Science Lesson

Unfortunately, the USA isn’t doing as well as it used to be internationally when it comes to high school science. An international survey in 1998 ranked 12th graders in the USA 19th out of 21 countries surveyed. It’s high time all teachers had a good look at their science lesson plans and had a hard think about how we’re teaching science, as well as what science we’re teaching.

One of the problems that many teachers encounter when drafting up science lesson plans is helping students to grasp difficult concepts, and making science interesting rather than something that “only nerds/geeks do”. While teachers have a number of potential tools to make science more lively and relevant – and understandable – one of the easiest teaching tools to get the knack of is the video or DVD player – or more up-to-date classroom technology such as online clips and video feeds.

Videos have a lot of advantages for teaching science. With a video – whether your science lesson plan involves an elementary-level Magic Schoolbus jaunt through the innards of a flower or a more advanced animation explaining black holes and relativity – your students have the chance to go on impossible journeys and get a grasp of advanced concepts with their imaginations as well as with the logical parts of their mind – and concepts in the imagination tend to be better understood and easier to recall.

And videos have another advantage: the rewind button, which means a clip or sector can be watched again and again so a point can be properly understood.

Videos can be fitted into a science lesson plan in many different ways. Use short bites of video to bring variety into your lesson and to let another voice speak to explain a concept. How about playing the segment in Young Einstein where the (very offbeat) Einstein outlines his thought experiment about riding on a wave of light? Or that popular YouTube clip by Alpine Kat explaining particle physics and what the Large Hadron Collider aims to do?

Demonstrations. Some experiments just can’t be done in your classroom. Analysis. Just say your science lesson plan for today was on animal adaptations.