Miss J's Science Teaching Blog

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

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