Choosing a text to use in science lessons can be tricky. If it is too hard, your students won’t learn…
Making The Abstract Visible – Momentum
Quick blog. Physics quantities are horribly (wonderfully) abstract: energy, forces, momentum…. If you could visualise them, they’d be easier to…
Three Effective and Efficient Reasons for Reading in Science Lessons
Being a good reader correlates with good performance in science. Well, it would wouldn’t it? Reading scores correlate well with…
The Impossibility of Reliable Setting by Ability
In principle, I don’t like the idea of setting by ability. It feels like segregation. But I also don’t like…
Kasetsu – a highlight from ASE
One of my joys at the ASE conference is meeting up with Japanese science teachers. I admire their work tremendously…
Super-Quick Update to Refutation Texts
Brilliant ASE conference! Loads of curriculum thinking. Disciplinary and substantive knowledge very important (see Counsell here). Charles Tracey (@physicsnews) suggested…
My ASE Slides – before I present them
This may be counter productive, but ASE conference time is precious. If you were thinking of coming to my presentation,…
How Knowledge Grows…
We are all now familiar with the idea of schema: the mind-map diagrams representing knowledge and the relationships between items…
My ASE Talk January 10th 2019 – How to Teach Problem Solving in Science (with added Bar-Models!)
I have planned the outline of my ASE Annual Conference talk (Thursday 12.00). It may develop a little, but the…
Applying Efrat Furst’s Model of Building Long-Term Memory Representations
One of the challenges facing teacher is to know when to apply specific tasks to support long-term learning. I have…
Reading for Learning 