Teach17

Shaun Allison’s Making Every Science Lesson Count takes six core principles of great teaching — challenge, explanation, modelling, practice, feedback and questioning — and applies them directly to the science classroom.
The focus is not on flashy activities, but on helping pupils think harder, remember more and become increasingly independent.
Here are 17 practical ideas you can use in your next science lesson.

1. Start a new idea by checking the knowledge pupils need first, because teaching electromagnetic induction is much harder if they have forgotten magnetic fields.
2. Plan challenge around thinking, not workload, by asking what pupils will have to explain, connect, predict or justify rather than simply giving them more questions.
3. Keep the science ambitious for everyone, but support pupils with prompts, diagrams, sentence starters or worked examples instead of automatically giving them easier content.
4. Identify the misconception you are most likely to encounter before the lesson and plan one question specifically designed to expose it.
5. Break difficult explanations into short stages and check understanding after each one instead of delivering the whole explanation and hoping pupils followed it.
6. Use precise scientific language from the start and expect pupils to replace vague phrases such as “the electricity moves” with more accurate explanations.
7. Draw diagrams live and build them gradually so pupils can see how each part contributes to the scientific idea.
8. When teaching calculations, model the decisions as well as the mathematics: identify the quantities, choose the equation, substitute, calculate, add units and check whether the answer is sensible.
9. Show pupils a strong six-mark answer and ask them to identify exactly where the science, evidence, logical links and specialist vocabulary appear.
10. Deliberately show an incorrect calculation, graph or explanation and ask pupils to find the first point at which the thinking went wrong.
11. Move from “I do” to “we do” to “you do”, reducing support gradually rather than jumping straight from teacher explanation to difficult independent questions.
12. Give pupils repeated practice on important scientific ideas, because understanding something during an explanation is not the same as being able to retrieve and apply it later.
13. Mix previous topics into current work so pupils might encounter forces during an energy lesson or particles during a pressure lesson and have to make connections.
14. Use practical work only when it has a clear purpose: developing practical skill, illustrating an idea, collecting evidence or testing a scientific prediction.
15. Before a practical, ask pupils what they are changing, measuring, controlling and expecting to happen so the science remains more important than the equipment.
16. Ask questions that reveal reasoning — “Why?”, “What evidence supports that?”, “What would happen if…?” and “Which idea from an earlier topic helps here?”
17. Make feedback require action by asking pupils to correct a calculation, improve a conclusion, redraw a graph or rewrite an explanation more scientifically.

The strongest message from Making Every Science Lesson Count is that excellent science teaching is usually built from strong fundamentals rather than constant novelty. Clear explanations, carefully chosen models, purposeful practice and good questions help pupils think harder about the science itself.

Buy Making Every Science Lesson Count by Shaun Allison on Amazon UK