I’ve advocated #ASEChat on Twitter before as a source of excellent CPD.  If you want to know more about #ASEchat then check out  my guide here and look at the official #ASEchat page here.

Last night I moderated (if that is the appropriate term) a discussion about teaching electricity which made for very interesting reading.  I’ve posted a summary of the chat below, and as with all #ASEchat sessions, the official archive and summary can be found on the official #ASEchat page.  I maintain an unofficial archive of #ASEchat transcripts on Google Docs in spread sheet format which allows you to sort by contributor, highlight links etc.  The electricity chat can be found here.

Summary of Topic 24 – Teaching Electricity

I chose this topic as a biologist because I’m not sure I always do it justice. I wanted to hear from experienced and creative physicists how they introduce the concepts and any models they might use. I’ve listed some of these below:

• The Rope Model: recommended by the IoP and several ASEchat participants, the rope model can be used to model flow of charge around the circuit (several participants didn’t like the phrase ‘flow of current’). For those who haven’t seen this model before, this video captured at a regional ASE workshop (featuring Helen Pollard from the IoP) demonstrates how it works.
• The penguin rollercoaster was mentioned more than once (similar to this one) in which @gwiff explained the penguin is the charge, the height is the voltage, the current is the penguins going past, the resistance is the friction and finally the battery is the escalator.
• Several teachers said they introduce the term coulombs early on in KS3 and to specifically avoid referring to electrons. @Lethandrel said “Coulombs given joules each (EMF) Mission give them all away (pd is each charitable donation) Must do it in conga line” and shared an image of her own furry coulomb.
• Several teachers pointed out that many of the models have flaws in them (credit to @alomshaha and @informed_edu for pointing out the flaws in the rope model). All is not lost however as other contributors suggested that discussing models and their limitations fits in very well with ‘how science works’. In fact @alomshaha points out “It was while struggling with electricity as a student myself that I first really understood what a model was in science”.
• Primary teachers have a part to play in teaching electricity. Advice included avoid referring to electrons, don’t teach students that current decreases round a circuit, make circuits and test for breaks in these circuits, testing different sized batteries.
• Finally the question was asked if electricity is taught poorly in many instances, are we not better off leaving teaching electricity until KS4 so it can be taught by subject specialists. The response was mixed, however physicists are in short supply and many schools don’t have this luxury, so good models and explanations are essential for all teachers.

Top tweets

ViciaScience: Is teaching electricity just about understanding how bread is transported from bakery to supermarket?

Lethandrel: Avoid talking about electrons – kids end up obsessed and can’t think of electricity without them

Lethandrel: I talk about coulombs per sec and joules per coulomb, cute furry creature with bag of jewels/joules nice visual to hang it on

Agittner: have we all seen John Travoltage on the Phet simulations?

informed_edu: pet hate: "current flows round the circuit"

informed_edu: @Bio_Joe Charge flows around the circuit. Current is the number of coulombs flowing past each second.

alomshaha: @asober The IOP’s rope model is inadequate. Does not explain potential difference or drop in P.D across resistor

Useful links mentioned in the discussion

PhET Interactive Simulations – http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulations/category/physics

Squishy circuits – http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/apthomas/SquishyCircuits/index.htm

Teaching Science for Understanding (Electricity) – http://www.education.leeds.ac.uk/research/cssme/ElecCircuitsScheme.pdf

Klunky Schematic Editor – http://www.qsl.net/wd9eyb/klunky/

Switched On Kids – http://www.switchedonkids.org.uk/

Hilary Osoko has advice for Primary teachers – http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=96600

Making sense of children’s ideas http://staff.science.uva.nl/~joling/vakdidactiek/documenten/electricity.pdf

Shortly before the summer holiday I went on a briefing session on the new Ofsted framework for school leaders.  I’ve tried to tease out some of the most important issues for heads of department – as you read below remember that I’m not an Ofsted inspection and that I’m commenting on notes that I made during the briefing session.

The Ofsted Framework is changing early next year (subject to Royal Assent) so what does that mean for teachers and school leaders.

What is changing?

Ofsted is trying to make the framework more manageable, simplifying and streamlining the inspection process.  The number of key judgements will be reduced to four, plus an overall judgement.  The new judgements will be:

• Achievement
• Quality of teaching
• Leadership and management
• Behaviour and safety

The overall judgement will take account of the four judgements above and also how well the school promotes pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development.

What does this mean for the classroom teacher?

I’m told that the classroom teacher won’t notice a huge difference over previous inspections.  There may be more lesson observations as inspectors try to get a handle on achievement, teaching and behaviour, and there could still be part-lesson observations.  There may even be bespoke observations, for example if there is belief that there is insufficient challenge in maths, starts of lessons/activities could be sampled instead.  Teachers will still receive feedback at the end of an observation.  Joint observations will still be conducted (to help moderate judgements about teaching and learning made by the school as part of the self-evaluation process).

There will also be a greater focus on the teaching of literacy across the school, and inspectors will be looking to gather information about the impact that teaching has on learning over time.  Progress (as well as raw attainment) will be important as well.

What does this mean to subject leaders?

With the culling of key judgements and abolition of the compulsory SEF, it may be time to look again at your own self-evaluation procedures, perhaps focussing more attention to the four key judgements (as listed above).

There will be a greater focus on reading and literacy so if you haven’t already embraced literacy across the curriculum, now might be a good time to start putting this into effect.  Whilst there is no separate judgement for literacy, it will be looked at as part of the key judgements.  Pilot schools recommend that there is a literacy component to lesson planning pro forma.

There will no longer be judgements for special educational needs (SEN) and school specialisms but they will be looked at as part of the new key judgements.

Behaviour is more important than ever, with the message coming both from government and from Ofsted.  The inspection team will try to collect evidence to show what behaviour is typically like rather than just the behaviour they see during the inspection.  This could include pupil or parental feedback and exclusion records.

There will no longer be reference to contextual value added (CVA) figures, and inspectors will revert to using value added measures as in the past.  Tracking information and baseline data will be very important to help demonstrate progress and justify the school’s approach.  Make sure as a department you have a good handle on progress and can demonstrate this if asked.

Inspectors will also be looking to see more of focus on formative assessment and it may be worth revisiting this in departmental meetings.  Inspectors will want to see the impact teaching has on learning over time, and may look at student work and corresponding data.

School leaders will be focussed on improving outcomes and narrowing the gap.  Self-evaluation, monitoring and teaching, capacity for improvement and compliance with statutory requirements will form part of the leadership and management judgement.  Departmental leaders will be expected to have in place strategies, structures and approaches which are bringing about improvement, and to show how barriers to learning are overcome.

It is also worth mentioning that inspection teams will only have Raiseonline data and the last inspection report, any other information will be provided by the school (and in a format of the school’s own choice).

That’s the crux of it! I’m no expert but I’m happy to try and answer any comments or respond to feedback below. 

Image © Blue Square Thing on Flickr

Visser J, Differentiation and the Curriculum, Birmingham, 1993, University of Birmingham

Differentiation is the responsibility of each and every teacher and should be a routine part of planning. Only the teacher can differentiate their own lessons – it can not be delegated to the Learning Support department or simply copied out of a book.

Types of differentiation

Differentiation by outcome

Giving all students the same task (and any supporting resources) and letting students attempt it at their own level. E.g. create a poster to show…

Differentiation by support

Giving all students the same task and teacher directing more attention to specific students/groups of students. Could also be giving weaker students supporting materials for a task or specialist apparatus (e.g. a digital thermometer)

Differentiation by grouping

Putting students in groups chosen by the teacher. Could be grouping by ability, gender, interests, social/behavioural groups or mixed ability.

Differentiation by resources

Giving all students a similar task but giving different resources. For example a students doing an experiment and then one group of students given a scaffold to support their investigation whilst another group might only get a list of equipment.

Differentiation by task

Giving students a different task to do based on their ability, interests or aptitude.

Could be as simple as getting each group to present the same information in different ways e.g. a scene in Shakespeare – a poster, a comic strip, a story, a play or an essay

Could be setting a different task for students – e.g. working on different sets of maths problems, working on different texts, reading different stories/plays etc.

Where to start?

•Learning objectives – all/most/some or levelled objectives

•Knowing your students – subject assessment data, reading ages, CATS scores etc

•Be organised – teachers need a work-life balance. Throw in drama activities etc that require little marking, use peer marking & self assessment

This post is taken from a presentation I gave at a mainstream school recently.  Is there anything you’ve done that you’d like to add – if so I’d love to hear your comments below.

Collective memory

If you haven’t done one of these before you really should.  Students of all ages love them – and they are easy to prepare.  I choose a suitable image related to my topic (with text and images/diagrams) and I split the class into groups.  Each group has to recreate the diagram but they are only allowed to come and look at the image one at a time, and for a limited amount of time.  The competition between groups is an excellent motivator – and if you get the groups to plan how they are going to do the activity, and evaluate their practice at the end it makes a good thinking skills activity too!

Jigsaw

I’ve attached a jigsaw template to this post.  The premise is simple – find a suitable diagram and then overlay the jigsaw (MS Office tools are sufficient e.g. PowerPoint, Word, Publisher).  Print out the diagram and you have jigsaw lines over the top.  I’ve managed to cut out 5/6 at once or you could pass the image for a teaching assistant to cut out.  Again preparation time is minimal and it is a good way to get SEN students to think about an image – working very well for those with poor hand-eye coordination.

Link to black jigsaw (with transparency – for general printing)

Link to white jigsaw (with transparency- to overlay over photos etc)

This jigsaw was completed by one of my weakest students – he not only managed to complete the jigsaw (telling me about some of the things on it) but managed to glue it down himself too (pity he didn’t quite get the paper the right way around!).

Double circulation role play

Aim: To learn how blood flows around the body & sites of oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange.

This needs a little preparation/apparatus to make the most of it.  You will need a set of cards and either red/blue counters or the provided oxygen/carbon dioxide cards.

You will also need to select three suitable students to take the role of heart, lungs and body organs.  If you have a large or able group you may want to use multiple students for the body organs, representing multiple organs.  I give the students a card to remind them of their role.

The rest of the class take the role of the red blood cells.  Students have to move from the heart to the lungs and collect an oxygen token.  Students then return to the heart before being directed to a body organ where they exchange their oxygen token for a carbon dioxide token.  The student taking the role of the heart do the directing – selecting a suitable student is essential if this is going to succeed.

Whilst a little chaotic, even the weakest of students was able to participate and gain something from the activity.

Outcomes

• During the follow-up activity and plenary students could:
• describe the journey of oxygen around the body
• say how many times through the heart the blood passes whilst going around the body
• say which blood is oxygenated/deoxygenated at various points around the body
• make good guesses at the structure of the heart
• explain why the sides of the heart aren’t of equal size.

Resources

Role play cards

The presentation embedded below shows some of the strategies that teaching assistants can use with students in lessons, and the toolkit is a set of templates that can be used to support these strategies.

Feel free to download the toolkit/presentation and use them in your own establishment (whilst respecting our copyright of course).  I hope you find them useful.

The presentation


Download the Teaching Assistant’s Toolkit

My first impression when I unboxed the camera was the wobbliness of the neck.  Like a big black rubbery swan, the visualiser sat on my desk with curved neck, but fortunately a smaller footprint than a real swan!  When in use there was some wobble of the image when I knocked the desk, but this was only minor – however I’d recommend seating the visualiser on a firm surface.

The visualiser comes with manuals, a selection of cables, a mains adaptor (on a cable of reasonable length) and a CD containing software for PC and Mac.   Installation of the software was relatively straight forward on stand-alone laptops but our technician ran into problems when installing on our networked desktops (hopefully he’ll have success on the later version that we downloaded from Avermedia’s support site).

The software was quite straight forward, with the ability to operate the main features of the visualiser from both the software and the unit itself.  Pupils were impressed by the ability to switch between colour and black & white (handy for looking at monochrome text) although the negative mode freaked them out a little!  Capturing a still image from the camera takes only a mouse click, although saving them is much less intuitive (or perhaps I was limited by the resolution of my desktop – the control panel of the software starts up by default off the edge of the screen).  Video recording/time lapse is supported, as are basic annotation functions, mimicking some of the simpler functions of an IWB.  An interesting feature is the ability to broadcast the image over the network, for other PCs (with the software installed) to receive.  Whilst this sounds useful, there was significant lag between images being put under the camera, the screen updating and then networked satellite PCs being updated making it less useful than first impressions would suggest.

As you can see the images were crisp. quality good and the colours well balanced when viewing on the PC screen.  The image updated quickly on screen and zooms were good, although the software was unable to save a zoomed image, instead it reverted back to the full image.  Capturing the windows worked well, although it is possible that future versions of the software will make this process easier.

I didn’t use the VGA pass though cables supplied, which are more suited to the visualiser used as part of a permanent installation.  Instead I connected it up using the composite output (phono plug).  It took me a while to locate the tiny RGB/TV switch which needed to the flicked, but then the image appeared a glorious 72” wide.  It soon became apparent that the quality of the picture through the composite output was not as good as that captured at full resolution over USB.  Whilst this is probably due to the limitation of the composite video format, it is worth bearing in mind as connection to a PC gives a crisper picture with much brighter clearer colours.  Hopefully the picture below gives you a better idea of how the image differs from the composite output.

I haven’t had much of a chance to use the visualiser yet.  The software isn’t installed on my whiteboard PC, limiting me to using the composite video output.  When I tried the hardware out with my year 11 class it was very useful being able to project a worksheet on screen (I hadn’t got a digital copy of the one I was using) and then being able to show the pupils’ work on the screen was a huge motivator.  (With the software installed I would have been able to easily highlight the flaw in the plug wiring above, which is not as obvious in the bottom picture).

I look forward to using the Avermedia visualiser more in future as I become more accustomed to the hardware. 

Have you got a visualiser?  How do you use yours in lesson?  Do you have any ideas how I could use mine better?

Feel free to post comments and suggestions below.

Although the strategies are familiar, it is worth plugging the metacognitive plenary – the part of the lesson at the end where you talk about the ‘thinking’ involved.  Also gives a chance for the teaching to model and the pupils to evaluate their work.

For the collective memory I used science diagrams showing pollution (I have also used the same pictures with pupils.  The EM spectrum diagram works very well for this purpose).  For the reading images I lifted a picture from an Anthony Browne books – these are excellent for reading images (hard to make sense of single picture without text for cues).

As well as the strategies mentioned in the presentation we looked at fortune lines (and living graphs) which involved a group sticking ambiguous statements onto a graph/fortune line.  The answers are ambiguous so that there can be several right answers/no wrong answers.  Pupils work on their reasoning skills and the ability to justify their answers.

One of the main problems we encountered was pupils not being able to work in a group, and having poor communication skills.  I spoke to our speech and language therapist who recommended this book.  I use one of the activities at the start of every science lesson as a starter.  Not only are the pupils starting to develop their thinking/communication skills but they are alert & engaged for the rest of the lesson (and with much better retention too!)

It’s hard to sum up all the work we’ve done in a short blog post. Fill in the contact me form at the top of the page if you want to ask me any questions about what we’ve been doing.