A Chemical Orthodoxy

For years, Key Stage 3 science has played second fiddle to its big brother: Key Stage 4. Sadly, its neglect has caused it to suffer from poorly specified and sequenced curriculums. Resources have been diverted away from it. Assessment and tracking has been swallowed by GCSE-style grades. Non-specialists have been assigned to it. In some cases, it has ceased to exist and become part of a five-year course.

I imagine most readers of this blog will think of this as a travesty. Not just because it’s three years of students’ schooling, not just because it is the time to establish foundational knowledge and enthusiasm for science, but also because it exposes one of the saddest system-level drivers in educational policy: how schools shift their activities and responses to external accountability. There are external exams in Key Stage 4. Progress 8 measures, league tables and the rest. There are no such exams for Key Stage 3, so over time…it appears to matter less.

Problems heap upon problems, and in recent years an additional frustration has come to the fore. Inspired by books like Why Don’t Students Like School and Teach Like a Champion and spurred on by movements like researchEd and CogSciSci, teachers and leaders have become more evidence-informed in their practice. They have wanted to use regular retrieval practice, expert explanations, forensic checks for understanding and extensive independent practice in their lessons and across their curriculums. But as critical and informed consumers, they have found themselves frustrated by the quality of resource available to them. The textbooks, PowerPoints and resources that they paid thousands of pounds for could no longer meet their needs. They weren’t detailed enough and they weren’t sequenced well enough. They forced topics onto double spreads and provided assessments that didn’t match taught material. They used exam questions from decades old schemes of work that frustrated students and teachers alike. They didn’t provide enough practice for the students, and they didn’t provide enough guidance for the teachers. Crowded PowerPoints abounded, and science teaching became a matter of mashing through a slide deck, and outsourcing your explanation to a series of bulletpoints or an online video. Colourful curriculum road maps and sheets decked out with icons proliferated and might have kept some happy, but deep down we knew that they wouldn’t make much difference to students.

In response to this lack of quality provision, busy teachers across the country have been rewriting their schemes of work. Tens of thousands of hours have been sunk into the gargantuan task of rebuilding their KS3 resources in a way that meets teachers’ drive to do right by their students.

An additional ongoing issue is that whilst the evidence-based revolution is a good thing, classroom practice hasn’t kept pace with the abstract theories and ideas contained therein. Teachers might want to do retrieval practice or interleaving or a blank canvas explanation, or a prereq knowledge check, but they don’t know how to. None of us were trained in how to do this, and whilst there are an increasing number of books and blogs on these topics, it still isn’t enough.

Indeed, problems upon problems.

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Against that backdrop, imagine the scenario:

You are provided with five of the best and brightest science teachers from across the country. Each one an experienced classroom practitioner, they have been at the forefront of the evidence-informed revolution in science education, and have contributed to teacher improvement at a national scale. You put them in a room and say to them:

Write me a set of Key Stage 3 textbooks and resources that are like the ones in existence at the moment, but better.

No doubt, you’d get something pretty good back. You’d expect the textbooks to be well sequenced and detailed. You’d expect them to be tied to the National Curriculum. You’d expect them to be freed of the obsession with the double spread, and you’d expect more than four questions on a page. The PowerPoints might be a bit neater and cleaner, maybe spread out a little more and with a better attempt to manage the animations. You’d expect any assessments to be clearly related to taught content, and for the questions to be notably better crafted.

But you wouldn’t expect more than that. It would be like the old stuff, just better. It would certainly save teachers time. It would probably help the students learn a bit better. But it would very much be within the old paradigm. Lessons wouldn’t feel substantively different. Teachers would still be mashing through the slides, and schools would still attempt to make the content squeeze or stretch into 50 minute chunks. Teachers and teaching wouldn’t change in any meaningful way. Resources like this might represent an evolution, but as with most evolutions, they would be an additional link in the chain – better, but only a bit better.

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Let’s try a different scenario:

You are provided with five of the best and brightest science teachers from across the country. Each one an experienced classroom practitioner, they have been at the forefront of the evidence-informed revolution in science education, and have contributed to teacher improvement at a national scale. You put them in a room and say to them:

Write me a comprehensive set of Key Stage 3 resources that will radically enable the transformation and improvement of science teaching and learning in this country.

Well, that’s a different proposition, and a more exciting one. Having agreed to the task, we can imagine them saying things like:

“Before teachers teach a new topic, they need to check students’ prerequisite knowledge. Let’s write some questions that they can use for that.“

“The best way to explain this topic is by drawing this diagram freehand, and describing to students what you are doing and adding labels as you go. Let’s give some guidance to teachers about how to do that, and give them a blank slide on which to construct their explanation.“

“It’s really important when explaining this that we get the example and non-example sequence right, let’s try and figure that out and codify it so that teachers can use that sequence”

“After teachers have taught a new topic, they need to check students’ understanding. Let’s write some questions that they can use for that.“

“This topic needs loads of practice, and it also needs to link to the topic we did four months ago. Let’s make sure there are at least 25 interleaved questions for the students to do, and that there are notes for the teacher about common errors to look out for.“

“This practical is best delivered via the Slow Practical technique. Let’s write some guidance for teachers on how to do that.“

“Students need a codified and simplified summary of all the knowledge they need across the course, in a way that they can use as both a reference and retrieval practice tool. Let’s make that.”

“Some of these questions are best asked by Cold Call, and some best by mini-whiteboards. Let’s give teachers some guidance on that and explanations as to which is best for when.”

“There’s a huge amount of working scientifically content in the National Curriculum, but it’s pretty nebulous and not well defined. Let’s break it down into really clear items, and distribute them throughout the course in a way that respects student knowledge as it grows over time.”

“Students need regular retrieval practice, but getting into a good routine requires quite a lot of planning and forethought from the teacher. Let’s figure out a way to make their lives easier here.”

“We need a way to bring all these resources into a coherent whole. Students need their summaries and independent practice, and teachers need a guide that has all these explanations, checks for understanding and tips, tricks and strategies for effective delivery of the course.”

A resource like this wouldn’t just be an improvement on the old model. It would be a radical departure: a comprehensive tool not just for shovelling information at the students, but for helping teachers deliver lessons that are dynamic, engaging, effective, efficient and evidence-informed. This would not be an evolution, but a revolution – a paradigm shift from the old model and a radical departure into a fundamentally different way of resourcing, curriculum planning and teaching.

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By this point it should surprise you not at all to know that this resource is not a dream, but a reality. The “five teachers in the room” are Claudia Allan, Bill Wilkinson, Jo Castelino, Adam Robbins and Tom Millichamp. Hodder Education gave them the keys to the car and said “make something spectacular”, and boy, have they delivered. The outcome of their conversations, hard work, expertise, knowledge, arguments and insight is Springboard Science: a comprehensive teaching resource for Key Stage 3 Science. It’s been one of the greatest privileges of my career to work with them and see their acumen and effectiveness first hand.

Whatever you could possibly want, Springboard Science has got it: glorious step-by-step explanations delivered dynamically in class by the teacher? Check. Questions to use as a basis for checking understanding? Check. Vast amounts of interleaved student practice? Check. A robust a systematised approach to retrieval practice in conjunction with Carousel Learning? Check. A tightly defined and codified curriculum with student-facing support? Check. Misconceptions identified and mitigated? Check. Practical activities and working scientifically broken down and baked in? Check.

All that and more – whatever you could want, it’s there.

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One of the centrepieces of the course is the Teacher Handbook, a comprehensive guide to teaching and delivering the science curriculum. The introduction to the Handbook goes into more detail about the components of the course, and is available to all here:

If you found yourself nodding along as you read this blog, I strongly encourage you to check out the Handbook introduction above, as well as the other sample material available here. There has never been anything like this for any subject, and it has the power to revolutionise your teaching. In the meantime, I’m going to copy the final paragraph of the introduction below, and invite you to consider a simple question: are you in?

“Who is it that is Springboarding?
Titles are important and it would be easy to assume that the individuals doing the
Springboarding are the students because this course helps prepare and enthuse them for
further study. This is true, but only in part, because our goal is not just to Springboard the
students, but to Springboard their teachers. We want you to be able to develop and improve
your practice in a way that is evidence-based and workload-friendly. We want classrooms to
change, to feel different in terms of the methods and strategies teachers are using. We don’t
want to just slot into your classroom and make things a bit easier. We want to revolutionise it
and help you become a better science teacher.“