Secondary

Gothic literary texts can take so many different forms, but they share a preoccupation with the crossing of boundaries: between life and death, the past and the present, ancient and modern, good and evil or more generally, between what is real and unreal. Gothic writers take their readers, then, across… Read More

It’s never easy for students to move from Year 6 to Year 7.  For the vast majority, they move from being the biggest fish in a little pond to small fry in what feels like an ocean!  Add to that the fact that their last two years of primary school… Read More

From its humble beginnings to a now multi-million-pound industry, the ‘beautiful game’ is an economic asset, a cultural hallmark, a political (excuse the pun) football, and a social barometer. For these reasons, football and the recent Euros demand sociological analyses: they provide an extraordinary lens through which we… Read More

Quite rightly, schools are taking steps to ensure that their English curriculums are more representative of the diverse country that we live in. Many students, regardless of their background, still feel isolated from what they have been learning in their lessons. As teachers, we need to ask two questions before… Read More

Recommendations for how to get back to ‘the new normal’ seem to be everywhere you look nowadays. They roll in like crashing waves: mental health, wellbeing, catch-up programmes, behaviour, discipline. So, where to begin? How can we as teachers support the emotional wellbeing and emotional education of our students and not just make a token gesture? It can feel overwhelming, especially when your students will have had such varied experiences of home learning, home life, interactions with friends and more. A person-centred approach To truly support your students’ emotional wellbeing, I believe we need to take a person-centred approach, rather than falling into the trap of making assumptions. It’s so easy to paint a broad picture of what we think our students need but it’s far better to know. It is my belief that if we expect our students to explore and get comfortable with their myriad of emotions, we have to consistently do the same – not only as part of our own personal wellbeing, but also as part of our planning process before we teach these emotional health and relationships lessons. Of course, to maintain our professionalism we cannot share our personal issues with students, but it is hugely valuable to find an empathy and understanding around the challenges of really ‘seeing ourselves’ and contemplate the scarier aspects of how to reveal these to others. Healthy relationships start with the relationship we have with ourselves When teaching about relationships in RSHE it’s good to remember that having healthy relationships with our friends, co-workers and students must start with the relationship we have with ourselves. For example, if we have very little self-respect and are continually putting ourselves down, pushing ourselves to the limit or refusing to admit or talk to others about our fears and worries how can we expect others to do these things? So, let’s take a minute to put this into practice right now. How is your self-respect? Do you make sure you rest, eat healthily, drink water throughout the day? Do you speak kindly to yourself? Do you recognise when you need to talk to someone and do it? If you haven’t had a chance to think about how you are for a while, please spend a moment reflecting now. I recommend doing this regularly; self-reflection is a valuable life skill and knowing the signs of when we are disrespecting ourselves means we can ask for help, and in turn allows us to build empathy and an understanding of others, including our students, who often find it much harder to see and communicate their truths. Having been through this process of self-reflection and assessment, we can then begin to consider how we might feel about opening up to others in a group context. What might help? What might shut us down? Of course, we are all different, but taking time to consider these things will help us see how we can best support our students as we ask them to do the same. How do we bring self-reflection into the classroom? First of all, we start with remembering two equally important elements that are fundamental to every good PSHE/RSHE lesson: creating a working agreement (this is a useful way to establish rules at the beginning of the topic which are then referred back to regularly), and signposting to further support (within school, the community and online). Then we think about our cohort and suitable activities to engage them. For some classes talking and listening will be familiar but others may need time to get comfortable with the idea of talking and listening openly to each other. Be aware this may not be a Hollywood film style easy flow, ‘kids-pour-their-heart-out-instantly-and-everyone-is-bonded’ experience! But I assure you, if you do this regularly, every day if you can, your pupils will increase their emotional intelligence massively – I have seen this happen. Alternatively, if this feels a real no-no currently with your class, you could ask them to complete anonymous questionnaires or write on post-it notes and share their feelings that way, then you could share these anonymously back to the class. Further activities to explore respectful relationships A more in-depth activity you can do too is from Your Choice for Key Stage 4, my latest co-authored resource with the fab’ Simon Foster.  Amongst many topics that address the challenges of being a teenager in the 21st century, one of our lessons explores what respect looks like in a variety of contexts. Take a closer look at lesson 2.1 ‘Respecting others’ and try it with your class Reassessing our relationships as we move back out into society, to our ‘new normal’, feels more important than ever. People, and our relationships with them, may well have changed, but bringing self-awareness back to us as individuals will empower us all to acknowledge ourselves, to become aware of our feelings and to talk about them. This in turn will give space for others to do the same and create a stronger sense of self and community. In my book (if you’ll excuse the pun), this can only be a good thing. Read More

The allegory of Animal Farm draws students in, like a puzzle to be ‘solved’: who are Mr Jones, Squealer and Moses ‘really’; what is the Windmill? Understanding the historical context for Orwell’s writing provides a satisfying ‘solution’ for students, but it can sometimes overshadow engagement with the text as fiction. The characters aren’t just metaphors, they are ‘real’ within the story; the novel is carefully structured by Orwell, its themes stretching beyond its immediate context and Orwell’s original intentions. Here are three key talking points to help students engage with Animal Farm’s story and themes, and three activities to help them see the text as a construction, open to conflicting interpretations. 3 discussion points with questions: Orwell was a committed socialist. Animal Farm is a criticism of totalitarianism, not socialism, but it’s not always been read this way. Let students engage with controversy over its publication, as well as aspects of the text that leave us questioning. 1. Socialism Orwell presents socialism as an ideal situation, where “everyone worked according to his capacity” (chapter 3), but it doesn’t last in Animal Farm. Ask your students: What causes the animals to rebel? How do they achieve success? What goes wrong? How does Orwell's metaphor make his meaning ambiguous e.g. with the animal 'types'? 'Animal Farm is doomed from the start': Is this a fair reading? Can animals/men maintain equal control in a democracy, or is it inevitable that some will rise and some sink? 2. Power and propaganda Orwell maintained that the key passage in the novel was the creation of ‘special rations’ for the pigs, agreed by all of the pigs. Ask your students: What allows the pigs to take control? Does Orwell suggest power always corrupts? What kind of a leader is Napoleon? Would Snowball have been any different? How is the idea of totalitarianism still relevant today? 3. Freedom of speech Orwell struggled to find a publisher at a time when Stalin was an ally, and saw this as cowardly censorship, saying that “Liberty is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Ask your students: Squealer’s propaganda is clearly harmful, but is Benjamin’s silence also damaging? How does Orwell emphasise the power of words? Should we be able to say or write what we want? Are spoken words different to published ones? Should artists be political?    3 activities: 1. Understanding structure Once students have read the text, get them to summarise key events in each chapter. They can then come up with a short title for each instead of the existing numbers. As well as being a good revision tool, this helps in understanding narrative arc, or patterns in the structure. An additional aide is to sequence the titles in a storyboard, each illustrated with a key symbol e.g. Chapter 1 might become “Working Together”, “Beasts of England”, or simply “Comrades”, with an accompanying image of two animals singing together. 2. Understanding genre and setting Get students to ‘redesign’ the allegorical framework of the novel by planning a retelling or a film remake of Animal Farm, but changing the setting. The story could take place in: the Amazon jungle or African savannah a typical secondary school (this might prove controversial…) using popular toys (as in the film Toy Story) Afterwards, ask the class how choice of setting introduces other meanings e.g. awareness of existing stereotypes, or conflicting interpretations. How does this relate to the setting of Animal Farm? 3. Reading through different eyes Give students cards with roles or perspectives to adopt: this could be done in small groups (where students discuss their different ‘readings’ of the text) or as a whole-class, for instance, through hot-seating. A good starting point is to use a range of characters from the text to explain their version of events: roles might include Jones, Squealer, Snowball, Benjamin, Clover, Boxer, Moses, etc. This can then be expanded to encourage students to move beyond their own readings. Ideas for groupings might be: Different interests: a primary-school student, an older student, a teacher, a parent, an artist/film-maker Social roles: owner/employer, administrator, office worker, farm or factory worker, soldier, journalist Critical perspectives: Marxist, feminist, New Historicist, psychoanalytical. (These perspectives would need scaffolding e.g. with key questions – a way of simplifying them might be to give students cards with a reading ‘focus’ e.g. political, social, historical, emotional.) By Lucy Toop, a freelance writer and secondary English teacher in South London, and author of the introduction to the Collins Classroom Classics edition of Animal Farm. Read More

In recent years, there has been much debate surrounding the best way to support our most disadvantaged students to catch up with their peers. Despite teachers’ best efforts, some pupils still struggle to meet the demands of the new curriculum, and it seems like it is becoming more and more difficult to close the gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged. Where can teachers begin? Teachers, therefore, need low-effort, high-impact strategies to address this. But where to begin? As a teacher, I believe that teaching vocabulary is a good place to start. Words are, after all, the building blocks of understanding and communicating ideas. If we teach a range of high-leverage words thoroughly, we provide children with a springboard for learning across the curriculum. Sadly, time and time again data has shown that children from the poorest backgrounds are least likely to acquire new words in reading or spoken language. The famous and oft-cited Hart and Risley[1] study suggests that children from professional families hear 32 million words more than their disadvantaged peers before the age of 4, and that this – more than anything else – predicts achievement gaps in later life. This highlights just how important having a strong foundational vocabulary is for young people in the classroom and beyond. The word gap in the time of COVID-19 The pandemic has presented schools and young people with a myriad of challenges. Unfortunately, for many pupils, COVID-19 has further entrenched the disadvantages that our poorest and most vulnerable pupils have always faced. After missing out on months of face-to-face teaching, the vocabulary gap has widened further - and with Key Stage 4 fast approaching for many pupils, time is running short. Now that we are back in the classroom, teachers are feeling the impact of school closures on their students’ progress. A recent study found that 92% of teachers have confirmed that school closures and remote learning have contributed towards a widening of the word gap. Our concerns as a profession have prompted many conversations about how best to support young people to catch up in a post-COVID world. Closing the word gap is perhaps one of the most high-leverage approaches we can take to support our most vulnerable with the academic challenges they now face. In the aftermath of a global pandemic, doing everything we can to close this gap has never been more urgent or important. Start at Key Stage 3 At Key Stage 3, you can make a huge difference to your students’ chances of success at GCSE and beyond by embedding regular, systematic vocabulary instruction into their lessons. The renewed focus on rigorous literature in GCSE English Literature and English Language, as well as the increase in complexity of questioning across other subjects, has prompted us to think more strategically about how best to support those with less exposure to a broad vocabulary, and how to help them catch up with their peers. It only takes 15 minutes! Regular 15-minute doses of systematic vocabulary instruction can make big strides to bridging this gap. A practical resource to help you close the word gap A seminal text on vocabulary acquisition and teaching is Bringing Words to Life by Isabel Beck et al[2]. Beck’s book is a treasure trove of the research on reading and word-acquisition, and provides teachers with a framework for teaching new words effectively. Inspired by the methods laid out in Beck et al’s work, Building Brilliant Vocabulary: 60 lessons to close the vocabulary gap goes some way towards addressing the vocabulary gap. Building Brilliant Vocabulary is a fully-resourced vocabulary programme made up of 60 short, systematic and carefully sequenced 15-minute sessions. Specialist and non-specialists alike have the flexibility to teach each word as a standalone lesson or to integrate the activities carefully into lesson planning. In each lesson, a new word is introduced and taught using a tried and tested approach that: introduces words one at a time in a systematic, coherent fashion provides examples and non-examples to avoid misconceptions gives definitions and examples that provide students with a precise understanding of each word provides students with plenty of opportunities to practise understanding and using these new words in their own writing and speaking. Each lesson is designed to be flexible and intuitive for you to teach, and activities are designed to be accessible and student-friendly. Students see the word in multiple contexts, read about an interesting topic related to the word they are learning, and learn about its origins. They consolidate their learning with a final task that prompts them to practise using the word in their own writing. By introducing students to new words using this rigorous method that is backed by educational research, we can help to address the disadvantages that our children and young people face now more than ever. Inspired? Try some example activities with your class Explore words such as nostalgia, persistence, femininity and compassion. Download a free sample of Building Brilliant Vocabulary here   By Katie Ashford, literacy specialist and Deputy Head at Michaela Community School. Katie is also the author of Building Brilliant Vocabulary: 60 lessons to close the word gap in Key Stage 3   Read More

Research methods is not the most glamorous or popular topic within the A-level Sociology specification, and sociology teachers strive to make it engaging for their students. Amongst the other ‘more exciting’ topics, students often struggle to see how research methods is a vital component in sociology.  Throughout each module, students engage with sociological research, therefore it is advantageous for students to be confident when evaluating research methods. In a pre-Covid world, I usually set my students an independent sociology research project towards the end of the summer term. Although this is not a requirement of the A-level specification, the active learning strategy really brings research methods alive and gives students a great opportunity to put learning into practice. I typically run this research project at the end of the year to allow students to ground their research questions in the topics that they have learnt; this gives them a chance to explore further a topic they have found interesting. Students get a chance to apply their learning and experience in practice the factors that influence/effect the choice of research method and research subject. My students complete this research project feeling more confident and knowledgeable with research methods. This benefits revision and exams, as students can draw on their own experience to help them recall the strengths and limitations of a research method and write an essay. Students can also refer to their research project when writing their university personal statement as this demonstrates their independent learning and research skills, and helps their application stand out amongst the crowd. At the time of writing, most students are not in school and social distancing is paramount. Therefore, I have had to adapt this research project to work in a virtual format, but I have still maintained the positive impact on students’ learning. Below I will detail how to conduct a sociology research project with your A-level students in the classroom or virtually. Setting up the research project I like to introduce the project to my students with a short PowerPoint presentation outlining the details of the research project. Why are you setting this task? What do you expect from your students? You have a chance here to be creative and set a back story as to why they are conducting this research, e.g. the world depends on their research in order to achieve world peace. It’s important to promote the benefits of conducting their own research to get buy-in from the students. The research timeline is important to outline in this presentation, so students know what is expected of them at each and every stage. This does not need to be extensive; it could resemble the following: Creating an aim/hypothesis Writing up your research proposal, with a special consideration of ethics Writing up a literature review on past research about your topic (this is optional but can be compulsory for high ability students) -Research proposal approved- Writing consent forms Conducting your research -Distributing and gathering your data- Analyse data Completing your report and creating a summary PowerPoint ready to present findings The PowerPoint should also include a timetable/checklist so students know what they should be completing in each session and help them to manage their time and research project effectively. The duration of my research project is two weeks, but this can be easily adapted to suit your students’ needs. Research questions After the presentation outlining the research project, I spend the remainder of the session helping students develop their research ideas. I always give students examples of research questions e.g. “Do gender roles exist within sixth form?”, “What is the impact of the ethnocentric curriculum of ethnic minority students?”, “Are friendship groups in the sixth form area based on religion?” (These examples have been taken from my previous students’ research projects.) To help with ideas, I also give students a list of the topics that we have learned about so far and topics they will learn about in the future; they can use this list as the basis of a process of elimination to narrow down their research question. Additionally, I provide them with a list of contemporary topics, e.g. free school meals and lockdown, digital deprivation and education, divorce rates and lockdown, etc. The students should leave this session with a research question so that they can start writing their research proposal. Research proposal I strongly encourage you to ask your students to write a mini research proposal before they conduct their research for numerous reasons. The research proposal allows students to think critically about the method they are choosing before the actual process, and students have a chance to apply their understanding of research methods when choosing the appropriate method for their subject matter. It also gives students the opportunity to plan the process of research before diving in. Writing research proposals simulates conducting research at university; this gives them early experience that will be beneficial in the future and also an insight into the career of a social researcher. The research proposal can be a series of questions that students answer, before submitting to you for sign-off. I warn my students that if the proposal is not ethically sound or completed effectively then their research will be denied and that they will have to submit another proposal.  This is similar to the process social researchers face; their research proposals or funding applications can be denied due to a breach of ethics or not meeting the approval of the funding bodies. Please see an example of a research proposal template below:   [Research project title] What is your aim? Would your piece of research be qualitative or quantitative? Why? How would you choose a study group or sample frame? Why? What ethical problems might you experience with your topic? What particular methodology would you use? (questionnaires, interviews, secondary sources, content analysis) What benefits and problems are to be expected from the chosen methods? Why? How could you avoid biasing your results and ensure that you have maintained objectivity? What conclusions might you expect to find? Why? Approved by: Date: Research process One advantage of virtual research is that there are several free platforms that students can use to conduct their research and analyse data. I recommend students using questionnaires/surveys as it’s the most virtual-friendly research method. You can also limit the choice of research methods that students choose to use; this can save a lot of time during the planning stages. To maintain the realistic nature of the research process, I require students to obtain signed consent forms from each and every participant (if possible) before the research. Examples of research methods and platforms you can use below: Questionnaires- Students can use a range of closed/open-ended questions. The platforms below will generate quantitative data on the closed-ended questions, which makes the data easy to analyse. Microsoft Forms Google Forms Survey Monkey The data can be presented in numerous formats, that students can copy and paste the results into their research presentation. You can also create consent forms that have to be signed before the questionnaire is released to the participant on Google Forms. Additionally, students have the creative opportunity to include media/photo analysis on these platforms. Encourage your students to examine the features of the platform so that they can use it in the most effective way. These platforms also issue a link that students can share to get participants to complete. Interviews- If your students decide to use interviews, advise them to only interview really good friends or family members. To ensure safety for students, recommend parents or guardians being in the room when the interview is taking place or recording the interview. You can have students create an interview timetable with the details of their participants, meeting and even the meeting link for you to drop in to monitor the interview. You can also set up a team’s/class meeting and have breakout rooms for students to interview their peers. The following platforms could be used: Zoom Skype Microsoft Teams Google Meet Observations can be done at home or in the park when students are going out for a walk. All students need is simply a pen and paper or a device to take notes. Students can even engage in the ‘Garfinkel experiment’ at home and record (with permission) their family’s behaviour. If they are using secondary research methods such as official statistics, content analysis and thematic analysis, students can simply use the internet. Presenting findings After students have conducted their research and analysed their results, students need to create a leaflet/poster or presentation detailing their research process and results. Students who are creating posters can share this on platforms like Padlet so you can get other students to comment on what they like about the research or what they have learnt from the piece of research. Another option is for students to present their research in breakout rooms (available on Microsoft Teams/Zoom/Google Classroom) and then vote on which research was best. This stage is meant to simulate a peer-review process and allow students to be critical of each other’s research (subject matter and methodology). You can then later use the student’s presentations/leaflets/posters at open days to advertise the sociology department. This sociology research project is a fantastic project to increase engagement with your A-level Sociology students. Students are able to develop their independent research skills and acquire skills that can be applied throughout their learning. This project will make your students feel more confident when evaluating research methods and is a great opportunity for students to get first-hand experience of life as a social researcher.   By Annalisea Whyte, an experienced social science teacher based in London. Read More

This is a brief blog on how to run revision sessions for GCSE Science. Forgive me, but I’m going to start by being a bit contrary. Retrieval vs revision It’s best not to leave revision to one-off revision sessions. Instead, what’s preferable is to build a culture of “retrieval” with your classes. Students should actively be recalling and practising prior knowledge in an attempt to remember it for longer periods of time. And we, as teachers, should be facilitating and encouraging this. Fig 1. Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve has become a familiar sight for many[1]. Ebbinghaus got some volunteers to memorise some completely made-up syllables with no links to syllables used in everyday language. Then looked at how many were remembered at different time intervals. The executive summary of this was that the more times the syllables were recapped/retrieved the longer the time that they were memorised for. Now, it’s all well and good me saying that should build a culture of retrieval practice within our classrooms. But how can we actually achieve this? Here’s what I do: Retrieval “do nows” that students complete as soon as they enter a lesson (as in the image)[2]. I split my “do nows” into four sections; last lesson, last term, last year and a stretch and challenge question. I explain *why* we’re doing “do nows” like this to the students and very quickly it becomes a routine. Fig 2 Do now example, SciDoc Interleave or “interweave” your curriculum[3]. Interleave is when you teach two different concepts at the same time; if you teach a lesson that links neatly with some previous content then make that link! Interweaving (as coined by Mark Enser) involves separate strands of knowledge running as a continuous theme through your curriculum. Both encourage regular retrieval. Retrieval homework. This one’s easy. Don’t just set homework on what students are learning now. Set them homework on what they’ve covered previously. Okay, now I’ve had my little rant about how retrieval is superior to revision. Of course, let’s acknowledge that we are going to want to deliver some GCSE Science revision sessions to students. Especially when a formal exam is looming. I’ve thought quite deeply about how I approach this and do so in the following way: Prioritise declarative (factual) knowledge by using self-quizzing sheets/retrieval roulettes Scaffold students into doing exam questions Practice makes perfect. Practice makes permanent Give feedback Prioritise declarative (factual) knowledge by using self-quizzing sheets/retrieval roulettes Fig 3 Self-quizzing sheet, SciDoc The most important thing to prioritise in revision is declarative knowledge. Without very solid factual recall, students have no hope of answering highly complex problems. I wrote a blog on this recently[4]. To achieve this first step, I thought deeply about the most important “key learning questions” that are the absolutely non-negotiable knowledge that I want students to have[5]. I then produced sheets as in the image and encouraged students to self-quiz until the answers are committed to memory. Many contributors on “EduTwitter” have gone further and written “retrieval roulettes” to achieve similar aims. Recent sites like carousel-learning.com and kuizical.com have also allowed for remote retrieval roulettes to be implemented. Scaffold students into doing exam questions Fig 4 Scaffolded exam question, SciDoc When I’m confident that the declarative knowledge is becoming solid, then I get students to start practising exam questions. I usually start off doing this in a very scaffolded way, using sheets that consist of both the core notes (to reduce cognitive load in flicking to and from a textbook) and the exam questions themselves. An example is shown in the image. Scaffolding in this way aligns neatly with Rosenshine principles 7 (“obtain a high success rate”) and 8 (“provide scaffolds for difficult takes”) and keeps student motivation high initially. Practice makes perfect. Practice makes permanent Now of course this scaffold is temporary and needs to be taken away. I then get the students to undertake a vast amount of deliberate practice. Most domains of knowledge are predictable; our problem solving gets better the more problems we have solved (as we can draw out similarities). During the process of this practice, students also practise their procedural knowledge (knowing how to do something) and conditional knowledge (knowing when to do something). Ideally, these concepts are embedded throughout the course, but revision allows an excellent opportunity to practise them further. Give feedback Finally, any time our students produce some work it’s really important that we offer some form of feedback on that work. I’ve recently moved away from simply going over the answers, influenced by a blog by Adam Boxer[6]. If students did badly, then they are upset and demotivated. If they did well, then they’re smug and don’t know what to do to improve. Instead, I look at the overall themes from the work. Re-teach any concepts that students have done poorly at; and then get them to practise similar questions again. Following this, I’d give the class the opportunity to come back to this topic in retrieval “do nows” and consider tweaking next year’s scheme of work to address misconceptions/difficulties earlier. Tag me on Twitter @edmunds_dr, and let me know how you approach GCSE Science revision sessions with your classes. By Peter Edmunds Many of the resources mentioned in this blog can be freely found on sciencedoctor.school.blog [1] Image of Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve from Chun and Heo, 2018 [2] Credit for original template to the Harris Federation [3] https://www.tes.com/news/interleaving-are-we-getting-it-all-wrong [4] https://sciencedoctor.school.blog/2020/09/12/the-role-of-declarative-knowledge-in-problem-solving/ [5] https://achemicalorthodoxy.wordpress.com/2018/03/02/fixing-key-stage-3-core-questions/ [6] https://achemicalorthodoxy.wordpress.com/2019/03/26/what-to-do-after-a-mock-assessment-sampling-inferences-and-more/ Watch Peter's talk at the ASE Conference 2021 to find out more about running revision sessions and his upcoming AQA GCSE Science (9–1) Equations Practice Pack  https://youtu.be/GtiA-2dQ6uU Read More

The last twelve months or so have affected many people in many different ways.  Apart from the appalling death toll and the long-term effects on the health of many others, the control measures put in place have changed the way that schooling has worked for entire cohorts.  The Extended Response Question resource I edited for Collins turned out to be a lockdown publication in more ways than one.  Though conceived prior to the pandemic, much of the writing was done during the first lockdown.  Although designed for use in a conventional classroom setting, it has much relevance for the situation we now find ourselves in. This article outlines why good literacy is a key skill in science, and how you can help develop your students' extended writing to successfully tackle extended response questions in AQA GCSE Sciences. Why is literacy important in science? There is a long and not always easy relationship between science education and the development of literacy skills; extended response questions are probably at the sharp end of this.  Should the preparation of candidates to deal with ‘six markers’ be seen as a further burden on students and teachers and one peripheral to the central business of developing scientific knowledge and understanding? Is it seen as a key skill of a scientist to be able to construct a longer explanation? Is it best to simply be pragmatic and accept that it’s there in the exams and is worth a not insignificant number of marks? One of the hallmarks of the last year has been the high profile given to scientists, some of whom have become regular guests on news programmes and many of whom have acquitted themselves well not only in terms of the grasp of their specialism but also their ability to explain complex ideas.  This is not new of course; I would argue that it is part and parcel of being a scientist to be able to construct a longer response.  Being able to describe a procedure, compare two different approaches, or evaluate an idea is in the job description. Furthermore, many teachers have come to realise that getting students to write longer responses has a value that goes beyond simply demonstrating a competence in dealing with that type of question.  It shows whether they have understood ideas in more detail, can use key terminology in context and draw ideas together from different parts of the course. How can I improve my students’ extended responses? The AQA GCSE (9–1) Extended Response Questions Teacher Response Pack was written to offer teachers a way forward in three main ways:  The first was responding to the immediate situation if there are students in Year 11 who are underperforming and need both practice and guidance. We’ll soon know how these students will be assessed for the purposes of awarding grades this year and items like this may well figure large.  For some students, it’s more opportunities (so we’ve included dozens of such questions) and for others, it’s an unpacking of the command words.  Because AQA now use the same level descriptors each time a certain command word is used, students can be trained to respond accordingly.  An evaluate question needs a judgment, for example, and the candidate who doesn’t include one cannot get full marks. The second purpose is a more strategic view over the GCSE courses and a desire to integrate the use, both of the questions and ideas, about how to explicitly teach the skills of response over the duration of the course. The third is to support the view that it needs to be an even longer-term strategy.  We progressively develop practical skills and cornerstone concepts such as the particulate model of matter over five years; we should do the same with the skills of constructing longer responses. The constituent aspects of focusing on key terminology, quality sentence construction, and the organisation of text will serve students well on a number of fronts.  What some of our students need is repeated exposure to language and ideas.  We need to get them to not only think like a scientist but also to write like a scientist, and that won’t happen in the six weeks prior to an exam. How can I use this resource with my students? Twenty years in teaching and almost as many in curriculum development have taught me how inventive and creative teachers are (and have to be) in terms of devising approaches and developing ways of developing student competencies.  What we’ve done with this resource is to offer a toolkit.  There is a range of materials in there.  For each question, there is a model answer that would get full marks and another that would get some of the marks.  These are designed to present to students to develop their capacity to recognise improvements.  We’ve included commentaries as well, to support teachers to see what examiners will look for. The feedback we’re getting is that this lends itself to use in a range of ways, including learning at home.  In a recent interview in the Financial Times, Professor Sir John Holman (author of the Good Practical Science report) expressed the hope that the recently raised profile of science would increase interest in STEM careers, but that this would only happen if, principally amongst other factors, the teaching supported it.  Teaching needs to be good, and so do the tools that support it.  Check out the sample pages and see what you think. Watch Ed's talk at the ASE Conference 2021 to find out more about the AQA GCSE (9–1) Extended Response Questions Teacher Response Pack    By Ed Walsh Ed Walsh is a freelance consultant, specializing in science education. A teacher for twenty years and a team leader for twelve of those, he now writes and edits curriculum materials, designs and delivers CPD, and works with science departments to improve the quality of their provision. View secondary Science resources from Collins, including books written and edited by Ed. Read More