Teach Secondary - Issue 13.2

61 teachwire.net/secondary A great leap FORWARD M orecambe and Wise. French and Saunders. Taylor and Clough. Or for the more contemporary-minded, Mitchell andWebb. There have beenmany famous double acts whose complimentary talents and skills made their output far more than the sum of their individual elements. And in a similar vein, I’d argue that science departments will see the most success when their taught curriculum is built around scientific concepts that rely heavily on mathematical formulas. Leveraging expertise Positive outcomes in topics ranging from forces, electricity and waves, to quantitative chemistry, microscopy and estimation/ sampling, call for teaching based on simple problem steps, which avoids straining cognitive load by building on students’ existing knowledge of maths. Then there are those other tricky-to-navigate areas, such as the drawing and annotating of graphs, rounding of answers to decimal places or sig figs, and working with standard form maths. A heightened focus on curriculum development – across both planned and taught curriculums – should see your science and maths teams meeting regularly to work out the details, language and steps needed to maximise student confidence and success. This should be recognised as an important part of science curriculum planning – one that hinges on leveraging the existing knowledge and expertise of a school’s maths teaching for its science department. Cart before horse I can still recall how, when a bold newKS3 ‘waves’ topic was introduced, the ensuing wave speed equations gave our students plenty of problems to solve. However, problems soon emerged in that our students were unfamiliar with standard formnumbers. This meant all the prepared problems and work on electromagnetic waves couldn’t be used, since the students weren’t due to be learning about standard form inmaths for another couple of months. I was therefore pleased when recently talking to a newly arrived science colleague at my school – he teaches physics, I teach chemistry – keen to discuss my approach to maths teaching. He told me that he wouldn’t be using triangles to teach the rearranging of formulas. ‘ Excellent ,’ I thought. It’s such a 90s way of teaching, and fails to help students achieve fluency, since they end up having to remember the triangle rather than the formula itself. My colleaguewent on to explain that the simplest way of teaching students how to solve physics equations is through substituting values and then slowly resolving the resultingmaths sum– thus producing amore recognisable maths problemfor the students to then solve. Clarityand consistency The exchange drove home to me how the way in which maths is utilised and taught by a school’s science team shouldn’t be left to chance. The very best science teams will instead look to standardise their approach to teachingmaths within each science discipline. In physics, students will need to practice identifying relevant formula, and be taught how to check if units need converting before numbers are placed into equations for resolution. With so many non-specialist physics teachers currently teaching physics in combined science GCSE, this clarity and consistency is more important than ever if students are to learn the best methods. As a chemistry teacher, I’m always struck by how maths students will be provided with an equation sheet, while chemistry students have to memorise the equations they’ll need. Recall of those equations is therefore critical, so from talking to maths colleagues, I’ve started to incorporate their approach to helping students achieve mathematical fluency inmy own teaching. Ultimately, the expertise of experienced chemistry, biology and physics teachers ought to be harnessed and explicitly shared, so that every member of the science team can benefit from this collective wisdom. It should written down, recorded and rehearsed together – ideally in concert with the school’s maths team, so that easy pitfalls (lack of a consistent timeline for key concepts, confusion around certain language and terms) can be avoided. Maths colleagues can also help their science counterparts by demonstrating howmany problems students should be presented with before achieving concept success – and not just as a one-off exercise. As schools gradually move towards adopting coherent numeracy policies, effective interdepartmental collaborations will be vital inmaking themwork in practice. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Daniel Harvey is a GCSE and A Level science teacher and lead on behaviour, pastoral and school culture at an inner city academy S T E M Daniel Harvey looks at why having your maths and science teams in alignment is essential for those students pursuing the highest science grades