Trust Projects

Sheffield Hallam University, Centre for Science Education - Evolve (Cluster Project)

Centre for Science Education –Sheffield Hallam University – Evolve

Evolve is a pilot project to explore how becoming part of a community of curriculum developers can enhance a science department’s practice of teaching with engagement, understanding and skill development. The pilot will work with approximately 96 teachers from 12 schools.

The Evolve community will pioneer a new, collaborative way to create a curriculum, by combining the creativity of groups of teachers with scientific, curriculum and resource design expertise.

Aims

The project intends to:

  • Create a new cadre of teachers who are able to plan a coherent and creative curriculum, balancing engagement against attainment
  • Achieve long-lasting and department-wide changes in pedagogy, in terms of learning with engagement, understanding and skill development
  • Evaluate the potential for combining best practice in CPD and curriculum development with a state-of-the-art mechanism for creative collaborations online
  • To apply a number of innovative approaches to pupil engagement
  • To apply an approach to curriculum planning for learning with understanding
  • To plan a curriculum specifically targeting the development of personal, learning, thinking and social skills (PLTS)
  • To increase teachers’ confidence in using a greater range of teaching strategies designed for engagement , learning with understanding and skill development
  • Develop a clearer appreciation of when to apply different pedagogical approaches from the full repertoire
  • To create the environment where curriculum planning and development are practised as collegiate activities
  • To develop communities comprising ‘expert’ development groups and a number of school science departments, who will work together to foster new forms of practice through creative dialogue;
  • To produce four high quality teaching units for Year 7 that draw upon the innovative process and relate to the new programme of study at Key Stage 3
  • To establish how a wiki ICT environment can dovetail with and provide added value to ‘conventional’ professional development.
  • To explore the potential added value in the creative process of curriculum development of utilising the wiki environment

Programme

A wiki is an online collaborative publishing tool. Essentially it is a collection of web pages that makes it easy for a group to create documents together. Each small community will use a wiki to write KS3 curriculum units, starting face-to-face and continuing online. Wikis are also designed to foster reflective dialogue, by wrapping a discussion forum around each page in the scheme of work. Here teachers engage in online conversations with each other and the ‘experts’ as they build and negotiate content, leveraging each others’ expertise and creativity. Wiki technology has already proved itself successful in high quality publishing involving large numbers of authors (Wikipedia), and in businesses for capturing and sharing a team’s knowledge. The key feature is that the content of any part of the unit is always open to editing by anyone in the community, and so improves by the ‘natural selection’ of ideas.

Contact

Tony Sherborne - tonysherborne@googlemail.com