Teacher teacherFrom dance to management consulting, the Creative Science project has generated a multitude of new approaches to teachers' professional development. |
What is the best way to learn about science - or, indeed, any other subject? The old-fashioned rote learning approach isn't much fun for students (or for teachers), and is unlikely to inspire a life-long interest in science. Outside school, and as adults, we learn almost unconsciously 'on the job', through experience and action, and the simple imperative of being faced with problems we have to solve.
New teaching methodology developed in recent years has looked more closely at our learning processes - the ways in which we understand and remember things - to make learning more effective and enjoyable. The same approach informs the development of new teaching methods supported by Creative Science - an initiative launched by the Wellcome Trust and Department for Education and Skills (DfES) to generate new high-quality continuing professional development courses for science teachers and technicians. It is hoped that after independent evaluation, the best of them will be taken up and run by the national network of Science Learning Centres.
Projects funded will provide, among other things, training in ICT (information and communications technology) skills, subject knowledge updates, techniques for contextualizing science, and tools for facilitating classroom discussion.
Grape expectations
Cross-fertilization from the humanities can offer ways to help science teachers, used to teaching hard irrefutable facts, focus more on the process of reasoning than reaching a predetermined 'right' answer. Barry Gunter at Keele University is developing a course on which science teachers will develop 'brainwarmers' - classroom activities that are designed to encourage children to make predictions through reasoning.
"In one activity, which we call 'Titanic', we suspend food stuffs, such as grapes, rice, pasta, peanuts, above a jar containing three layers - syrup, water and vegetable oil - and get the children to predict whether they will float or sink, and where, and explain how they arrived at that prediction. The idea is to focus on the reasoning process rather than the conclusion. That more realistically reflects the ways in which scientific knowledge is arrived at.
If the child comes to an alternative conclusion, and they have reasoned it properly, then that conclusion is valid and can be tested. The children then reflect on their prediction and refine their conceptual model."
Several Creative Science projects have plundered the performing arts, which offer a wide range of different learning styles - including touch, vision, sound and movement - that stimulate pupils across a range of senses.
Wendy Fortescue Hubbard at the Maths Connection in Devon and choreographer Tamara Cater of the Meridian Dance Theatre are using dance to teach algebra to support staff. "Pupils' progress in science is being held back because they, and the support staff trying to help them, can't do the maths," says Wendy. "We'll be developing a dance piece, in which the dancers represent algebraic operations, to demonstrate to support staff how to rearrange and solve equations. That will give them the confidence to strengthen students' maths skills, so they'll have more time for science."
Other projects have turned to the ever-evolving world of digital technology. Dr James Collett and his team at the University of Hertfordshire will be showing teachers how to use the National Schools Observatory, a website developed at Liverpool John Moores University, which provides remote access to robotic telescopes. "Teachers can access professional-size telescopes situated in the best locations in the world, including Hawaii, Australia and the Canary Islands, and request observations, which are sent to them for analysis in the classroom.
"In parallel, we'll be showing them imaginative ways to exploit digital stills and video images in teaching science. We'll show them how to take pictures at night - or to video a falling rubber ball and a falling ping-pong ball and do comparative motion analysis on them both." Use of digital media can also engage pupils who aren't interested in science by tapping into their aesthetic sense instead. "But the real beauty of it is that once teachers have been shown these techniques, they'll realize how simple and quick to use they are."
The course will be held at the Bayfordbury Observatory and Field Station - whose dramatic space-age setting reflects the 21st-century nature of the course. One of the UK's top astro-photographers, Nik Szymanek (an underground train driver by day, and a talented amateur astronomer by night), will show teachers simple ways of using digital cameras to take astro-photographs.
The business of teaching
Many projects are looking far outside science teaching for novel ideas. A team from Synectics Education Initiative, for example, is adapting management training tools to encourage participants to think more laterally in order to facilitate discussions on new scientific issues.
"Synectics are tools to help turbo-charge thinking," explains Project Manager Mathilda Joubert. "You take a problem, such as: how do I get rid of the tension between myself and the boss? Then you use excursion tools to stimulate initial ideas. These might be visual stimuli like drawings or paintings, or role-play exercises, where you take a historical character, such as Shakespeare or Elizabeth I and ask how would they solve the problem. One idea might be to kill the boss. These initial ideas can be as absurd as you like, it's about forcing the brain to make connections. After all, as Einstein said, if at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
"You then use process tools to capitalize on the creative thinking and take it back from the absurd to reality, for example through forms of constructive evaluation.
"This example comes from the business world, but in the Creative Science project we will deal with issues arising in biomedical discussions, such as cloning, genetic testing and assisted fertility, and train teachers to facilitate discussions that will lead to new discoveries and inventions for their students." As well as helping teachers and pupils enhance their understanding by actively thinking through problems, these are important life skills. "Enhanced creative thinking skills can empower youngsters to invent the future they want, rather than having to accept the one they get."
Courses offering busy teachers a much wanted chance to be creative - without demanding a high proportion of their time for the privilege - are likely to be received with enthusiasm. It is to meet this double need for time and creativity that Tony Sherborne at Sheffield Hallam University and Marianne Cutler at the Association for Science Education (ASE) are planning to develop the UPD8 Live! constructor kit.
Science UPD8 on the ASE website www.ase.org.uk currently offers teachers classroom activities in response to science news, to help kickstart a science lesson or generate discussion by relating it back to something topical. "The activities are very popular. When we did a SARS activity, looking at the spread of diseases, it was downloaded by 2800 teachers in five days.
"When asked, teachers said they would love to create something like this, but they simply don't have the time: it takes six hours' time to create one activity. The constructor kit reduces that time to two hours. On a one-day course, we'll show teachers how to use these tools and develop their own activities. As well as getting the chance to be creative and gain confidence using contemporary science in teaching, they'll also develop their own ICT skills."
Training for technicians
Technicians are often the backbone of science lessons, yet they have few professional development opportunities. To address this gap, several projects funded by Creative Science focus on the training needs of technicians.
Phil Godding and colleagues at itec are developing a course that will update and expand technicians' ICT skills. "There's an increasing need for ICT in classrooms, such as computers, PC projectors, digital microscopes, and dataloggers," he says. "Dataloggers have a series of sensors which measure voltage, current, pH, light or sound and so on, then send the results to a computer. If you're in the field you can store the data in the datalogger till you get back to school then transfer it to the computer; if you're in school, you can see the results immediately." Often it is technicians who are best placed to use such tools.
Bill Hockley and Ed Walsh from the Cornwall Education Development Service aim to demonstrate to technicians the significance of their role in the effective teaching of scientific enquiry. "We'll start by looking at why it's important to study science at all," says Bill. "Then we'll ask, why do practical work? The aim is to show technicians there is a sound reason for practical investigative work in schools and that they play a vital role in this. Their job has real value and a theoretical underpinning."
The skills that a teacher is developing in pupils are not always self-evident to the prep room; the workshop takes technicians through the stages of an investigation so they can see the underlying purpose. "Technicians are often asked for ideas, particularly by less experienced teachers" says Ed. "This course is intended to give them a wider perspective and that can only be good news for the science team."