Paul is a science teacher
Fully in agreemant with the comment about a single exam board. I am getting fed up with the emphasis on teaching “skills”, particularly “Thinking Skills” in the absence of any specified content. Read Daniel T Willilngham to find out more about the importance of content.
I fequently get angry at departmnent meetings when we have this year’s version of “what the chief examiner really meant about the internal assessment criteria” explained to us. Surely if they print a specification, that’s what we use. A particularly annoying one this year was about using 2mm square graph paper, something about it being easier for the moderator to judge accuracy.
There’s a lot of potential in Chemistry for the students to gain lots of knowledge (and skills!) while having a really enjoyable time, but by the time they’ve got to year 9 most of out students are only interested in getting the next level - any enjoyment they ever had at learning something new for the sake of it, in whatever subject, has been knocked out of them. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that their school’s reputation is judged on their results, the pressure on the school is transferred to the teachers and the teachers don’t want to risk doing anything that might not succeed instantly. In fact it’s so bad that the last time I had to observe lessons as part of department reviews in my previous job, three out of four lessons had understanding the assessment criteria as part (all in one case) of the learning objectives.
A younger colleague who went on some lesson observation training recently said theat the video’d lesson they used, officially labelled “outstanding” by OFSTED, consisted of little after the first short task beyond the students looking at each others’ work, deciding what level it was and working out how to get to the next level. Admittedly it was a Geography lesson but if that’s outstanding teaching I think I’m in the wrong job. Perhaps Rick would like to give us a link to some emigration advice?