1. What’s going wrong with our Year 11s?

January 2018. Our Year 11 students had just completed mock exams. The science department I was part of at the time was poring over them with green pens and deeply-set frowns.

“How do they not know this stuff?” we asked ourselves. Those who had revised could generally recall the basic factual knowledge, but even then the definitions were often sloppy and falling short of what was required.

Those who hadn’t revised simply made stuff up, noting down ideas that seemed so far from the discipline of science that we began to ask ourselves what we’d been doing in the classroom all this time.

Then there were the longer, tougher questions, in which students were presented with an unfamiliar scenario and expected to show how some key scientific ideas could be applied to it. Whether they’d revised or not, most didn’t even come close to achieving any marks.

Reading their answers was a disheartening experience. Typically, they sought to string as many keywords as they could into a sentence, seemingly unconcerned whether what they were writing had any discernible meaning.

We looked at these exam papers for a long time. A lot of soul searching went on about our own place in the classroom: to read them writing such guff made many of us wonder whether it was something we’d done. Had we let them down somehow? Yet when we looked at our students’ scores relative to the national average, we found they were broadly in line, if not above.

As much as it was a relief for us, it was somehow more depressing to realise that this superficiality of understanding was the norm. Four and a half years of secondary education, and this is what young people have to show for it? The evenings were dark that month.

Eventually, we came up with a plan. Following loosely the ideas of Rosenshine and the Learning Scientists (a great band name if ever I heard one), we introduced regular quizzes to help students memorise some key facts. We also spent half an hour at the beginning of each lesson (all science lessons were double periods) modelling answers to extended questions. This process started in January, and carried on right through to the exams in May.

The quizzes were straightforward, but the modelling touched upon something more interesting. The word model has two key meanings in science. The models science teachers are most familiar with are the analogies they use to relate new ideas in terms of things the students are already familiar with. An example might be explaining the flow of electrical current in a circuit with the flow of water in a pipe. Such explanations allow students to visualise what the teacher is talking about, a key element of scientific understanding that will be discussed in a later article.

The models we were using were different. Modelling writing or calculations means providing appropriate thought structures upon which the students can build a logical argument. A key model I used in physics was for Explain questions.

First, I would ask students to identify an overall cause and an overall effect. The students would start their answer with ‘If’, followed by the overall cause, followed by a logical next step: ‘then’. The second clause of the first sentence would go on to become the first clause of the next; the students would work their way through a logical sequence until they reached the final effect.

An example of these cause and effect sentences (or if … then … sentences) can be seen below. It is an answer to the question: explain why the heart rate increases during exercise.

The benefits of providing students with such structures were manifold.

Firstly, it gave them the confidence to make a start. Many students freeze when they see blank lines of text, so knowing they needed to begin their paragraph with ‘If …’ helped them get going.

Secondly, it made students more concise in their writing. Rather than waffling aimlessly, they could logically and precisely develop their argument.

Finally, it was a means of helping them on exam questions that went deeper than simply rote learning. Cause and effect sentences meant nothing without students thinking for themselves about what affected what. I hoped it might give them something beyond the ability to score better on an exam paper.

In the end, the students got their act together and the exams went well. We had put together a strategy in January and it delivered decent (although not mind-blowing) results in August.

That left us with two options. We could sit back until the following January, preparing to gear up again with the recall and modelling once the students had suffered a fright in the mocks. Alternatively, we could apply some of the principles that had been so effective between January and May of Year 11 to teaching all the way down to Year 7.

This was where I began to think about curriculum, a process I will describe in the subsequent articles in this series.