Hi
Just a few thoughts on reading on reading shiyammys comments on
the 'Devil's snare of school science'.
In my opinion (HoD of a Sci department) the two big problems on
keeping both myself and helping my department members to keep up to
date are
1)Time
2)Access

On the UK teaching induction there is generally time to reflect on
what you're teaching (you also tend to have access to a lot of other
Science teachers and to the college library for questions and
resources). When teachers get their first jobs, even with the
(hopefully) reduced timetable of an NQT there is not the time to read
enough materials - even though most (?) teachers would express a
desire to do. Department meeting agendas are too easily swamped with
administrative matters.
Access to materials (eg RSC journal) - because these tend to pass
through a busy HoD they don't always get looked at in detail.
I'm interested in what people see to improve the situation. For my
own department we (try) to do the following...
1) Weekly newsletter (by HoD, but anyone can contribute bits) - I
tend to shove into this RSC articles, ASE journal parts, clippings
from newsgroups etc - this 'digest' of information seems to work
well - but is time consuming to do
2) Every meeting for the year is planned in outline in September -
put in (nearly) every meeting is a slot for a 'Teaching Moot' - a
session (led by different members of the team) on an area of teaching
and learning, and how we teach it or deal with it,
eg 'Cells', 'Chemical Reactions', 'Assessing SEN' etc.
These have helped the situation, what have other people seen that
works
Tim