never mind the optics

We had our inset day for CfE planning on 12th June.  The day was spent in departments, with my own faculty breaking out into subjects (physics, chemistry, biology) for short sessions to overtake specific activities.  Our objective was to build a 9 week course for each subject area – the plan is to have a subject rotation, not a teacher rotation in S1.

Over the day, several different strategies emerged.

• Biology using several “guest teachers” from healthcare professions
• Chemistry colleagues pulled out all the stops to provide stunningly visual experiments (see below)
• Physics went overboard with open-ended investigations.

Each approach has challenges;

• can we get repeat NHS visits to prevent a “school hall” address to S1?
• do the non-Chemists have the confidence/skills to attempt the more demanding reactions with pupils? What CPD is required?
• convincing Biologists & Chemists that they can do Physics? CPD !!

We’ve now identified which outcomes each of the 9 week courses will be designed to meet.  The plan is to provide some form of assessment, possibly in the 10th week.

We saw these subject-specific “minicourses” as focused introductions to each of the sciences addressing questions like “What’s Chemistry / Physics / Biology?” as S2 pupils struggle to complete choice forms for S3 and beyond.

We pinned our suggested S1 courses on the new “learning wall” outside the school’s main office area.

Over the day, the wall was populated with similar information from each of the curricular areas.   Here you can see one of the Maths staff (Mr. Bell) looking for spelling mistakes in the Physics outcomes.

The last activity for the day was a series of demonstrations from the Chemistry folks.  This was a short CPD session where we looked at two different reactions that can be used to create a volcano in the classroom.

The first of these involves aluminium powder and iodine crystals, catalysed by addition of a drop of water.

The reaction must take place in a fume hood as the funky purple smoke is iodine gas, which is bad for you.  Since we are were all moved into new classrooms this year, the session included a briefing on how to use the new portable fume hoods.  A couple of teaching points we discovered here were;

• iodine sublimes (iodine changes directly from solid state to gas)
• this is an example of a gas denser than air (if the extraction in the hood is switched off, a purple cloud builds up from the base of the work bench)

Then we looked at a different reaction that produced a similar effect, this was the burning of ammonium dichromate, an orange solid, to leave a green/black residue of chromium oxide behind.  This reaction does not require a fume hood, so I got close and filmed it.

ammonium dichromate volcano from mr mackenzie on Vimeo.

Podcast Video [ 0:45 ] Download

Despite the enormous gaps in my timetable due to study leave, I’ve remained pretty busy.  Having had only a peripheral involvement in other activities at school, there seems, for me, to have been a massive shift from working with pupils to working with other members of staff.  The driving force has been the coming of Curriculum for Excellence for our new S1 cohort who will join the school this August.

As a faculty, we’ve recently had a series of sessions looking at what CfE might mean for us.  The opinions expressed in these meetings are diverse and I have been genuinely surprised by just how radical some of my colleagues have been thinking when presented with a blank sheet of paper.

That’s radical as in

• no jotters
• current S1 notes sent to paper recycling skip
• staff issued with magnets to display pupils’ work on our (steel) classroom walls
• pupils to get scrap book and A3 portfolio pouch to store their work
• consensus that records/evidence of pupils achieving new science outcomes might not be written or paper-based artefacts (Flip camera?!)

We have a CfE inset coming up that may allow us the time to hang some further details on this set of ideas.

I thought I would include a second Animoto video.  What’s interesting is that pupils did not feel it was necessary to extend their videos beyond a minute, even when they had access to the all-areas education pass that allowed for full-length animations.

Podcast Video [ 0:39 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

So what might we consider to be evidence of achieving a Curriculum for Excellence outcome?  I’ve been working on one of these with a lower ability S2 science class.  The outcome we explored was

I can use my knowledge of the basic needs of humans, and the bodies of our solar system, to put together a reasoned report on whether we can colonise space.

I like the way this ties together aspects of physics and biology.  A lot of people out there have this idea that physics and chemistry go well, as do chemistry and biology.  How many people have experienced the intersection of physics and biology though?  I understand this gap a little as I used to work as principal engineer in a biophotonics instrumentation company developing laser-based laboratory equipment for protein analysis in the drug development sector.  When I attended meetings, I was amazed to see so many presentations from researchers who were using biology and physics to solve their problems.

As I mentioned in another post, my class have researched the bodies of the solar system.  They then reviewed their prior learning on the gases in the air, respiration and photosynthesis to make an informed choice of potential colony – they decided on Mars.  Our timing was spot on, as we were able to follow the European Space Agency’s Mars500 project, looking at the potential effects of long term isolation on astronauts travelling to Mars.

For a lower set, writing a report was a daunting prospect.  So we threw out that idea and I took them to the library and introduced them to Animoto, GoAnimate and Glogster.  Once we got round initial problems of web filtering, pupils experimented with all 3 and unanimously agreed to work with Animoto.  I applied for, and received, a free education all-access pass from the Animoto folks for 6 months.  Without this, their films were limited to 30 seconds.

I’ve attached one of the short films they produced to this post.  Are these clips evidence of achieving an outcome?  I feel that they are at least part of the way.  One of the things I like about them is that there is not a powerpoint presentation in sight.  My concern when I hear people around the school talking about implementing CfE is that too many of the outcomes might be assessed by the quality of a powerpoint presentation to the rest of the class.  If nothing else, I hope I have shown this class a different way of structuring and showing information.

Oh, did I mention that they had fun doing it?

Podcast Video [ 0:52 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

My school will be implementing something along the road towards the new CfE outcomes for Science for S1 after the summer holidays.  I don’t know how far down the road we will go in our first year of implementation, it’s unclear if anyone has the answer to that yet at this stage.  

Perhaps unsurprisingly, assessment seems to be an issue already.  It’s disappointing as I thought perhaps there would have been sufficient flexibility in our approach to allow the classroom teacher to assess pupils against the 4 capacities when it came to report card time.

There may be some consensus in the need to get away from the treadmill of racing through a course to meet the requirements of an exam, but so far all I can see is the potential for a “core” science curriculum to be taught in same way by all members of the department and “extension” topics where creativity and opinions of pupils may have some input into what and how a specific outcome progresses.  

The “core” science would be assessed as it always has been, with formative assessment of the additional outcomes.  This assessment policy by committee does not live up to my hopes for CfE.  How are other schools planning to implement CfE in Science?

I’ve clocked up quite a few miles lot in the past few weeks.  The trip to Perth for TeachMeet Physics (see earlier post), a day trip to Aberdeen to help write resources for science teachers to assist with the new optoelectronics CfE outcomes and then, after 2 days of Easter study school, I headed south for a check-up with my NHS dentist (one filling, btw) and let off some steam in Glasgow.

One thing I like about these long drives south (and back again) is the opportunity to fill my iPod with podcasts that I’ve just not had time to listen to during the typical school week.  With such patchy radio reception on the A9, it makes sense to have something else on standby for entertainment.  My “binge listening” habit has been commented on previously.

This last trip was accompanied by the 365 days of astronomy podcast, a project to celebrate 2009 as the International Year of Astronomy.  The individual podcast episodes are very easy to listen to, with a maximum length of 10 minutes per day.  Clearly, several weeks of podcasts are necessary for the 5 hour drive to Glasgow.  The topics discussed each day are diverse and I enjoyed learning Swedish astronomy nouns, hearing various speakers talking about our debt to Galileo, different views on Pluto’s reclassification as a dwarf planet and the answer to the question “What would happen if the moon didn’t exist?”

I’m currently looking at the astronomy outcome with my S2 class and one of the ideas they have put forward is the need for any colony to be sustainable.  It just so happens that one of the earlier podcasts in the 365 days talks about the space beer brewed from barley grown on the International Space Station.  So here we have an example of an arable crop being grown in space.  This is just the point my class were making – at some point you have to start growing your own crops if a space colony is going to survive.  The people behind the 365 days of astronomy podcast allow the audio to be reproduced, so here is the space beer episode.

January 9: The Link Between Beer and Space Settlement [ 10:06 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

We’ve been told that the new S1 will experience the CfE outcomes when they join us after the summer holidays.  In most cases, there are strong links to existing materials used in the context of the 5-14 guidelines that we can draw upon.  However, there are clear gaps in our resources.  Draft outcome SCN 307E is one example;

I can use my knowledge of the basic needs of humans, and the bodies of our solar system, to put together a reasoned report on whether we can colonise space.

My S2 class will start work on this topic on Monday.  The question I have is where this sits in terms of the sciences.  I can see the topic develop in terms of physics or biology.  Either way, we’ll spend Monday’s lesson exploring the solar system and getting to know the names of our planets.  I’m going to use a package called Celestia for this.  There’s also OSXPlanet for apple users, this runs the simulation as a desktop background.  It looks really nice but I just can’t work with a clean desktop on my macbook and that spoils the view!

Here’s a screenshot of Saturn as seen on Celestia.

Cool, eh?

We had a full day inset on Curriculum for Excellence on Tuesday.  I was dreading the prospect of a full day sitting in our school hall listening to someone from down south lecture us about the changes that are coming.  As it happened, my vision of what our session would involve couldn’t have been further from the reality.   There was no guest speaker and we didn’t have to sit all day in the hall.

What we had instead was a day with quite short whole school presentations/videos by the head teacher followed by more in-depth departmental/faculty breakout sessions where the implication of CfE for our own curricular areas were discussed in detail.  I was quite pleased with this unexpected opportunity to discuss the implementation of CfE within Science, as the ongoing administrative side of department meetings often means we never look much further ahead than the current reporting cycle.

Despite having participated in a week-long curriculum planning event last winter, I have remained sceptical about the draft outcomes for Science due to their woolly wording and lack of clarity.  I think I had a lightbulb moment on Tuesday when, in between all the chatter, I realised that it was the pupils’ experiences that counted, not some summative assessment grade or STACs.  When the penny dropped (collectively, I might add) you could feel the relief around the room and the renewed willingness to engage with the challenge.  Questions raised changed from confrontational sentiments such as “How are you supposed to do that?”, “That’s not covered until Higher!” and “We shouldn’t have to rewrite all this!” to more proactive questions like “How could we make this outcome more practical?” and “Can we throw away the S1 textbooks?”

I feel a lot more comfortable now that we have started the discussion, although I don’t know where it will lead us.

image by antonio1952

I’m nervous about the first day of term (this coming Monday) because I have been asked to give an INSET session on how I make best use of ICT in my classroom. It all came about from an open evening for the school’s Parent Forum AGM, where several members of staff were approached to show their rooms and resources used in day-to-day lessons. The feedback we received was pretty positive and resulted in a request for us to run an ICT session for the entire staff at the next inset day.

My plan right now is to break the sessions (about 30 minutes each) into the following steps;

• show my classroom blog and the different resources I have made available online for pupils – another colleague will also discuss blogs but, having shared our experiences, it is clear that we use them for different things
• short focused introduction to the latest tool I have used, screencasting, taking my colleagues through a quick and simple example using the windows software they already have on their classroom pcs and discussing scenarios where this could be used across the curriculum
• a look at the video project I produced with my S2 class towards the end of last session, highlighting how open-ended activities such as this could fit into the CfE draft outcomes for Science

I had thought about a short introductory session on Glow, now that we are likely to be switched on in the New Year, but my Glow account has just been activated and looks pretty empty at present.

It might sound daft to be so nervous about talking to colleagues about what I do every day. In principle, I think it is good that the school recognises the need to share good practice. The problem here is that I can’t see there being very much interest in it. Feedback already received from colleagues suggests they don’t want to know about things that would mean spending more time doing school stuff. From my own perspective, I would have preferred to have a willing audience, rather than an audience who are there through compulsion.

Have you found yourself in a similar situation in the past? How did you approach the problem and how was your presentation received?

I’ve heard people talking about “dead time” recently. It’s defined as the time between pupils choosing their course options for the next few years and the end of the current school year. The problem is that you end up with kids in your class who are not going to be taking your subject next year (for whatever reason) and whenever you try to motiviate them to work, they remind you that they don’t need/want to do your subject next year, so why bother?

Well, it bothers me. The way I see it, it makes little difference whether a pupil is taking my subject next year or not. Those who are will start their new course in June, those who are not don’t need to be dragged through what is left in the curriculum, all this does is switch them off to the possibility of picking your subject up again in later years.

Last year, I used the “dead time” to work with my low ability S2 class to produce a series of short films, each showing a small group performing an experiment (they all chose an experiment that went bang!) After filming, editing and producing a compilation DVD, they voted on their favourite script, effect, experiment, camera operator, scientist, etc. and awarded prizes at a “Science Oscars” ceremony.

Being the new boy in our department, I have the bottom S2 science set again this year. I’ve taken my inspiration for this year’s “dead time” from a Curriculum for Excellence meeting I attended back in November – a group of physics teachers and university researchers got together to start work on a set of resources supporting the introduction of optoelectronics in the draft science outcomes. We were looking at cross-curricular opportunities, linking physics outcomes on light into the chemistry/biology outcomes, and someone suggested an investigation into the response of plants to different colours of light. So that’s what my S2 class will be doing this year.

We have propagated some geranium cuttings from the school greenhouse and are getting ready to grow them on under single colours of light. I persuaded my PT to part with some cash and I’ve bought a supply of ultra bright blue, yellow and red LEDs. Tomorrow, I’m hoping to show some of the class how to assemble a circuit on prototyping board before we move on to soldering next week.

One of the things I am really looking forward to is the chance to give the class an opportunity to try soldering. Everything we do with circuits in school is based around the ubiquitous crocodile clip, a component designed to allow teachers to move quickly from one circuit to another with little thought for giving pupils the skills they might need if they decide to follow a career in electronics.

When I asked the teams to develop success criteria for their experiment, they told me it was important to know if the plant had grown. They came up with a range of ideas and settled on three different measurements; plant height, leaf size and “greenness”. While my classroom is fully quipped to deal with height and “size” measurements, I’m not so sure about the determination of colour. The kids came to the rescue with a suggestion to make their own “paint chart” to compare the shades of green, so that’s another task for tomorrow. It’s going to be a busy 50 minutes and that’s before I introduce our new wiki for recording our progress!