Short Description

Struggling to implement a 5-year plan or a mastery curriculum? Arrange a school-based CPD workshop so your department can learn the effective strategies our pilot teachers have used to help students achieve better understanding, enquiry skills and scientific thinking. We walk you through the steps in the context of the Year 7 energy topic of energy. You’ll see the strategies modelled, discuss why they work, and then practise them yourself – so you can apply them to other topics. Plus you’ll get:

• Energy lesson plans, teaching materials and assessments
• Follow-up support for re-teaching the topic

What you will learn

1. The rationale and evidence for the 5As mastery learning progression
2. How to check prior understanding and adapt teaching for gaps and misconceptions
3. How to pre-teach concepts and procedures vital to understanding
4. How to give students experience of the phenomena and relationships
5. How to use models and analogies to support theoretical understanding
6. How to support students in explaining the phenomenon
7. How to help students generalise understanding to similar contexts
8. How to model and guide Detect, Recall and Solve strategies to apply knowledge.  
9. How to use diagnostic assessment and re-learning so more students reach mastery.
10. Developing thinking skills for GCSE.

Effective CPD

Easy Mastery adopts research-based principles behind effective CPD:

✔ Clear focus: on the 5 critical learning stages for reaching mastery, and what each looks like when you teach it
✔ Active learning: learn by analysing good and bad examples, reflecting on the lesson you taught, and re-designing teaching episodes
✔ Collaborative learning: work with a colleague and observe each other teach the lessons, or compare your strategies with other teachers at the workshop
✔ Extended duration: more than a 1-day workshop, with lesson teaching beforehand and follow-up
✔ School factors: opportunity to discuss individual challenges with a clinic at the workshop and through email 
✔ Coherence: based on the 5-year plan big ideas approach and our 5A's learning progression

Download the flyer and agenda

What you will get

✔ Energy lesson plans, teaching materials and assessments
✔ Follow-up support for re-teaching the topic 
✔ Online seminar in Autumn term for further follow-up

Why Mastery

Easy Mastery is based on the Blueprint 5-year plan, a big idea curriculum framework to prepare students for new GCSE and its greater emphasis on apply and analysing knowledge, and enquiry skills.

Mastery is a system to improve the performance of all students. Backed up by decades of research, it can help low and middle-achieving students acquire and apply concepts, and high achievers extend their understanding further.

Previous feedback 

I attended your workshop and thought it was brilliant. Excellent resources to help ensure mastery of science. We have a lot of work to do!

An extremely thought-provoking course, for rethinking priorities in teaching science and the possibility of creating more 'space' in the curriculum.

An inspiring day with so many ideas. I definitely plan to make a start and make changes.

I really enjoyed this philosophy on education; really made me think. I will be changing the way I do things.

Great concept ideas: I will be suggesting these to my HoD and using Big Ideas. Thanks for a very good learning experience.

A really helpful course and lots of great ideas to start implementing.

Very useful and relevant. Likely to make an immediate impact on planning for lessons.

Fabulous day – I’ve got a lot from it. Lots of good ideas and discussions.

Great to have topic/syllabus drawn up as I’ve been battling this in my own rewrite from scratch.