Picovolt's public profile

I taught in secondary schools for over 30 years as a physics specialist and Head of Department. I then spent the next 15 years as a PGCE Tutor and Teach First Tutor at Keele University and Birmingham City University. Whilst in the university sector I also worked for a number of organisations, such as Keele Science Learning Centre, the ASE and The Prince's Teaching Institute, delivering CPD, particularly to in-service teachers who were teaching physics but who did not have an academic background in the subject.

Whilst at Keele I was involved in a project looking at assessment following the removal of levels from the National Curriculum and worked with a number of schools developing assessments using the SOLO (Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes) taxonomy of Biggs and Collis. I later expanded this into a lesson planning structure for beginning science teachers that incorporated the CoRE (Content Representation) structure established by Mulhall, Berry and Loughran. This work had a fundamental impact on my own thinking about teaching and learning and I think demonstrates that even an experienced, and I would like to think effective, teacher can, through the application of theory, improve their teaching and hopefully the learning and classroom experiences of their pupils.