Teach Secondary 13.7

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kit Betts-Masters is a lead practitioner for science and produces physics, education and technology videos for YouTube under the username @KitBetts-Masters. For more information, visit evaluateeverything.co.uk 1 INEXPERIENCE The pandemic-era school closures, coupled with the ways science is now taught, means that your students will have less experience conducting practicals. Try to use more frequent, more simple practicals to improve their problem-solving and equipment handling skills. 2 GROUPWORK In a similar vein, you may well find that your students are relatively unfamiliar with participating in group work. Address this by actively involving them in your own demonstrations, so that you can model the skill of teamwork. 3 INFORMATION OVERLOAD Some students can struggle with following the complex written methods often found in physics teaching.Where possible, break down your practical delivery into multiple lessons, beginning with a group reading and demonstration of the method. 4 UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS This is something I personally suffer from a great deal. You need to accept that some students might not complete every variation of an experiment, so try dedicating separate lessons to explanation, setup, data collection and analysis. (You can still allow time for extending the practical, for the benefit of more enthusiastic and capable group members.) 5 PREPARATIONAND EQUIPMENT Involve your technicians in the setting up of demo sets beforehand. Allow yourself enough time to go through the method and anticipate any issues they might have, such as faulty equipment, or even something as simple as keeping key equipment in place while performing some other action with your hands. Try to then allocate time for a preliminary test to take place before the data collection lesson itself. in love with physics. Successive cohorts are consistently amazed at what we’re able to do in the lab – whether it’s measuring gravitational acceleration, getting close to Planck’s constant or estimating the age of the universe. You’ll be embraced as the one person who knows how to use the data logging set. You’ll come to be known as the only one able to obtain accurate results from the ageing set of radioactive sources in your lab, and getting the spark counter or electron beam to actually work. When you can get these things right, students and staff alike will treat you like a magician. But then, you’re also half-expected to be the slightly unhinged teacher out there on the playing fields, launching parachutes or tasking their class with measuring the speed of sound. Or indeed launching projectiles around gymwhen teaching about energy, accuracy or Hooke’s Law. Anything to get your classes excited about what we all know, deep down, is the coolest of the sciences... You’re the one leading trips to the Space Centre, master classes at top universities or voyages abroad to CERN and Iceland. You’re at school some evenings, with a class on the school roof (architecture and risk assessments depending), looking through a telescope or even launching rockets into space. I love teaching physics, and all of what I’ve described is possible for you to experience too. It’s a great job to have within a school – perhaps even the best. PRACTICAL PAIN POINTS Here are five common issues I see students struggling with in A Level practical physics lessons, and what you can do about them… 67 teachwire.net/secondary S C I E N C E