Effective pedagogy launching soon

RSC Education is excited to announce the launch of Effective pedagogy, the first self-led course on our new professional development (PD) learning platform. Launching in 2025, the course offers new insights to refine your teaching practice and improve your learners’ outcomes.

The Effective pedagogy course consists of eight modules, including Purposeful practical work and Numeracy, which you can work through at a pace that best suits you. We’ve designed each module to develop a specific aspect of your chemistry teaching, for example:

• How cognitive science impacts teaching and learning
• Strategies to improve literacy and numeracy skills
• Adapting teaching to students with a range of learning profiles
• Methods to improve students’ practical skills and competencies.

Course participants explore module topics through a variety of tasks and interactions, such as animations and multiple choice questions. Discussion thread questions (often based on chemistry classroom scenarios) prompt participants to reflect on their current teaching practices by engaging with other course participants. After completing the course during pre-release, one participant said, ‘The questions and tasks were thought-provoking, and being able to read and engage with other teachers’ views was very useful’.

‘Even the most experienced chemistry teachers will find useful tips and be reminded of important techniques’

Teachers face significant time pressure, so we wanted to ensure this self-led PD course would be a worthy investment of your time. We specifically selected course authors – all of whom are experienced teachers and teacher educators – for their expertise in chemistry education. Throughout the course’s development, we listened to teachers’ opinions via focus groups, quality assurance reviews and testing. One pre-release user called Effective pedagogy ‘a brilliant course with a phenomenal breadth of topics, all of which will inform my teaching practices going forward’, while another said that ‘even the most experienced chemistry teachers will find useful tips and be reminded of important techniques’.

Departmental professional development

If you are in a middle leadership position, why not consider using the Effective pedagogy course with your whole team? Several pre-release users who are heads of department commented that the course will be useful in planning PD, with one user saying, ‘I plan to discuss many aspects of the course with colleagues and to implement some of them in my departmental development plan’.

If you are looking for facilitated PD, check out our Sustained professional development courses. We deliver these sessions live and online on topics ranging from practical skills and subject knowledge to teaching strategies.

Enrol on our teacher PD courses to empower yourself and your students by investing in your career.