper questions lined up as extension/homework/confidence builder and we had a quick look at how they would have to apply their knowledge to a question.


Over all, worth doing.  It was very active on their part, they had to use group work, research skills and explanations.  I plan to do it again tomorrow to start year 13 human biology off on homeostasis and for year 11 (targets D-G) for radioactivity.


These are their posters....