Lecture (teacher-centred)

In this approach, it is the teacher that is the focus. Students either passively take notes or ask questions
through the teacher’s presentation. Handy for large groups of students or for when you need to get
through a large body of information. The key to this lesson style is to keep it lively by inserting graphics,
video snippets, animations, science demonstrations, audio grabs or guest appearances via video
conference. To help increase the engagement during a lecture, try incorporating student polling using
Poll Everywhere, Plickers, Quizizz or Kahoot. The advantage of getting active student feedback is that
this formative assessment can help shape your lecture and future lessons to fit the student’s needs.

Hands-on activities (student-centred)

Break out the experiment materials! Whether the students work in small groups or by themselves, the
lesson has a clear question that students need to find an answer to with the teacher acting as a
facilitator. There are a few variations here;

Students follow an experimental procedure with a clear set of instructions and scaffold for their
scientific report.

Students explore the materials themselves to design and test their own fair experiment, keeping
variable testing in mind. This version is better for students who already have a clear understanding of
the scientific method and are now ready for independent thinking

Station-based rotations. Here the students rotate around the classroom to explore a variety of hands-on
materials that all cover an aspect of your lesson topic. The trick here is to ensure that there is enough
time for the students to complete each activity and that there are no bottlenecks in terms of access to
resources or one particular activity taking too long to complete. A fun way to link all the stations
together to pull together a scenario such as a forensics investigation; some students will enjoy the role-
play!

You can find over 150 free science experiments here

Project Based learning (student-centred)

This teaching method draws on the hands-on nature of the activities above and extends this to involve
students in a deep dive into a given topic. Time is the key here, as students will be engaged over an
extended period of time in researching their topic, designing their experiment or model, writing a
scientific report or creating a poster and presenting their findings in a short talk. When planning this in
your scope and sequence, consider access to resources both within and beyond your school and how
the students might be able to involve the community in their research or as an audience for the final
presentation at a school science fair. Often part of inquiry-based instruction, the outputs of Project
Based Learning (PBL) can include several of the following as a major work;

Field journal

Student Podcast

Working model

Science poster

Research paper

Video diaries

Augmented reality or Virtual reality

App creation

The outcome doesn’t necessarily have to be informal too; try emulating the entrepreneurial show Shark
Tank and have students compete for a prize in a pitchfest!

Peer-led team learning (student-centred)

Peer-led team learning (PLTL) is about empowering the students to teach the other students. Often
employed in undergraduate studies, this approach also works in schools where it is most effective when
connecting older students with younger students. Alternatively, PLTL can also be used when pairing
students with a high subject aptitude with students needing help. Guidance is important here as you
need to ensure that what is being covered is correct and safely performed. With supervision, this
approach can be effective for students to learn leadership skills and can create a positive atmosphere
around scholarship.

Flipped learning (student-centred)

Flipped learning has gained a lot of popularity in recent years. The idea is that the instructional content
is given to the students outside of normal school time, with the intention that students can then come
to school with deeper questions for teacher clarification. you can present this content via a series of
videos, articles and books to read, podcasts to listen to, investigating a problem and so on. There is
much debate on how to best implement this in the classroom; in essence, you need to consider how
your students will respond to flipped learning and how you can motivate them to trial it. A handy app to
use with this is Flipgrid, whereby you can record a very short video question to your class and the
students then respond to you with their answers via video as well.

Differentiation (student-centred)

Differentiation is all about ensuring that students of all levels can be involved in your lesson. You may
want to create worksheets with different tasks or levels of difficulty, perhaps have a variety of activities
for students to choose from or creating a variety of job roles for students when running PBL. Of course,
with differentiation comes a time requirement to prepare the lesson, however it can help with students
being more on task as they can choose tasks that they can achieve. You can differentiate tasks as both
extension activities as well as design activities for students who need more support.

The most effective teaching and learning strategies

Teaching and learning strategies taken from the best of UK education research

What are teaching strategies?

List of teaching strategies for primary school

1. Know Your Pupils and Develop Their Respect

2. Appropriate use of Summative and Formative Assessments

3. Teach the Vocabulary

4. Explicit Instruction

5. Effective Questioning Techniques

6. Deliberate Practice

7. Differentiation

8. Reinforcing Effort/Providing Recognition

9. Metacognition

10. Personalised Learning

11. Collaborative Learning

12. Explicitly Teach Thinking Skills & Problem Solving Techniques

Other Teaching Strategies To Consider

List of Learning Strategies

1. Spaced Practice

2. Retrieval Practice

3. Elaboration

4. Interleaving

5. Concrete Examples

6. Dual Coding