Videos Get Results in Science Lesson Plans

Unfortunately, the USA isn't doing as well as it used to be internationally when it comes to high school science. An international survey in 1998 ranked 12th graders in the USA 19th out of 21 countries surveyed. While that survey is now ten years old, there hasn't been any real change since then. It's high time all teachers had a good look at their science lesson plans and had a hard think about how we're teaching science, as well as what science we're teaching.

One of the problems that many teachers encounter when drafting up science lesson plans is helping students to grasp difficult concepts, and making science interesting rather than something that "only nerds/geeks do". While teachers have a number of potential tools to make science more lively and relevant - and understandable - one of the easiest teaching tools to get the knack of is the video or DVD player - or more up-to-date classroom technology such as online clips and video feeds.

Videos have a lot of advantages for teaching science. With a video - whether your science lesson plan involves an elementary-level Magic Schoolbus jaunt through the innards of a flower or a more advanced animation explaining black holes and relativity - your students have the chance to go on impossible journeys and get a grasp of advanced concepts with their imaginations as well as with the logical parts of their mind - and concepts in the imagination tend to be better understood and easier to recall.

And videos have another advantage: the rewind button, which means a clip or sector can be watched again and again so a point can be properly understood.

Videos can be fitted into a science lesson plan in many different ways. While the first thing that springs to many teachers' minds when you think about using video in a science lesson is full-length documentaries that take up the whole lesson (or most of it), this is not the only way to use a video.

Use short bites of video to bring variety into your lesson and to let another voice speak to explain a concept. How about playing the segment in Young Einstein where the (very offbeat) Einstein outlines his thought experiment about riding on a wave of light? Or that popular YouTube clip by Alpine Kat explaining particle physics and what the Large Hadron Collider aims to do?

Demonstrations. Some experiments just can't be done in your classroom. Either you don't have the equipment or the experiment is too potentially dangerous to leave in the hands of a room full of fidgety adolescents. But you can show someone else doing the experiment on video quite safely and cheaply.

Analysis. Just say your science lesson plan for today was on animal adaptations. After teaching the main points, you can then show a clip of one or two animals in action (you could try leaving the sound off as a way of focusing your students on what they can see and notice for themselves rather than relying on what the presenter tells them) and get your class to list all the specialised adaptations the animal they watched has (e.g. the cheetah is spotted to give it camouflage, it has long legs to help it run fast, etc.)

What you shouldn't do is just mindlessly plug and play, leaving your students to watch the video while you catch up on a little grading or other paperwork. The most valuable and affordable resource for enhancing your classroom lessons is educational videos and DVDs. So make sure you're using video the right way and see immediate benefits in your students' engagement, retention and test performance by clicking here. Are you using them as well as you could?

Check out this free video to find out.