Teaching Secondary Science: A Complete Guide

by Adam Boxer

Teaching science is no simple task. Science teachers must wrestle with highly abstract and demanding concepts, ideas which have taken humanity's greatest minds thousands of years to formulate and refine. Communicating these great and awesome theories involves careful forethought and planning. We need to deliver crystal clear explanations, guide students as they develop their embryonic knowledge and then release them to develop their thinking independently, all the while curating and tending to their long-term understanding as it develops over time. In Teaching Secondary A Complete Guide , Adam breaks down the complex art of teaching science into its component parts, providing a concrete and comprehensive set of evidence-informed steps to nurturing brilliant science students. Adam hopes that you find this book interesting, but his main aim is for you to find it useful. Useful when it comes to sketching out your curriculum, useful when preparing your explanations, useful for mapping out how you will check student understanding and useful for all other aspects of science teaching. This is a truly complete guide, and science teachers of any experience will find it packed with ideas that are new, challenging, interesting and, most importantly, useful.

Genres: Education, Teaching, Nonfiction, Science

360 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 5, 2021

Reviews

[Tom Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic compendium of concrete strategies to use in the science classroom.
Boxer goes into detail about the different phases of a lesson, paying very close attention to the often overlooked ‘Art of the Explanation’. Boxer outlines the different ‘Directions of Travel’ a teacher could take when explaining a concept, and provides an incredibly handy summary in the appendix. This addresses the issue faced during ITT that we receive little formal training on how to actually explain concepts, a skill that is fundamental to our profession. The 114 pages on delivering explanations is truly comprehensive.
The book maintains a strong evidence base throughout, with ‘Theory Sidebars’ that reference principles from cognitive science.
All in all, Teaching Secondary Science: A Complete Guide is an excellent book for science teachers at all stages. It provides excellent advice on every stage of the learning sequence, including checking for pre-requisite knowledge, writing practice sets and how to review assessments.
It provides guidance on how best to maximise the learning of your pupils and minimise teacher workload, whilst also providing excellent examples and lesson scripts for teachers to put into practice.

[Steve Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Immense, outstanding. So much to consider, even for teachers of subjects other than science. Very ready for the start of term now!

[Alison Westwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this on my kindle but it is such a wealth of information I'm considering getting a physical copy too so I can find the info faster if I need too.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astute and compelling summary of sensible, well reasoned (and researched) science pedagogy. As such, it looks completely different to the policies and strategies pursued by schools in my experience, which lack such a clear paradigm laid out in this book.

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even if you don’t teach science. Chock full of good teaching.