10 February 2019
It's been a week of continuous professional development (CPD) at the ASP, involving collaboration with national organisations and participation by teachers from over 20 primary and secondary schools. The Oxfordshire Science Learning Partnership is the local hub for the National STEM Learning Centre at the University of York and regularly uses the ASP lab in the Yang Science Centre for their courses.
The latest course saw around a dozen newly qualified science teachers from across Oxfordshire gathering for a day of training on how to carry out exciting science experiments and demonstrations safely.
The ASP also co-ordinates the science subject specialists' group of the Abingdon Partnership of Schools, and hosted ten primary science co-ordinators for a session of training on assessment methods in primary science. This was led by Claire Kirkham, of St Blaise Primary School, who is also a National STEM Learning CPD trainer, specialising in primary science.
ASP's own staff have also been busy this week providing physics coaching for teachers and science technician support under our contract as a Lead School for the Institute of Physics (IOP) Stimulating Physics Network (SPN) programme. The expertise of our own science technicians is an invaluable resource at Abingdon School and the Lead School status is allowing us to share this by providing advice on health and safety and maintenance of science equipment to other schools in the area.
ASP Co-ordinator, Jeremy Thomas, has been trained as a School-based Physics Coach for the IOP and is now delivering bespoke coaching sessions on teaching a wide variety of Physics topics to six schools in his local network.
