SCIENCE


The Christmas Lectures and associated schools


programme aim to bring science to life.Olympia Brown from the Royal Institution explains how they ensure the lessons are engaging for young people


live lectures in front of an audience and a television broadcast over the festive season. The schools programme was started by Sir Lawrence


I


Bragg in the early 1950s and gives young people an opportunity to hear scientists and engineers talk about their work and demonstrate the key principles behind it. A Nobel prize-winning physicist, Sir Lawrence,


who gave the Christmas Lectures himself in 1959, freely admitted that his talent for communicating technical subjects was not in-born but learnt from bitter experience. Over 100 years previously at the Royal Institution,


another great physicist, Michael Faraday pioneered his public demonstration lectures “adapted to a juvenile auditory” and the prestigious Christmas Lectures were born. As one of Faraday’s greatest legacies, the annual


Royal Institution Christmas Lectures were originally aimed at 15 to 20-year-olds. Today this has been revised to 11 to 17-year-olds, which reflects the need to target younger children when they start to form their attitude towards science and engineering. If children are put


AM PRIVILEGEDto have the job of looking after the schools lecture programme and the Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution. We have just finished and aired the 2011


Christmas Lectures called Meet Your Brain, with Professor Bruce Hood. It was an exciting journey from the original science topic to


Engaging science


off science and maths they do not study these subjects beyond GCSE and miss out on a wide variety of career choices as a result. This Christmas Lectures aim to do just that – give


young people that spark of excitement, inspiration and encouragement to engage with science. Throughout my role working on the Lectures, many people I have met said that the Christmas Lectures carried them several steps down a path that led to a science degree. All of these people can recount the exact lecturer that inspired them. After the Lectures this year, I got a real buzz


listening to the young people talk to each other and piling over one another to get to Prof Hood to tell him


Are longer days the solution? Psycho babble


THE SHADOW education secretary, Stephen Twigg, has called for longer school days in order to address the problem of teenagers joining gangs, to provide a “haven” from chaotic homes, and to prepare students for work. He insists that the measure will make the classroom more relevant to the modern age. There is some merit in the idea. Current school


hours were designed for a long-gone farm economy, which has been replaced with something much more high-tech. Studies in the US, where extended school hours have been piloted, have been enormously promising. In particular, studies found that students did not, as expected, become bored or lose attention; they showed impressive improvements in maths, science and reading, compared to their peers; and the school “climate” improved alongside other “non- instructional” benefits. The National Center for Time


and Learning in the US cites five potential benefits to extending school time, including making it possible for students to spend more time on a task, allowing teachers to delve into subject matter in more depth, encouraging more student engagement through project-based learning and elective courses, building in time for more teacher-student interaction, and creating more time for teacher planning and professional development. All very good, but... And there are a few big buts. The first is that


simply extending school time will not produce the desired results. Larry Cuban, a Stanford University professor of education, has argued that what matters most is the quality, not the quantity of time students and teachers spend together. Similarly, other studies have found that there is little or no relationship between student achievement and the total number of hours students are required to attend school, and that the strongest relationship exists between engaged academic learning time and achievement. In other words, if teachers fully engage a class


for an hour, they are much more likely to excel than students who sit in a classroom for a whole day in an


“unengaged” state. The message is, of course, that teaching methods are crucial to success. In the US, the longer days have been successfully


achieved by “block teaching”, which involves four or five 90-minute sessions of a single subject, taught back-to-back. Students take fewer courses on any given day, but spend more time in each. In examining this type of approach, researchers have found no significant difference in attendance rates, no significant difference in suspension/exclusion rates, a greater ability to pursue electives in block scheduling, and more A grades, with fewer Cs, Ds and Fs. It makes sense that students who


struggle in an unhealthy home environment can be supervised and supported during longer school hours; the system also helps to ensure that homework is finished each day, even if it isn’t done at home. It keeps kids off the street in an age where there is little sense of community apart from the


gang culture within the teenage population, and where there is little provision for entertainment


out of school hours. Similarly, it provides students


with more opportunity to experiment with different courses, subjects and interests, in a safe environment and under the


auspices of good role models. And the truth is that it is a balancing measure between classes; many middle class parents carry


on the school day for their children by paying for extra tuition. This way, every child, regardless of financial background, has access to support and increased learning time. Is there a cost? The financial implications of this


type of scheme may be prohibitive, given the current economic climate and broadscale cuts, but that’s not all. There can be a significantly negative impact on a number of other variables, which can affect student performance, emotional health and wellbeing. We’ll look at those in my next column.


• Karen Sullivan is a bestselling author, psychologist and childcare expert. She returns in two weeks.


how much he had inspired them and that they want to find out so much more about the brain. In my experience, it is rare for professional science


communicators to share the art of engaging younger audiences. Specialists may be best placed to understand their area of research, but, paradoxically, this expertise often means they are the least qualified to explain it to non-specialists. Put simply – once you know something, it is


impossible to truly imagine what it’s like not to know it. This makes it much harder to relate to your audience. That said, we all know that many young people are


quick to learn new things, absorb new concepts and make new connections, if they are presented with an intriguing topic – something science can provide in abundance. Yet, these ideas can be impenetrable if they are shrouded in unfamiliar language. Technical terms can be so ingrained that they slip out without you even noticing. The best way to pitch content correctly is to listen


to your audience. Over the months leading up to the filming of the Meet Your Brain series, we asked a few children to come along to rehearsal to feedback on the demonstrations. Many of the demonstrations we initially came up with were cut out of the final lecture because in the end we found by trial and error the best way to communicate the concepts. An engaging experiment does not have to be


flashy or expensive, it does not have to take a lot of preparation either – like listening to a sound or moving your eyes. An engaging experiment is about telling a story, bringing something to life and letting people have a go at it too. Prof Hood did an amazing job at striking the right


note with communicating his area of research – the brain and how we engage with one another – with accuracy, showmanship and without “dumbing it down”. Presentations and shows enable an audience to


have a personal encounter. A passionate and interesting person is fascinating to watch. They have the power to move hearts as well as minds. A large audience builds feeling, the contagious thrill of a unique shared experience. Presenting the Christmas Lectures is no different


and Prof Hood built this “emotional engagement” using tools such as personality, story, interaction, humour and challenge with both his live and television audience.


Meet Your Brain: Professor Bruce Hood presents the 2011 Christmas Lectures


One of the most powerful emotional weapons is


curiosity, which Sir Lawrence understood. He said: “There is a most important principle which I think of as the ‘detective story’ principle. It is a matter of order. How dull a detective story would be if the writer told you who did it in the first chapter and then gave you the clues. Yet how many lectures do exactly this.” The desire to give answers, before allowing your


audience opportunity to consider the question, is a hard habit to break. Yet this simple change can be the difference between merely talking over heads and engaging young minds. The answers are usually not what really motivate


most scientists, engineers and mathematicians. The questions, the unknowns, the mysteries and challenges are their inspiration. Certainly a key component of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures is the inclusion of some of the big questions – the things we don’t yet know. Unlike a book, film or exhibition, a live


show enables you to interact with your audience. Audience participation, whether through dialogue, demonstrations, questions or competition, forces the viewer from a passive role to an active one. An interactive demonstration can have a powerful impact, destroying false assumptions and creating that “penny drop” moment of understanding. By varying the range of your emotional engagement


techniques throughout a presentation it is possible to keep an audience of young people hooked. In fact, these techniques are effective with all age groups.


SecEd


• Olympia Brown is science learning manager at the Royal Institution of Great Britain.


Further information


The Royal Institution’s Christmas Lectures were shown on BBC Four in December. Prof Hood presented his three-part series called Meet Your Brain and achieved viewing figures of over two million. You can view the 2011 Lectures and behind-the-scenes footage, archived Christmas Lectures from the past 50 years, and science video content from across the web on the Royal Institution’s new science video website, the Ri Channel, at www.richannel.org The Ri schools science programme is also available


to all. More information about the upcoming events is available at www.rigb.org


SecEd • January 19 2012


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