Microbiology and the New Curriculum for Wales: Part 1
Hello! I'm Melissa Flanagan.
I am the Head of Science at Ysgol Clywedog in Wrexham. I have been a head of science for 4 years, and before that I was a Head of Year for 8 years. I have been teaching science for 27 years and I still love it.
The thrill of the job is explaining new concepts to bored teenagers and seeing them get so excited and interested when things start to 'make sense'.
I like finding and using new ways to engage the pupils and help them to realise that they quite enjoy science actually!
I joined up with the Superbugs project for a few reasons. My team at Ysgol Clywedog in Wrexham had been really engaged in using the new Curriculum for Wales to write a whole new curriculum for year 7. We had designed interesting and exciting new learning plans and were loving the freedom and flexibility that the new curriculum was allowing for. The chance to help build a collaborative and online learning resource which was following the new curriculum seemed like a good next step. In fact, even before I had this opportunity, we had written the framework for a new scheme we had called Just The Job which was going to be giving the pupils the chance to explore different science careers. One of the careers we had included was a microbiologist; this Superbugs project would really help with that.
In the collaborative sessions, I have had the chance to speak with other teachers and also experts in the microbiology field and in the ICT web design field. This has helped me to see what is needed in order to design a user friendly resource. In session 2 we all had to consider how we could measure the success of our resource: is a well visited site actually a successful site? Are the students actually learning from it and how could we measure that? Is there always a link between engagement and learning? These made me think about my own schemes and consider more carefully how I can gauge the learning and progress made from an exciting new plan. As part of this, the Superbugs team (made up of teachers from KS2-4 from across wales, with different specialisms) looked at the Progression Steps, and areas where we thought our pupils would benefit from extra input from a Superbugs resource. Some really diverse ideas were raised for this, like microbes on Mars, computational skills, life cycles, ethics, and many numeracy opportunities for primary into secondary school.
The next challenge we face as a co-production team then, is how do we make these resources accessible to all? It is clear that as a team, we have different needs and ideals as well as different areas of expertise. The same will be true of our audience. We want this resource to be used by people who have never taught microbiology, and we want them to feel safe and supported in doing so. One of our success criteria is to figure out ways in which this resource can be used in cross curricular ways, and to be able to measure how successfully that happens. Personally, I want to embed the final product into the whole school and have it accessed during science, maths, PSHE, history at least.
