Checkpoint Teachers Guides and Workbooks

Teacher’s Guides Endorsed by Cambridge Assessment International Education – for Teacher Support

Having been a Head of Science in a large multicultural high school for many years and leading a correspondingly large science department through two changes in the curriculum, I was able to apply this experience to writing the teachers guides.

At lower secondary level you may have teachers who teach their specialism such as biology and chemistry in upper secondary but here must be able to also teach outside their specialism, say physics or Earth and space, so the guide must provide ample support for all the science sections in the lower secondary course. Here you can see that the guide provides at least ten pages of support for each chapter.

As a Head of Science, the first thing you look at after finding all the department will have the support they need will be to see how the student’s book covers the learning objectives of the curriculum. Here we can see that each chapter does just that with a table that not only covers the learning objectives for knowledge and understanding but also for thinking and working scientifically.

You can also see in the table that the location of each objective is not just shown in the students book but also in the workbook, the teachers guide itself and in the Boost online resources.

The curriculum coverage table can be extensive, this one covers two and half pages, and here we can see at the end of it there is a chapter summary which helps the teachers familiarise themselves with the chapter content and the sequence in which it is presented.

This is followed by the chapter notes which begin with the terminology that the students will need to learn.

One of the things that strikes a teacher’s mind looking through the students book is “How do I split this up into lessons?” To help out here I have produced a lesson ideas table which suggests how you divide up the chapter into lessons, the supplementary and enrichment activities you can access online at Boost and suggested homework activities.

Next, a major concern, especially if teaching outside your specialism, is “What support is there as I go about the lesson in the lab?” and here is the Activity notes and answers to read in conjunction with the students book before each lesson so that it goes smoothly. In this chapter there are four and half pages of support then all the answers to the various questions in the chapter.

Workbooks Endorsed by Cambridge Assessment International Education for Learner Support

Each workbook supports one of the student’s books and follows the book content but this time it gives the students an opportunity to display what they know in an exam paper format. In the introduction to each book I try and also set a wider objective in the hope that it may make it more appealing to the students by saying:

“The aim of every science course is to make you become scientifically literate or, more simply, to become a ‘scientific citizen’. This means that you can confidently talk and write about the science you have studied and know how it helps us to understand and live in our world.”

There are the full range of question types that the students will encounter in their future exams as these examples show:

The answers to all the questions in the workbook are found back in the Teacher’s Guide at the end of each chapter.

If you would like further information about my Checkpoint Science books, just email me at peter@peterdriley.com and I will do my best to help.