Wizards, Dwarfs and Giants

This has been my discovery of the week.  I take no credit for it - I found it tucked in the back of The Teacher's Toolkit as a tool to help develop teamwork in a class.


I've used it for lower ability year 11 boys to get them working together, for twitchy year 9s who need to stop and do something else in the middle of the lesson and for year 10 who were about to go off to their science mock exams.  They've all loved it. Give it a try.


You need to split your class into two teams, boys versus girls worked well.... Each group then has to decide which character they are going to be, a wizard, a giant or a dwarf - I found cartoon images of these and projected them up on the board, along with the rules.  (From here on in it's a lot like "Rock, paper, scissors")


Wizards beat giants by casting spells
Giants beat dwarfs by stamping on the ground
Dwarfs beat wizards by tickling their feet.


I mimed these for the class to demonstrate....


On your count ("1......2.......3.......") everyone in the team has to do the action that goes with the character their team has chosen - wizards put their hands out in front of them and wiggle their fingers, giants put their arms above their head and dwarfs crouch down.


The suggestion is that a team gets two points for a win and one for a draw, and the first to 10 points is the winner.  I've been doing "best of three" as an end of lesson thing.


Oh, and you get to giggle along with every kid in your class as they pretend to be wizards....

Interviewing potential PGCE students

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to be on the interview panel for prospective PGCE science students at Leeds University.  The University regularly asks for us to go along, they like to have a university tutor and a teacher doing the interviews, but some schools are reluctant to let staff out, with all the cover implications.  I was lucky, I had a class that could be left to get on with some work and a year 12 class who were loaded down the day before with past examination questions, so cover was minimal.  So off I went....


I met up with the university tutor about half an hour before the start time.  Again, I was lucky, one of my ex-colleagues and lovely friend works in the school of education, and I was paired with her for the afternoon.  We caught up on a lot of news in between things!


There were four candidates, two for chemistry and two for biology.  Obviously I can't say what each of them was like, or what the outcome was but I can say that their passion and commitment to science and teaching was amazing.  Obviously they were a bit naive-sounding at times, but nearly all had spent at least two weeks in a secondary school and knew what they were expecting in terms of workload.


My friend gave them a quick introduction to the course, and then they were sent off to do a written test, a reading test and prepare a two minute talk on some effective teaching they had seen.  We interviewed two candidates and then got them back together for the presentation and group discussion part, and then did the remaining two interviews.


I learnt a lot. I was worried about whether I would know what to say or do - again, interviewing is another new thing for me this year - but I had a list of questions to follow and did a lot of encouraging, reassuring nodding and smiling.  Above all I enjoyed it. I loved meeting these enthusiastic people and trying to find out if they had the personality and skills to train to teach.  Apparently I was calm and confident, and I got an answer out of one candidate that might have sealed it for them!


Some top tips then if you're thinking of applying:

• Get into a school. Get into several different types of school. You're looking for at least a fortnight.  Spend time with staff and pupils and make sure this is really what you want to do. 
• Go into it with your eyes open, yes teaching is rewarding but not all the time.
• Remember, your experience as a kid in school is probably very different to what happens for most kids in most schools.  Not everyone is going to want to, or be able to do A level sciences and save the world from global warming... what do these kids do?
• See a range of subjects. You might really want to teach biology but what does your average pupil do in maths and english? How is science different?
• When you see good teaching try and work out why it was good. What was the teacher doing? What type of person was the teacher? What were the pupils doing?
• Obviously you will want to prepare for an interview but please get off your script. Rehearsed answers that you've learnt off by heart sound just like that and don't allow your personality to shine through.  You won't be able to script all your lessons.
• Read up on things about teaching, for example in the news.  You might want to look at some educational policies but be careful - chances are the interviewer knows more than you do and you don't want to get things really wrong.  If you know it all now, why do you need a place on the course?
• Good luck.  The PGCE is possibly the toughest year of your life, there will be highs and lows like you rarely experience anywhere else.  You will always be tired and there will never be enough time to do everything you want to do (let alone need to do). You will survive and the staff in your placement schools have all been there too - we all want to help you.

My first go at leading training (and my second too!)

My Head of Department asked me to organise some training a few weeks ago.  I've never been asked to do anything like that before, so I was a little nervous.  I  know that I need to be more of a leader, even though I've no official responsibility or role, so it was good to start with something I'm enthusiastic about.  The brief was basically something on teaching and learning, based on the Passport to Outstanding programme, to take place during our weekly departmental meeting, and I also had to get three more colleagues involved (who were ace!). There was a bit of emailing went on, and a couple of conversations grabbed at lunchtime, but we got there in the end.


One borrowed the school ipods and showed us how to generate QR codes as well as explaining what all the mysterious ones around the department were for (a great year 9 revision quiz). We practiced using the ipods to read the codes we were given, and then followed the instructions - a few were turned into paper aeroplanes, a few given to someone else in the department and so on.  I liked this website for putting pictures in the middle of the codes.


Another colleague talked us through how to run a Marketplace activity, something that she does a lot, very successfully. I think they can be a bit worrying the first time you try them so having someone talk you through is really useful.  We've also been trying to use this type of activity more as it's felt that it can increase literacy skills, something we're focusing on at key stage 4.


My other amazing colleague talked about how she has been learning to "let go" more during lessons, letting the kids get on with activities and not feeling that she has to control every aspect of the hour.  It doesn't sound much, but it's very difficult to do, and I know I'm guilty sometimes of wanting it all my own way during a lesson.


My little bit of training took me hours to prepare! I finally got round to getting some hexagons laminated so I spent the evening before cutting them all up....  I gave them to my colleagues with the challenge to pick a topic (they used particle theory, the nervous system, electricity, space) and write out the key words onto the hexagons (using whiteboard markers). Then they organised them into the patterns to show the links.  It was amazing to see adults go through the same out-loud thinking process as the kids do - "I'll put this one next to this one because..."  Since then at least one colleague has been back to me several times to thank me for showing her this - she is using it with lots of classes and has started to turn it into a memory game, snap, and even making one massive class-sized pattern.


The best thing was that I really enjoyed doing it, showing other people a new thing, and then having them come back to me once they'd tried it to tell me how useful it was to them.


It turned into such a hit that the following week I tried to get the department onto twitter to show them all the great cpd they could access (asechat, ukedchat and so on).  I think this might have been less successful, possibly because it requires people to use their own free time in the evenings, and some are already swamped in marking and planning.


All I need to do now is think of the next great thing to share...

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