Planning and Implementing Progression for Science in the Classroom Training Materials

These Key Stage Three National Strategy training materials from the Department for Education are designed to run a session with science teachers on helping students make progress in lessons - intended to follow their Subject Leaders' attendance at a Planning and Managing Progression in Science session.

Components
*Session 1 - What does progression within lesson plans look like?:
How progression might be reflected in teaching plans. The use of five key scientific ideas and yearly teaching objectives from the Framework for Teaching Science: Years 7, 8 and 9 is explained. They identify the good progression shown in the plans for a block of lessons from the QCA unit, ‘The solar system and beyond’ from Science: a scheme of work for Key Stage Three.

*Session 2 - From yearly teaching objectives to lesson objectives:
The language of lesson objectives and expected outcomes is refined. Participants practice writing lesson objectives, supported by the use of Bloom’s taxonomy and the idea of levelness.

*Session 3 - Finding out where to begin:
Judging existing learning at the start of a teaching unit. Participants examine students’ responses to a starting-point activity on digestion and decide how to help them to make progress to the next level of understanding.

*Session 4 - Using and building on starting-point activities:
Participants look at a range of starting-point activities so that lessons early in a unit can build upon the results and evaluate possible lesson patterns that cater for a range of prior understanding.

*Session 5 - Developing activities to promote good progress in lessons:
Identifying teaching approaches that promote progress to higher levels, using the key scientific ideas to apply the idea of levelness. They analyse the progression in the key idea of particles and match activities to the demands of the planned progress. They generate teaching and learning activities in the contexts of the other four key ideas.

*Session 6 - Checking pupils’ progress:
Participants examine a range of checking-progress activities from the Science: a scheme of work for Key Stage Three and consider how these activities allow the teacher to check progress.

*Session 7 - Follow-up:
Consolidation of learning to determine follow-up actions in school. A key messages leaflet gives the main points of the course.

These materials consist of:
*Tutors notes – includes Overview of the unit, Unit objectives, Outline programme, Synopsis, Preparing for the unit, Resources needed for each session, Key messages, Pre-unit task and Evaluation forms.
*Training slides for the session
*Participants resource pack – copies of the slides and handouts used in the training.