[Full disclosure: I work for Adam and I gave him feedback on the manuscript. This should colour your opinion of this review, but at the same time, I have a terrible reputation for being brutally honest, so...
I only wrote this piece because it was banging about in my head and I needed to make space for other things!]
Teaching Secondary Science is a thorough guide to getting the best out of yourself as a teacher. Clocking in at a chunky 398 pages (including acknowledgements, introduction, and FAQs) there is plenty of meat to sink your teeth into. And what perfectly cooked meat it is.
The book itself is broken into seven parts, although those parts are of vastly different lengths. The parts are as follows:
- Substance
- Explanations
- Building Understanding
- Independent Practice
- Assessment and Feedback
- Practicals
- Building Brilliant Scientists
You can see already that the book is almost a walking tour of usefulness. Reading it feels like my hand is being held on a journey into the classroom. There's a bit on what needs to happen before you even get into the room, this is followed with delivery, follow up, and then assessing. Within each section there is a series of chapters. Most of these chapters are pretty short - only a couple of dozen pages at most. What's remarkable is that they still flow into one another well - there is no feeling of bitty-ness or fragmentation. Most, if not all, of the chapters start with a short recap of the previous content which means it is an easy book to pick up, flip through, and use a specific bit. I ended up with two copies, and I keep one on my desk at work and have, on a couple of occasions, flipped through to find a specific thing I wanted, be that the phrasing of something, an example, or a whole-ass concept. Each chapter also ends with a short summary called a chapter take home which, you guess it, summarises the chapter in a few key bullet points. I guess in theory, you could just read the chapter take homes, but I wouldn't recommend that.
One of the traps authors sometimes fall into [I'm not going to name names here] is they use language in a way that closes off part of their audience. I am a well-educated person; I have a degree in chemistry, a PGCE, and a couple of credits towards a Masters in International Law. And yet, there are some authors who I cannot for the life of me work out what they are on about. Adam is not one of these. Even though he does make up words and phrases. The book is full of "Adamisms" - ways of describing things that he has literally made up. But it doesn't prevent understanding. In fact, it aids it. And he's very upfront about the importance of using this made-up, shared language. Once you get a hang of it (and it's not hard) it is a lot easier to just use the term, rather than describing the concept time and time again. One of these Adamisms is a so-called direction of travel called explanation ⟶ definition. The idea being that you should give the explanation first, and the definition second for reasons Adam clearly lays out in the book. Well, explanation ⟶ definition is clearly made up, but it also clearly makes sense. I'm not stuck trying to remember what was that fancy phrasing [here's looking at you, visuospatial sketchpad]. It is also worth mentioning that throughout the book, Adam walks the walk. He does exactly what he is telling the reader to do. At one point, he even front-loads his means of participation! He's also very good at telling you why he's chosen to do something in a particular way, whether that is repeating the challenge equation [which has been developed since it appeared in his blog], or only covering part of a concept to begin with. I'm not left wondering if I've missed something, or if an omission or inclusion is a stylistic choice, or if it's important. Speaking of blogs, if you've read or seen a lot of Adam's previous work, some bits may be familiar to you, but it is very useful having everything in one place. It's also much easier to keep a copy in your desk and flick through it, than looking it up in a blog.
There isn't an index, which personally I think is a drawback, but I've heard all the arguments and the contents page and glossary are very comprehensive, to the point where I've not yet encountered something I couldn't find. Maybe I just have a thing about indexes... One of the compromises for the lack of index is the detailed glossary, and all the keywords throughout are in bold (not just the first time you meet them). This does make it easy to check "hang on, what does this word mean?", but my brain likes to shout bold words so it slightly detracts from the enjoyability of the read. But it's a trade-off - appeasing my ridiculous, shouty brain versus being able to quickly identify and define keywords?
As an experienced teacher, a lot of edubooks can be a bit meh. I know the stuff already. One of the great things about Teaching Secondary Science is that I learned from it. Even stuff I was already doing, it either gave me ways I could further improve my practice, or it gave what I was doing a name which is great because then I can talk about it in a succinct and clear way, instead of being kinda wishy-washy.
Sprinkled throughout the book, there are theory sidebars. These are grey boxes containing a little soupçon of theory. One on of the very first pages, Adam says his aim for the book is to be "concrete; theory-light". The theory sidebars are a useful way of keeping the rest of the substance of the book concrete and practical and fully-actionable, whilst also pointing the reader in the direction of the theoretical why. They stop it being too much "you should do this in your classroom because I say so" and more "you should do this in your classroom because I've read all this and put what they suggested into practice in my classroom and done loads of the hardwork and troubleshooting and this is the outcome". Downside [but also upside] of these sidebars - every one comes with a suggestion for further reading. And there are 29 of them. Which has done horrible things to my reading list. I was doing so well at clearing it.
Anyway. It's a very useful book. But, like I said, you shouldn't take my word for it. You'll just have to get a copy yourself and see if I have been fair 😉