Workshop 1
 Contents
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Section A Exploring current practice
Activity
A1 Auditing current practice |
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Aims
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To review how energy is currently taught throughout
your existing science curriculum.
Background
In considering how you might introduce new ideas
into the curriculum, it is clearly important to consider what is already
there. It may be possible simply to add a new approach to existing approaches,
though it may be, for example, that an existing approach needs to be modified
to allow a new approach to be incorporated. Understanding the nature of
existing approaches will help to put into perspective the new ideas about
energy that will be introduced in later activities. In this activity you
will review how the concept of energy is dealt with in your existing schemes
of work and in the textbooks that you use, and identify some of the general
features of the approaches used.
What to do
1. Look at your schemes of work. Which units
include important ideas about the energy concept? What are the key ideas
about energy to be learned in each of these units? How do the units relate
to each other, and how is the energy concept developed?
2. Do you use more than one textbook? If
so, are there differences in the ways that they deal with the energy concept?
3. Look at the tests on units that include
ideas about energy. What kinds of knowledge about the energy concept are
pupils expected to learn? Which aspect is most emphasised?
4. How could you summarise in a few sentences,
the approach to energy in your existing teaching? The following questions
may provide a focus for your thinking:
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Is energy defined clearly from the start, or is it
a concept that gradually acquires meaning as pupils use it?
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Is energy considered as something which pupils can
experience directly in practical activity or is it a more theoretical idea?
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Is energy seen as a unifying concept throughout the
science curriculum, or is it dealt with differently in, for example, biology
chemistry and physics?
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