Case Study - in-school bespoke support for physics teaching

During 2015-16 we worked in partnership with the Suffolk and Norfolk Science Learning Partnership, based at County Upper School, to support ten schools within East Anglia, providing three days of bespoke support in each school. This was part of the Teacher Subject Specialism Training programme and was aimed at non-specialist teachers of physics.

All the schools needed different support:

• Several schools did not have any physics specialist teachers, so wanted training for all of their science staff together. We ran a series of twilight or half-day training sessions to address the big misconceptions in topics such as forces or electricity. We also spent time co-planning schemes of work, working one-on-one with teachers and observing lessons.

• One teacher we worked with had been teaching KS4 physics for many years, but had not taught KS5 until this year. By spending a day working together one-on-one we were able to work through all the topic areas that that needed to be covered, and practice all the critical practicals.

• At one of the school's science teachers teaching Applied Science BTEC Level 3 were not physics specialists. We worked with them to select a physics module, help outline their scheme of work, address any teacher misconceptions, and begin to design tasks suitable for the assessment criteria of pupils’ portfolios.

Delegate feedback

‘The training that you have been offering has been hugely helpful from the feedback I have had so far. The format has gone down really well with teachers here (see quote below) the key factor is to find people as good as you who are willing to do it.'

'Best CPD I have ever had'.

‘Really helpful, great explanations and useful descriptions of practicals.’