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Scientific Vocabulary – Why I explicitly teach it

When I first started my career as a Physics teacher, I was convinced that the way pupils got good grades in their Physics exams was by being good at maths. Physics is basically applied maths, right? Then I realised that actually only about 35% of a typical GCSE Physics exam paper is on equations and maths. That means there is 65% of an exam that relies on the pupils being able to communicate scientific ideas and theories correctly using the correct scientific vocabulary.  By not helping my pupils to access the scientific vocabulary and by focusing so heavily on the maths I was doing my pupils a disservice.     I realised that I needed to start to support my pupils in understanding and using scientific vocabulary but had no idea where to begin! No-one in my department really focused on teaching of vocabulary explicitly and with a purpose. A key word was just defined to the class and then quickly moved on from so that we could focus on the maths.  I found this very hard. I then attended
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The Use of Inquiry Based Learning in A Level Physics

Upon joining my current school, where I teach mainly A Level as one of only two specialists, I completed an exam analysis with my Head of Department on the previous academic years papers. Upon doing this I noticed two main places where students were dropping marks – practical planning (especially unknown practical’s!) and problem solving. The problem solving was a real issue for us as an A Level team as paper 3 is all based on problem solving! I knew straight away that we had a problem that we needed to solve. It was decided that inquiry based learning was to be the way which we were going to attempt to solve this problem. Inquiry based learning is when as the teacher you ask the students a question or introduce them to a problem and leave them to solve it on their own with very little input from the teacher. This is not a technique that can be used with novice learners. It takes time as a learner to develop the skills so that IBL is effective. We have to carefully consider if we are d
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Extremophiles – The Tiny Organisms Making Cross Curricular Links

As an astrobiologist extremophiles are amazing and such an important little organisms and they should be in your classroom too! Extremophiles are organisms that have adapted to survive in some of the most extreme conditions on Earth. In Astrobiology extremophiles are used to see how we can extend the biogenic markers we use when searching for life.    So, how can these tiny organisms make cross curricular links in science?    Well, these tiny organisms can help you link all three sciences together seamlessly, and I am going to tell you how! In Physics, when teaching how nuclear power stations work at GCSE we always talk about the water used as a coolant. Well, there is an extremophile (my favourite one in fact) called ‘radio resistant’ extremophiles. These are extremophiles that live in the coolant water in nuclear power stations, most power stations actually use antibiological treatments in the water now due to them. They have adapted to be able to repair and replace their radiated ce
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Live Lesson Carnage

After my first week of teaching my full timetable live, I have some successes and some well... carnage! My first ever live lesson with Year 13 P1&2 Monday morning was going so well, my writing on the graphics tablet was finally legible and the students were happily unmuting and interacting with me. Skip to the end of the lesson and I'm happily going through the exam question annotating on my computer so they can all see feeling very smug and confident. I get to the end of the exam question, one of them unmutes "Miss, were you talking during that because if you were you were on mute". After a long discussion we established that they had happily sat there watching me annotate over my screen without thinking to tell me they couldn't hear me... the explanation was much more concise second time round! Today P1&2 however wasn't a patch on Monday year 13. Joined my teams meeting seeing about half of my students waiting for me in the lobby and was quite pleased bu
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How you can promote scientific literacy in your Physics class!

  If 2020 has taught us anything it’s that scientific literacy is important. It always has been and always will be. I don’t mean being able to read and understand a paper on theoretical physics but being able to read and understand journal articles, newspaper articles or magazine articles on science.   In terms of our pupils, they are examined on their use of scientific terminology. For a typical triple physics GCSE paper ~35-40% will be maths and equations leaving ~60-65% as written questions. Our pupils have to be able to write coherently complex scientific ideas and we need to help them with this. I therefore believe it is our duty as science teachers to expose our pupils to as many examples of actual scientific writing as possible and help them to develop their vocabulary skills.    To be able help them, we don’t need to teach them about the details of how we learn to read, spell etc – although it is very interesting for us as educators – but we should teach them how to break down
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