Making every science lesson count

‘What can I do to help my students become the scientists of the future?’ is the question posed on the back cover of this book, and it’s well-answered inside. Although only 118 pages long, it is packed with advice, tips and suggestions, many of which I will seek to implement in my own classroom.

The introduction discusses the subject specific challenges that science teachers face, eg teaching outside one’s subject specialism. The book is structured around six principles to support great science teaching – challenge, explanation, modelling, practice, questioning and feedback – with a chapter devoted to each one.

Each chapter discusses the importance of the principle and offers several strategies designed to tackle it. The strategies are only a page or two long, but are outlined thoroughly. An example I particularly like combines questioning with building a diagram of, for example, the lining of the small intestine, rather than just presenting pupils with a static diagram that pupils may find difficult to understand. Another example aims to improve the effectiveness of end-of-lesson plenaries by suggesting teachers ask students what they have struggled with.

There is a helpful illustration in the introduction summarising these principles and how they depend on each other. Chapters close with a set of reflective questions, which I found very useful: they have prompted me to think about my own practice and what I would like to change.

If you teach science at secondary school, I highly recommend this book. As well as being full of lots of useful suggestions, it gets you thinking about what you do and what you could do better. It would be difficult to implement all the suggestions at once, so I suggest taking one chapter at a time. Try the suggestions before moving on, or make a list of the top few things you would like to start with and go from there.