Walton Priory Middle School’s James Croxton-Cayzer shares his top tips for ensuring practical science lessons get students thinking as well as doing.

"Sir, are we doing a practical today?"

If you teach science, you probably hear this question at least once a lesson. Pupils love practical work, but how often do we stop and ask ourselves: are they really learning from it? Are practicals just a fun way to prove a theory, or can they be something deeper – something that engages students intellectually as well as physically?

I was recently asked to speak at a NACE member meetup about how we at Walton Priory Middle School ensure that practicals are not just hands-on, but minds-on as well. Here’s how we approach it.

1. Don’t just do a practical: know why

Before anything else, ask yourself: What do I want my pupils to learn? Every practical should have a clear learning goal, whether that’s substantive knowledge (e.g. learning about the planets) or disciplinary knowledge (e.g. “How are we going to find out the RPM of a propeller?”).

I used to assume that if pupils were engaged, they were learning. But engagement isn’t the same as deep thinking. By clearly defining why we are doing a practical and keeping cognitive overload in check, pupils can focus on the right aspects of the lesson.

2. Give them a puzzle to solve

Rather than handing over all the information at once, I break lessons into two parts:

• Knowledge I am going to give them
• Knowledge I want them to discover for themselves

Children love discovery. Instead of telling them everything, create opportunities for them to piece it together themselves. If you’re like I was, you might worry about withholding information in case they never figure it out. But I’ve found that knowledge earned is usually better retained and understood than knowledge simply given.

For example, when teaching voltage in Year 6, I might tell them that increasing voltage will increase the speed of a motor (since there’s little mystery there). But I won’t tell them how to measure the speed of the motor. Instead, I challenge them: “What methods could we use to measure the speed of a fan?” This immediately shifts their thinking from passive reception to active problem-solving.

3. Hook them with a story

While linking science to real-world applications is common practice, storytelling as a teaching tool is often overlooked. A compelling story can make abstract scientific concepts feel personal and meaningful.

For example, in our Year 5 Solar System topic, I frame the lessons as a journey where alien explorers (who conveniently share my students' names – weird that…) must learn all they can about our planet and surroundings. In our Properties of Materials topic, I create audiologs for each lesson of a ship’s journey – except there’s a saboteur on board! Each lesson, the rogue does something that requires students to investigate different properties to solve the problem. Will they ever find out who did it? Who knows! But they are certainly engaged and thinking about the science.

4. Use partial information to encourage scientific thinking

One of the most powerful ways to keep students engaged is to avoid giving them everything upfront. Instead, drip-feed key information and let them work out the missing pieces.

For example, instead of just listing the planets, I provide partial information – snippets of data they must organise themselves to determine planetary order. This encourages effortful retrieval and intellectual engagement, rather than passive memorisation.

Returning to our Year 6 voltage lesson, I ask: “How can we prove that?” Some students count propeller rotations manually. Others try using a strobe light or a slow-motion camera. One of my class recently attached a lollipop stick to the fan and tried to count the clicks on a piece of paper – a great idea, but the clicks were too fast! So I turned it back on them: “How do we solve this?”

• Record the sound? Great!
• Slow it down? Super!
• Put the sound file in Audacity and count the visualised sound wave for two seconds, then multiply by thirty? Amazing!

The key is that they think like scientists – testing, adapting, and refining their approach.

5. Keep everyone engaged

Minds-on practicals require careful structuring. Not all students will approach a task in the same way, so scaffolding and adaptive teaching are key:

• Structured worksheets help those who struggle with open-ended tasks.
• Flexible questioning allows you to stretch more able learners without overwhelming others.
• Pre-discussion before practicals ensures students understand the why as well as the how.

All students, including those with additional needs, should feel part of the investigation. Clear step-by-step instructions, visual aids, and breaking down the task into smaller chunks make a big difference.

Even with the best planning, some students will struggle. Here’s what I do:

• Encourage peer teaching. Can a more confident pupil explain the method?
• Break it down even further. Can we isolate just one variable to focus on?
• Provide alternative ways to engage. If a pupil is overwhelmed, can they observe and record data instead? Once they feel comfortable, they may ask to take on a more active role.
• Reframe the challenge. Instead of “You’re wrong,” or “That won’t work,” ask, “What made you think that?” This builds resilience and scientific thinking.

Key takeaways

• Make sure every practical has a clear learning goal.
• Give pupils a reason to investigate, not just instructions to follow.
• Use partial information to make them think like scientists.
• Ensure adaptive teaching so all pupils can access the learning.
• If pupils struggle, break it down further or reframe the challenge.

Final thought: hands-on, minds-on science

Science should be a subject of curiosity, not compliance. When we shift practicals from tick-box activities to genuine investigations, students become scientists – not just science learners.

By ensuring every practical is intellectually engaging as well as physically interactive, we help pupils develop not just knowledge, but scientific thinking. And that’s the ultimate goal: to create independent, curious learners who don’t just ask, “Are we doing a practical?”, but “Can we investigate this further?”

Related reading and resources:

• NACE subject-specific resources: primary science
• NACE subject-specific resources: secondary science

Bob Cox, author of the Opening Doors books, shares some key principles and strategies for a challenging primary English curriculum – based on the latest addition to the series.

Every school’s intent is to be ambitious for its pupils. In the privileged role I have as educationist, consultant and writer, I so often admire displays, website quotes, inspirational messages and exhortations to pitch high and achieve dreams; yet I also realise how complex this can be to apply in the classroom on a day-to-day basis.

Primary teachers are expected to be experts in many subjects, so detailed support is needed in specific domains. Along with my team of ‘opening doors’ consultants, and with case studies being explored constantly with the schools in our network, we have been able to condense and express into a new publication some of the key principles and strategies needed to develop high-quality, ambitious primary English from which every pupil can benefit. This means that pupils who are already advanced and need regular immersion in literature, language and ideas are provided for in rich and creative ways: not by discrete divisions from others or by labelling, but through a challenge culture which encourages and enables all pupils to aspire and reach further. 

It's not just a question of talking about risk-taking, the unexpected, the wonder of top-class thinking skills, philosophy and quirky writing; it’s using the resources and strategies to make this all happen. How many keynote speeches have I attended over the years receiving deserved rounds of applause for charisma and style and social justice – but giving little indication for teachers who are not subject experts of where to actually begin.

I’ve seen schools hugely idealistic, wonderfully caring and totally committed, wandering in the dark for pathways to subject-specific depth. It’s all too easy then to adopt a package, a linear routeway, a stepped process which often tends to leave high performance learners revisiting concepts previously mastered. This can leave teachers de-skilled in the longer term too, as the delivery stages can dominate thinking and planning more than creative ideas. The latter needs the constant fuel of new challenging texts, quirky possibilities and curiosity. That starts with the teacher’s autonomy and nurturing of ambition. I am seeing this happen across our network and it’s very exciting!

In short, personalising approaches in any way can becomes harder if teaching to the middle rather than beyond the top takes a cultural grip. If models of excellence and ambition start to be squeezed, teachers themselves may lose sight of their own potential and ‘age-related’ notions become a goal rather than a starting point.

Our new book ‘Opening Doors to Ambitious Primary English’ provides the guide that schools have been asking for to confront that key issue of HOW ambition expresses itself in English, with a mixture of research, case studies, ideas and examples of pupils’ writing.

Essentially, high performance learners will benefit from being in a school where challenge for everyone is a priority! 

Five key principles for achieving this:

1. Pitch lessons beyond the level of the most advanced pupil.
2. Scaffold and intervene as appropriate for others.
3. Link quality texts from the past to the present and across the globe.
4. Exploit the potential of literature, including poetry, to give scope for new learning and deep knowledge acquisition as well as general knowledge.
5. Plan for sequencing and progression of knowledge via concepts in English.

Five key strategies for successful implementation:

1. Access support is needed continually, even for advanced pupils; this could include chunking stages; visual literacy; music; drama; questioning as a culture.
2. Productive group work and structured classroom talk provides the explorations of style and language needed for in-depth comprehension of quality texts.
3. Diversify the question layout to meet the needs of the pupils.
4. Develop quality writing via taster drafts which can link into sustained writing.
5. Zoom in to teach the specifics of English; zoom out to offer linked-in whole-text reading.

This is just a snapshot of the exciting work which we facilitate and activate. It’s very fulfilling. Our work is particularly in tune with attempts to inject high aspiration by matching intent to resources and approaches which will lift pupils’ standards and confidence.

Visit our website to read more about the five resource books in the series and the new book which will become the lead one, as it puts into words what schools have already been achieving to inspire so many more to follow. It’s time to make your primary English that much more exciting! 

“Opening Doors to Ambitious Primary English: Pitching high and including all” is available to order now from Amazon or Crown House Publishing.

NACE members can benefit from a 20% discount from all purchases from the Crown House Publishing website. Log in to our member offers page for details.

More from Bob Cox:

• Opening doors to challenging English for every pupil: quality text to quality writing
• Recorded webinar: Developing an ambitious English curriculum for all (login required)

More able in history or just literacy?

The building blocks: historical knowledge

Facts are the building blocks of history.

Developing historical understanding through open-ended questions

Making links: developing historical enquiry skills

And finally…

References

• Jenner, T. 2021. History in Outstanding Primary Schools. https://educationinspection.blog.gov.uk/2021/04/27/history-in-outstanding-primary-schools/
• Lowe, H. & McCarthy A. 2020. Making Space for Able Learners – Cognitive challenge: principles into practice. NACE. https://www.nace.co.uk/page/making-space
• Runeckles, C. 2018. Making every history lesson count: six principles to support great history teaching. Crown House Publishing.

Read more:

• Diversifying the history curriculum: how to embed challenge and confront misconceptions
• Top 3 ways your school library can support the teaching of history
• 3 ways to challenge more able students in secondary history

Charlotte Bourne, Deputy Head of Learning at Shakespeare’s Globe, shares four places to get started with the free online resources developed by the theatre’s education team.

As well as being an iconic cultural venue, Shakespeare’s Globe provides free resources for schools, supporting teachers to create learning opportunities that provide challenge for all. With materials available for teachers and learners across all phases, our education resources are designed to:

·         Offer flexibility within the teaching of Shakespeare through active approaches, rehearsal room techniques or technology – giving opportunities for children to flourish across a range of domains;

·         Add breadth to learners’ understanding of vocabulary through interrogating language choices;

·         Add depth to leaners’ understanding of the relationship between Shakespeare’s texts and their contexts;

·         Use them as a springboard to wider learning opportunities, such as homework projects or longer-term investigations.

Each year we also run a “Playing Shakespeare” microsite which tracks a production as it is developed and performed. This year’s microsite is dedicated to Macbeth (details below).

Ready to go deeper with Shakespeare? Here are four places to get started…

1.      ‘Discover' zone

Great for an introduction to Shakespeare or a focus on context, the Globe website’s ‘Discover’ zone provides a wealth of information on: the history of Shakespeare’s Globe(s); factsheets about Shakespeare's world; blog posts from the Globe; music at the Globe; ‘ask an actor’ podcasts.

Our fact sheets – on Shakespeare, London, writing plays, actors, indoor theatre, special effects, the first Globe, playhouses, audiences, and costumes and cosmetics – are particularly useful for introducing students to Elizabethan and Jacobean contexts in an accessible way at KS2, and can easily be adapted to your lesson objectives. For example:

·         Support the development of critical literacy skills: “We have very few accounts of how the audience behaved, and most of them are about ‘bad’ behaviour. This probably tells us more about what was considered ‘news’ than about how audiences behaved all the time.”

·         Introduce learners to how performance conditions impact on texts: “There were practical reasons why some plays were better suited to indoor theatres. Indoor theatres had a small stage (about half the size of an outdoor theatre’s stage). There were also stools allowed on the stage: the most expensive seats, where rich ‘gallants’ sat to be seen as well as to watch. This gave the actors far less space for big battles or crowd scenes. On the other hand, the smaller space and the candlelight enhanced a play’s magical effects.” This could be followed by an investigation into which of Shakespeare’s plays learners think would suit each type of theatre.

2.      Staging It

An interactive filmmaker for desktops and tablets, Staging It aims to help learners understand Shakespeare’s texts from a director’s perspective and offers the option to virtually stage a scene at the Globe.

Actors are filmed performing a moment of a play on the Globe stage. Each line of their speech is shot four times, each time performed in different ways (happy, flirtatious, defensive, etc.). Students decide which clips to add to the dynamic storyboard to build a final scene. They can then interrogate the choices they made, and the impact of these on how each character is perceived.

These resources support students in recognising that the text is a conscious construct, shaped by the context in which it is received – vital preparation for GCSE English that can be introduced at KS3 through this resource.

Follow-up questions can be used to support the development of critical thinking: How am I looking at this character? What leads me to have this viewpoint? What does my viewpoint ignore? Is there another way to look at them? How might [a different culture/gender etc.] view them? Which of these possible viewpoints makes the most sense given the text? This could be modelled in advance by the teacher, as “revealing the thought processes of an expert learner helps to develop [these types of] metacognitive skills” (EEF, 2018).

3.      Teach Shakespeare

The Globe’s website for teachers, Teach Shakespeare provides hundreds of learning resources in multiple formats: photos, video clips from previous productions, synopses, audio interviews, fact sheets and schemes of work. Designed with input from teachers, the site can be searched by age range, play, format, or purpose (e.g. lesson plan/exam revision). No signup is needed to access the resources.

Many of these resources incorporate rehearsal room techniques. These have experimentation, collaboration and reflection at their heart, and encourage students to make their own discoveries about the text.

For example, this resource suggests the activity ‘walking the line’ to investigate Shakespeare’s use of metre: foot up on unstressed syllables and down on stressed syllables, noticing and commenting on irregularities in the ‘Gallop apace’ speech in Act 3 Scene 2 of ‘Romeo and Juliet’. The ‘commenting’ is particularly important, because it is the collaborate nature of reflection that helps further the metacognitive talk referenced above. We provide video clips showing the actors undertaking some of these techniques, to model the insights that come through actively exploring the text in this way.

4. Playing Shakespeare

This site provides a gateway to all our previous production-specific websites created as part of the Playing Shakespeare project, each of which tracks a production from rehearsal to final performance. This year’s microsite is dedicated to Macbeth, with previous productions covered including Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew. Each of these sites contains photos, interviews with the cast and director, design briefs, articles and teaching activities.

The interviews with cast members give students the opportunity to unpick the texts in performance – a key aspect in appreciating the form. Listen to several Macbeths discussing their interpretations, for example, can help students understand that, unlike a novel, a drama text is incomplete on the page.

There are research articles on particular plays, written for a KS3-4 audience moving to focus in more detail on the relationship between text and context. These provide a rich exploration of writer's craft that cannot be separated from context, and can be used to model the integrated approach to this required for higher-level literary analysis.

Our Macbeth 2020 website has launched and will begin tracking the production in January!

Stefan Pearson, Teacher and Challenge Coordinator at Bradford’s Copthorne Primary School, shares five key takeaways from this year’s English for the More Able conference…

 Last month I attended the English for the More Able conference in York, run by NACE in partnership with Rising Stars. The conference explored a range of approaches to support, engage and challenge more able learners in primary English, with an opening keynote from author Anne Fine, interactive workshops, and opportunities to share ideas with fellow primary teachers, coordinators and school leaders.

Like most delegates, I left the event with a pile of notes and a head buzzing with ideas – some of which I’ve already begun to test out in my own classroom. Here are five of my main takeaways from the day – offering fresh perspectives to keep primary English relevant and engaging for learners of all abilities.

1. Oracy skills can – and should – be taught in schools.

Among the keynote speakers for the day was Neil Mercer, Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge and Director of Oracy Cambridge. Professor Mercer’s talk reinforced my belief that oracy skills are an essential foundation in learning and life, which can – and should – be taught in schools.

To communicate successfully, young people need to develop language and skills to reason and reflect, express ideas clearly and confidently, listen carefully, and talk and work well in a group. Most children’s home experiences will not provide opportunities for them to develop all the oracy skills they need, making it even more important that oracy is taught in schools.

The aim, Professor Mercer believes, should be to engage children in “exploratory talk” – characterised by active listening, asking questions, sharing relevant information, challenging ideas and giving reasons for doing so, and building on what has already been discussed. In exploratory talk, all participants are encouraged to contribute, ideas and opinions are treated with respect, and the group works within an atmosphere of trust and with a shared purpose, seeking agreement and joint decisions.

2. We need to talk about listening…

3. … and provide effective Talking Points.

Dr Lyn Dawes, also a member of Oracy Cambridge, shared her work on Talking Points – thought-provoking statements that encourage children to talk about a topic, promoting discussion, comparison, analysis, reasoning and negotiation. Through participation in Talking Points discussions, learners explore a curriculum topic in depth, generating shared understanding and establishing areas for further investigation. Most importantly, they develop skills for effective group discussion, practising sharing their opinions and giving reasons, listening and responding to others, and collaborating to ensure everyone has a chance to contribute.

Talking Points can be used across any curriculum area and can be created by both teachers and learners – a fantastic resource to support effective learning and develop oracy skills, which can then form the basis of written work.

4. Grammar really can be fun!

NACE associate Christine Chen ran a workshop on grammar games, sharing lots of practical ideas. One of these involved writing a six-word sentence and numbering the words 1-6. Learners are then asked to roll a dice, identify the word class of the corresponding word, and replace the word so the meaning of the sentence alters.

I’ve already tried this with my class and the children really enjoyed it. This kind of game also builds in differentiation, providing scope for challenge while reinforcing learners’ understanding of the different parts of language.

Another idea from this session which I’ve also tried out is the challenge of writing descriptively without using adjectives – meaning other word types must be carefully selected to convey mood, pace, emotion and so on. This prompted my more able writers to rethink their approach to description, and they really relished the challenge.

5. Engaging parents can be as simple as this.

My fifth and final key takeaway from the conference is in fact a resource developed by my own school. During her plenary talk, headteacher Christabel Shepherd mentioned our reading mats for parents. These proved in-demand amongst conference delegates, with many schools recognising the importance of engaging parents in developing children’s reading and comprehension skills.

We give the reading mats to parents and carers as laminated resources to use at home. They provide explanations and examples of different question types – for example, questions to retrieve information, to comment on language choices, or to relate texts to wider contexts. The sheets include question frames, which can be adapted for any book.

At Copthorne, where 98% of our learners are EAL and many families speak little English at home, we’ve found these reading mats very effective in supporting parents. In addition to encouraging shared reading at home, the mats enable parents to make effective use of questioning to develop their children’s understanding.

How does your school support more able learners in primary English? Contact us to share your approach.