Hello my name is Mark Winterbottom. I'm a senior lecturer in science education
at the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. There's one big message
when thinking about teaching A Level and
that is making it as demanding and as thought
provoking as your efforts to teach IGCSE.
So what that doesn't mean is that you
stand up in class and do a lot of talking,
but actually what that does mean is that you
get students to do the thinking. So when
you're trying to make them engage in a
concept encourage that talk at the start
of a lesson, so that you've got
interactive dialogue between you and the
students, but then give them something,
which allows them to either work it out
for themselves, or to work through it for
themselves. In this way you're engaging
with their prior knowledge, you're
getting good exploratory talk happening
and you're getting them to learn. One
other thing to think about, or one of a
way of thinking about it is to employ
the principles of assessment for
learning. Now really what they say is
that you should see the learner as
autonomous and you should try to develop
that autonomy you should make the
learners support each other by working
in pairs or in groups and you should
give them feedback so that they know where
they're starting from, and where they're
going to. So that involves clarifying your
learning intentions at the start of
lessons and getting students to reflect
back on what we've learnt at the end of
lessons. There's no difference than when you
teach IGCSE. A Level is just the same, it
requires you to engage your students in
deep and exploratory thought. If you
get your students to think then actually
you're achieving one for big aims of
science education and that's to develop
real new scientists who can actually do
science when they leave. So fostering
their critical thinking, fostering their
data analysis skills, fostering the way
in which they interpret data and make
sense of data as part of inquiries is
really important. Don't be hijacked by
the specification, don't allow for
content knowledge to rule your teaching.
Really think about those key skills that
they'll take forward into scientific
careers and actually it's that kind of
thinking that makes science lessons
enjoyable at A Level or at IGCSE and
which will make them think, or make
students think that science is really
for them and that's what you're trying
to achieve.
One key part of teaching A Level science
is practical work, now of course many of
you might say that there's not enough
equipment in your schools in order to do
it and that may well be true and is a
real disadvantage. However, when you see
the opportunity for practical work,
really think if you could do it. There's
a lot of kitchen chemistry
experiments you can do there's a lot of
just normal resources, which you can
employ to achieve the same ends as
practical work, but don't run to your
head of department every five minutes to
ask for new equipment, because they
probably won't pay for it, so really
think what will students learn from
practical work, is it therefore worth
doing and if it is really make that case
for it and really go out of your way to
try to get the equipment in
any way you can. There's two key things
that children get out of that practical
work, one of them if you ask the right
questions alongside is learning of
conceptual ideas, the second is learning
how to do, so how to do science, how to
interpret data, how to think. Both of
those are equally important. The other
challenge for teachers often talk about
is time
specifications are often very full of
content knowledge, but look in the
specification because the application of
understanding is just as big as the
content knowledge itself, so really think
properly about how you can prepare your
students for the whole specification and
that will diversify your teaching, so
that rather than you having to do
everything, probably quite inefficiently,
you get your students to do most of the
work and that for homework in class and
that will mean that they're more likely
to learn what you want them to learn.
What you may also find is that students
and parents really see coming to school
as a way of getting knowledge, in other
words they want to write down everything
you say, they just want to sit and listen,
they want to go home with good notes and
then the parents then look at the
quality of your teaching based on the
products that they see coming home. That
can be quite difficult to educate
students to realize that their
responsibility is to do the thinking to
do the learning, so when you design
activities for them to do, to try to get
them to think through offering up the
ideas you want to come to, then actually
the best way is to design them so that
you can generate notes off the back of
them, so when they go home they know
they've got things to revise from but in
the class they really did the learning
by doing the thinking.
Some of you may find that the students
who arrive in your A Level class really
don't have many practical skills, so
I would suggest that at the start of a
year you really focus on developing
those skills, really think about
what do they learn how to do in
your practical activities and structure
your practical activities so that you've
almost got a matrix, which tells you what
you think they're going to learn in
terms of skills and competencies as well
as what you think they're going to learn in
terms of conceptual ideas. Some teachers
I know even do a little two lesson
course on practical skills at the start
of the year that's not a bad idea,
especially if you ask students to write
up their own little practical skills
handbook, which they can draw on
throughout the year, but ultimately
really think about it because feeling
unskilled for a student actually can be a
barrier for their engagement in
practical activities and so making them
feel confident is really important.
