Wrapping up the term

Recently I had a day visiting a school in Huntly where we did some co-teaching (which usually means I have to really focus on not squirrelling to different ideas as well as general interference with the lesson!). For the workshop we used my handy dandy new capabilities posters (the second updated version that went out to all schools that asked) to review the science for the year. Teachers wrote down specific skills they did with the students.

Our work... and I don't know why it's on this angle either!

I'm sharing because I think it's a really good way of looking back at what we've done, how it has fitted into the science capabilities as well as challenging teacher understanding of the capabilities -where do particular skills go? We did it on post-it notes with different colours for the different levels of the school and this was helpful to think about how are we teaching the capabilities across the school: is it more Gather and Interpret Data at the junior levels? Are there more Use Evidence and Critique Evidence at the senior level? Does Interpret Representations show up across the board?

It was great seeing all the different topics and skills students were developing -especially seeing "floating and sinking" happening in the senior rooms! Sometimes we forget to revisit these ideas as we tend to think of them as 'junior class topics' and they very certainly are not!

From this, I typed them all up on a google doc for the school to review. I think it's really important for the teachers to see what each team or syndicate is up to, what they're doing and how... It also gives us a chance to critique our understanding, add more and plan for next year -what's missing,  what could we be doing more of?, what can we focus on next term or year? We don't tend to do a lot of critiquing of our teaching in science and I wonder if a bit more would be helpful for our own understanding. Using google docs means we can add some comments to the side, asking questions, etc... I looked at what had been written and thought for next time, as teachers become more tuned to the capabilities, I'd like to see differences with some tags. For example, many teams wrote about observations or diagrams, but what differences might we see across the levels?

We also looked at the front end of the curriculum but this time wrote the activities we did and this also was interesting. You can see the cards at the bottom of the photo. From this, we can start talking about what areas are we doing well in and which areas could we perhaps target with science. I think some of the areas eg equity or diversity in NZC Values may be more difficult but through discussion and brainstorming, integrating science with other curriculum areas could support development in these areas.

I believe it was a really worthwhile activity for the staff with some good opportunities for follow ups -so I thought I'd share! We also talked a bit about questioning -are the questions asked in the junior rooms the same as in the senior rooms? Sometime they might be eg What do you notice? but with the expectation of a deeper answer from higher up in the school. However, are we also asking questions with more 'scientific verbs' eg compare and contrast, match, interpret, extrapolate...?

Finally, my apologies for the blog mailing list mix up. Thanks to all who replied to be put back on this! If you'd like a copy of the capabilities posters or my NZC ones (which are really just the front bits of the curriculum), do ask!

Keep on sciencing!
Paul