Debating and critical thinking skills are an absolutely essential component of scientific thinking. I have provided a range of resources to promote debating skills: a lesson plan where students consider the disadvantages of cars and create their own solutions, debating strategies ideas and student instructions that can easily be adopted into a wide variety of lessons across different subjects. Feedback to my TES inbox please. Thank you.

This is a presentation that I gave to colleagues at a TeachMeet event on using Socrative as an ICT assessment for learning tool. This presentation provides 8 tips for teachers on how to effectively use Socrative in their classrooms.

There are two resources - an example lesson and a tube map slide that is easy to modify. This is a student friendly alternative way of sharing learning outcomes with students at the start of lesson and assessing their learning at the end. The first slide can be shown to the students. Each tube line represents a different part of the lesson. The learning outcomes start easier and then become more challenging as the lesson progresses. The second slide can be printed and used as a personal learning checklist for the lesson and as an assessment for learning tool. Students rate their confidence on a scale of 1 to 5. 1 is low and 5 is high. They can share this score with the teacher using their fingers. They write this score in the left of the two boxes at the start and in the right of the two boxes after a learning activity.

This is a document that I prepared to help KS3 students track their progress through tests set during the year. Feedback to rowan.savage@hotmail.com

This is a visually engaging and fun method for students to self assess their progress at the end of a class. If more than 1 web is used students could assess their progress at the start, during and end of a task as part of assessment for learning. Slides are printed as 6 slide handouts. Feedback to rowan.savage@hotmail.com, rowan savage@highfield.herts.sch.uk or contact me via TES.

This is a lesson sequence designed to be flexible to suit any keystage, subject or SoW. Peer assessment can be carried out using my peer assessment pro-forma that is in my resources. It could potentially form the basis of an outstanding lesson. Please provide feedback to: rowan.savage@hotmail.com. I will amend this with suggested improvements later in the year.

This is a copy of a 10 minute presentation on personal learning checklists that I gave at the Science Done Right conference at the Open University in Milton Keynes in March 2017. The presentation starts by talking about a 2014 OECD report on teaching that shows that 20% of teachers in the UK work over 60 hours per week and yet schools can still be improved. It moves on to talk about the Shanghai mastery method of teaching Mathematics where all students understand a topic before a class moves on. Personal learning checklists allow teachers to check that students thoroughly understand a topic before sitting an exam. The Excel document is for teachers to use to check that students understand a topic. The Word document is handed out to students so that they can check their own understanding as they progress through a topic. These can easily be modified. The names in the Excel document are fictional but the results are real.

The website Read-able is an outstanding literacy resource providing instant determination of the reading content of material. You paste a website URL or a text (e.g. copied from a PDF or Word doc) and instantly get a range of data including reading and grade (US year group). Add 1 to the US grade to get the UK year group. An example analysis is attached of differentiated websites for a science graded task that I produced for GCSE. This will help in determining the correct level of challenge for students in lesson. Please share this with other teachers, SENCO and teaching assistants.