During my training year I had to teach a Year 8 class (12 year-olds) the physics topic of heat. I began with a common question for the...

Summer is ending and the new syllabus is rolling out. I just spent a few months developing my resources for the entire course and I want...

For years I've toiled with quiz questions in my biology courses (AKA core questions). I've used quiz questions as starter quizzes, to...

There is only one short cut to improving subject knowledge—reading great books. In this post I compile a selection of the books that have...

Where should a topic on the digestive system begin, let's say, for a GCSE class (ages 14-16)? Should it be with the general structure of...

Download chapter 1 here Summary   This outstanding book... deserves to be very widely read. I hope it makes a major contribution to how...

After coming across two interesting journal papers I thought they would make excellent case studies for my students. Let me introduce,...

What is the cause of osmosis? Typically, with my students of 14-16 years old (GCSE courses), I don't delve into the mechanism. It's the...

What are the most important factors for teacher sustainability? I'm sure there are many. Student behaviour, planning time, teaching...

Short answer questions are currently ubiquitous in UK secondary biology education. They work well for providing objectivity. This gives...

The Powerpoint years Creating presentations were great for organising my thinking while I planned, I could include: Exactly the right...

This preprint was vastly improved and made into Chapter 5 of my book . This is a brief summary of my new (preprint) paper in which: I...

Glucose homeostasis—What will happen? On the surface we have the learning of the component parts of the human body that function as a...

A thought experiment: Scenario 1: Two pedagogy-passionate colleagues (of the same subject) are being observed by a non-specialist. The...

They say that feedback is not about improving the work, but about improving the learner. Yet, what aspect of the learner? Their knowledge...

Whilst reading through a rather old book called Life Cycles by Peter Calow (1978), I came across a diagram that instantly struck me as...

This is a summary of my paper here in the Journal of Biological Education , whose ideas have been vastly advanced and presented in my...

In lower secondary science education, chemistry and physics curricula seem to focus on developing robust explanatory models, such as the...

In this post I will explain where I think many typical explanations fall short on the concept of surface area to volume ratio (SA:V) in...

Ebbinghau's forgetting curve has seen a resurgence in popularity. While I agree that knowledge is essential for domain specific...

Update I like concept maps, I think they're a valuable tool, but students do need training and I found that they also need motivation....

Cell respiration and its relationship to photosynthesis is one of the fundamental concepts of biology. It sits up high in the hierarchy...

I once approached a physics teacher to lend me his expertise and opinion on my sequence of lessons for Gravity, Mass, and Weight. His...

While the scientific method doesn't exist , experimental methodology remains an important concept for secondary science education. It is,...