Fizzics

We had a full day inset on Curriculum for Excellence on Tuesday.  I was dreading the prospect of a full day sitting in our school hall listening to someone from down south lecture us about the changes that are coming.  As it happened, my vision of what our session would involve couldn’t have been further from the reality.   There was no guest speaker and we didn’t have to sit all day in the hall.

What we had instead was a day with quite short whole school presentations/videos by the head teacher followed by more in-depth departmental/faculty breakout sessions where the implication of CfE for our own curricular areas were discussed in detail.  I was quite pleased with this unexpected opportunity to discuss the implementation of CfE within Science, as the ongoing administrative side of department meetings often means we never look much further ahead than the current reporting cycle.

Despite having participated in a week-long curriculum planning event last winter, I have remained sceptical about the draft outcomes for Science due to their woolly wording and lack of clarity.  I think I had a lightbulb moment on Tuesday when, in between all the chatter, I realised that it was the pupils’ experiences that counted, not some summative assessment grade or STACs.  When the penny dropped (collectively, I might add) you could feel the relief around the room and the renewed willingness to engage with the challenge.  Questions raised changed from confrontational sentiments such as “How are you supposed to do that?”, “That’s not covered until Higher!” and “We shouldn’t have to rewrite all this!” to more proactive questions like “How could we make this outcome more practical?” and “Can we throw away the S1 textbooks?”

I feel a lot more comfortable now that we have started the discussion, although I don’t know where it will lead us.

image by antonio1952

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