Academic Pathways Webinars

Each webinar in this set focuses on an important aspect of teaching where I share ideas from the science of learning, describe helpful pedagogical practices, and share what we do in our grade 9 science classes. I hope you will find them helpful, since their focus is effective teaching.

How to Use the Webinars

The webinars are roughly 30-minute pre-recorded sessions that you can watch any time, but would benefit from watching with colleagues from your school. Here is my advice on how:

• create a Zoom meeting (1 pm often works well) and invite your teaching colleagues (even one is better than none!)

• one person plays the webinar video and shares their screen for everyone else

• pause the video to talk whenever an idea interests someone or people have questions

• contact Chris for further discussions or sign up for one of his discussion sessions

Each webinar proceeds by presenting the big ideas, pedagogical strategies, and then concrete examples from our grade 9 science classes. Beneath the video on the page is a list of links to classroom examples. I will add more webinars over the next few weeks.

Pathways Teaching Resources for Science

You don't have to start from scratch developing a new science course for academic pathways. We have been running pathways for three years at my school and have developed a well-tested and refined course. All the digital resources we use are available here. Many teachers have successfully taken these resources and implemented their own version of the course with great results.

Chris's Advice for Pathways Teaching

The three most important ideas we can address to make pathways teaching a success are:

1. Belonging. Help all your students fell welcome as valued members of the class

2. Pedagogy: create a learning environment that matches how students learn (how their brains work)

3. Content: teach less, but teach it well (see #2 above)

Read more about planning for academic pathways here.