D. Lambert | Secondary | Science
Let’s dive straight in. I want students to make better connections between content within my subject. I think collaborating with other subjects on content a bit useless if I am honest. There are two reasons for this.
Firstly, we have to teach our subjects in the order that is best for our subjects. Often we are told that something like science and geography could collaborate on teaching energy. I think this is a waste of time personally. I'll teach energy when I think it is best for my subject and I'm not going to alter that to suit geography (and visa versa!) When ever the student comes across energy then great they can refernece they have done something on it already in another subject, but I don't see any great value in merging us all in one.
Secondly, and more importantly, I find no real point forcing through connections between other subjects when they can’t make connections in my subject first. Too often students struggled to link what we have done previously in science to what we are doing now. I want to outline how my thinking on making connections within my subject has changed over the last number of years.
1 - The Clear Scheme of Work
I hated when schools had a scheme of work that jumped around the chapters of a book. I loved when I was in school we went through biology from chapter 1 to chapter 38 in order. This may sound silly but I knew with certainty that every page to the left was done and every page to the right was expected to be done. With chemistry or geography that wasn’t case. Now that is more a textbook issue, but my point is, as a student I knew exactly what was expected of me due to the simple fact the teacher taught in order of the book.
When I became a teacher I promised I’d cover any course in a clear scheme of work so that I knew with certainty what has been covered before. You might say when we should know this but that’s not always the case when you take over different year groups. An underrated aspect of a clear scheme of work is that the students know clearly what has been covered. I thought by having a crystal clear scheme of work for both teachers and students that students would naturally see connections between topics and teachers would be more confident throwing in previous topics into present topics. I was too naïve. Connections were not made. There were too many assumptions that this was going to just happen and it didn't.
2 - Spaced Retrieval
After a while I finally got my head round a basic understanding of retrieval practice and spaced practice, and added them to the start of my lessons. Retrieval grids had columns for content from last class, last week and last month. Again I felt like I was getting students to revisit older content. I was dragging up old thinking and putting a fresh polish on it. My retrieval practice became better and better with the use of a list of core questions and I dropped the specific-ness of last class, last week and last year. I still use regular retrieval practice but I now recognise that while I am getting students to revisit old thoughts, I am not getting them to see the connection between what was learned to what we are learning right now.
3 - The Question Set
Imagine getting students to answer 20 or so questions after you teach the digestive system. The questions naturally start off about the digestive system but soon focus in on the stomach, and then the stomach acid. It moves onto questions about pH and indicators and then suddenly they are answers questions on chemical reactions, identifying reactants and products. By the end they are drawing atoms with electronic configurations and identifying the properties of metals. The only way to describe what I am talking about is by examining this question set written by Adam Boxer and Jesse Gaffey.
Look at these questions! Here we are explicitly connecting previously topics students have learned to what they are currently learning. A question set like this only works if everyone (students and teachers) knows exactly what has been learned previously. Here is the upper level of making connections. We lay the connections out in front of them. I have challenged students with question sets like these and they have yet to let me down. In many respects this is the last type task we can give students that outline the specific connections we want them to see.
This is probably as good as it gets when creating situations where students see connections between topics, but the other day I noticed the fourth dimension of making connections for students; getting students to think about content that will help them to connect to the learning around the corner.
Level 4 – The Learning around the Corner
So I am teaching speed/distance/time the other day and students are motoring on through the work. I didn’t plan to get to this question 89 in the lesson so I shrugged my shoulders and let the students at this question.
They struggled on the question set, but they stuck with it. While they were quietly working away I stood staring at the board and I thought to myself that this is a strange question to ask here. Up until this point all we had done was single speed/distance/time calculations, sometimes comparing two scenarios. Now the students were being asked to calculate the speed up until a certain time and then examining what happens after that point. It is a tough question and maybe not something they need to practice right now.
It then dawned on me that the next concept I was teaching was speed/distance/time graphs. While this isn’t ground breaking, I suddenly saw a purpose to this question. The next lesson will be on speed/distance/time graphs. We will look at graphs, how to read, how to draw and how to plot. What the students don’t realise is that we will now graph that tortoise and hare question. We will bring that data to life with the graph. I am teeing up students to be successful later in the topic.
With some of the thinking already done, it allows a solid foundation for me to continue to build my explanation on. Slowly but surely, step by step the learning becomes more concrete for the students.
With some of the thinking already done I haven’t overloaded their working memory and when we arrive at the end of the topic we can look back and see how their understanding developed and grew from one, now overly simplistic, idea.
With some of the thinking done they are more likely to be successful and this is more likely to lead to more motivation to continue to learn.
This is the one thing I never added to my booklets. I never stitched the concepts of a topic together. I always planned backwards when making connections for students. I never planned forwards. I never thought about getting students to answer questions that I will revisit in a lesson or two’s time that we build on from.
Summary
I am not a Steve Jobs fan now but the story he tells at this graduation about how you can only connect the dots by looking back really resonated with me. If you want students to make connections then it’s best to put then in situations that will challenging to find the exact connections you want them to make. You can only do this consistently well when you know what they have done and the scheme of work follows a logical order. Leaving students to make their own connections is time consuming and has less chance of success.
This summer I will be rewriting all my biology booklets and (hopefully) be starting to write my agricultural science booklets. I will be writing extended question sets, like the one on digestion, that get students to connect previous content to the content in the current topic. But I am going to try go one step further and write questions that tee up the learning around the corner. This will be tricky as I will have to think more deeply about what my scheme of work will be, and how I explan and question my way through a topic.
If I get this right my students will have more of a chance to be successful because they will be continually linking concepts they covered previously to what we are doing now, and they will be teeing themselves up to being successful for lessons around the corner.