Trust Projects
Science Challenges - Cams Hill Science Consortium (Cluster Project)
Designing Innovative Science Challenges
This project has two main foci:
- Conducting action research projects to support KS3 school teachers in developing pedagogy best suited for motivating and engaging target groups.
As well as researching practical in-class activities and resources to support target groups of teachers , the project will also seek to devise a method of enabling teachers to improve their identification of gifted & talented science pupils by not just relying upon prior attainment data but to recognize characteristics and in-class behaviour and achievement. As part of this action research the project will support teachers with CPD to enable them to analyse and evaluate the impact of their interventions upon pupil progress. Teachers will also be offered CPD so that they are able to present their work at a conference which we shall host during the summer term.
- Developing, trialling and evaluating a variety of offsite Science Challenges designed to encourage discussion and debate of contemporary and contentious scientific issues.
Liaising with the senior managers of the different schools and scientists based at local universities the project will design and plan three inter-school challenges. Teacher training workshops will be incorporated into the programme to support the teachers involved to develop the pedagogical skills needed to run effective off-site challenges for gifted and talented pupils.
Overview
The Science Challenges will be hosted either at INTECH in Winchester. Each of the Challenges will focus upon researching and debating a different current and/or contentious issue within Science. Challenge 1 will focus upon the future of space exploration targeted towards higher achieving KS2 pupils and supporting the professional development of the secondary teachers involved in the other Challenges by involving them in collaborative planning and evaluations of this Challenge. Challenges 2 & 3 will be focused on the the potential offered by stem cell technology but will be run separately in different ways for KS3 boys and then KS3 girls.
Programme
Each Science Challenge will involve approximately forty pupils. Typically, this will comprise teams of eight pupils with two teachers from five different schools who will work with scientists from academic or business backgrounds to explore and debate contemporary and/or contentious scientific issue. It is intended that the KS2 event will be on a larger scale and will be a family event involving pupils and their parent(s) in a Saturday Science Challenge. The packs will also be made available to teachers through the STEM Hub and our own websites which will enable us to share best practice and disseminate our findings to schools nationwide. We will also disseminate practical support for other teachers via designing and running teacher training workshops delivered via the Science Learning Centres and regional and national conferences.
Evaluation
We will evaluate each of the three Science Challenges in terms of their pupil, teacher and other stakeholder interest levels. This ongoing evaluation, together with the findings of the action research projects will enable us to disseminate our work via our own cross phase teacher training conference to be held in the summer term. This conference will cascade training packs of resources enabling other schools to run their own KS2 & 3 Gifted and Talented Science Challenges.
Contact
Matthew Newberry - matthew.newberry@btinternet.com