Category: web

The Canary in the Coalmine 3b/4

Recap

Previous posts have introduced the research that we did, summarised the negative and attrition factors the teachers considered most significant and linked this to what they reported might encourage retention. Understandably, we were most interested in the factors considered important by those who were seriously considering leaving! For at risk colleagues, what they said would help most were:

  • financial incentives
  • increased planning time
  • reduced marking load
  • teaching physics only
  • lesson resources
  • department resources

One identified challenge is that different factors are within the control of different stakeholders within the education sector; I suggested that thinking about this in terms of fuzzy boundaries is helpful, based on this:

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Methods – all colleagues

All colleagues need to acknowledge the challenges, both generally and how it works in your local area/school/MAT. Teachers need to be enabled – which is more than simply encouraging them to do it! – to seek physics-specific support as well as more general teaching advice. I used to tell trainees that “there’s no such thing as a good teacher, just teachers who are good at X.” Find the local experts on specific areas of the curriculum, go to D&T to see how they deal with practical work and maths to see why kids struggle with your wording about ‘directly proportional’. Join the IOP’s professional community to get physics-specific resources.

Use those physics-specific resources for your own support and development, such as the free-to-access videos on IOP Spark. Wherever possible, invest your time in shared resources and transferrable approaches, like a question bank you can use and reuse every lesson, iterating rather than creating from scratch. Where a school has these in place already, use them. If you can’t find them, ask. Quite apart from anything else, the benefit of your students knowing the ‘house style’ means you’re able to lean on department and school procedures rather than establishing your own!

For colleagues working in the classroom, especially early in their career, it’s worth remembering how many different skills you’re trying to polish. One analogy is that it’s like trying to learn everything about driving a car simultaneously:

  • general maintenance
  • using the controls
  • hazard perception
  • highway code
  • adjusting for changing conditions
  • following directions
  • planning a journey

What actually happens – or at least it did back in the mists of time when I learned to drive – is that you consolidate one set of skills and move on to others. My parents got me sitting in the passenger seat, thinking about the conditions and other road users, before I got my provisional licence. I built on my experience of being a cyclist and all of those specific hazards. I practised using the controls, including a gear shift and a choke – I did say I was old – in an empty car park on a Sunday, so no other cars to think about. And so on.

A department scheme of work and borrowed resources are the equivalent of someone else doing the journey planning so you can focus on making progress, while not going over the speed limit. Shared planning means you can improve consistency of style and approach in a department – we call it a staff team for a reason. And if you’re wondering why you’re seeing new colleagues struggling, remember the curse of knowledge and lend a hand.

Tactics – Heads of Department, CPD and MAT Science Leads

As suggested in the final section of our paper, matched timetables should be the first priority at the department level; this will involve advocating upwards, possibly in writing with a link to our research. A colleague with year 7, 8 and 9 science classes has three courses to teach. Each course includes resources, practicals, risks to manage, misconceptions, assessments… and two-thirds of those will usually be in their non-specialist area. It is easy for their last experience of those ideas to be from ten years and two degrees ago. So instead, could they have three classes of the same year group? Three opportunities to teach the same content, with far less time needed to review/choose/write resources. It also means it’s worth them investing time in a more streamlined feedback and marking approach. When the tests come around, marking three sets of the same paper is easier than three different ones.

Wherever possible, give them more physics. Unless you’re over-supplied with physics specialists – statistically unlikely – then their colleagues will also be pleased. All of the hinterland we talk about, all of the extra confidence and increased familiarity, means less time spent planning. They can use that time to dig deeper into the pedagogy, to improve their understanding of the school approach to assessments – or simply have a cuppa in the prep room. Over time they’ll still get to teach more of the curriculum, but nobody would expect every French teacher to be as good at teaching Spanish simply because they’re in the MFL department.

Every Head of Department wants to support their colleagues with shared resources, feedback and marking approaches which balance the needs of the students with the sanity of the teachers. This is about making sure everyone knows the materials are there to promote a consistent house style and reduce duplicated effort. The danger here is that if you’re short of physics specialists, anything you ask them to create in-house means extra work for them, per-person. If you’ve got one specialist building things for everyone to use, being the point of contact for issues and troubleshooting, then congratulations – you’ve got a lead practitioner! Are they getting paid as such? If you work across a MAT then you’ve got the added challenge of providing support that’s helpful in terms of workload but still allows flexibility for different schools.

To make this easier, there’s a whole load of resources and projects that can support you at a department or MAT level to increase physics confidence and competence across the team.

  • the Stimulating Physics Network (SPN, now administered by STEM Learning) works with the department to boost physics skills
  • the Ogden Trust works with schools and individuals; the SKPT project in particular is a great way for individual colleagues to be upskilled, but availability may vary depending on area and they will need dedicated time.
  • the CPD videos on IOP Spark are topic-based support including real classroom approaches as well as physics explanations, and the ECPL set are a good way to structure mentoring conversations with those new to teaching physics. The Early Career Framework is time-consuming enough without having to write your own physics modules.

Remember that making sure there’s development opportunities provides many benefits; the point of including them here is that by reducing the overall workload in the team, you’re addressing an attrition factor. The downside of this is that it’s easy for biology and chemistry colleagues to feel that they’re missing out on refreshing and developing their own specialist areas.

I’m looking at ways HoDs could use a department audit, based on the questions used in our research, to identify local priorities and match them to specific, evidence-informed tactics. If you’re already monitoring this, please give me a shout!

Strategy – Headteachers and MAT leadership

My colleague and friend Mark is keen to use the model of ‘dealing with the closest crocodile.” Apart from what this reveals about the wildlife in Cheshire, it’s a great way to remind us that there’s almost always a crisis demanding the attention of education professionals at every level. Whether you use an Eisenhower matrix, GTD or some other way of prioritising, there will always be more problems than time or money for solutions. So why should the boss of a school with a hundred staff and two thousand students be spending time on physics teacher retention?

The title of this post is the reason why. Physics teachers are special, rare and hard to retain. But they’re not, despite the understandable hyperbole, actually unicorns. Instead, a good way to think about them is – to use a more recent biology concept – as an indicator species. Physics specialists have more options outside education, and those options are better paid on average (see Fig 5 in this from the NFER). The grass gets greener as they see their pay starting to plateau. Especially since the pandemic they’re contrasting their situation – in the workplace Monday to Friday, with associated time and money implications – with their fellow graduates working in PJs from home, with decent coffee and no commute. What this means is that they have more options, so they act when their non-physics teaching counterparts, under the same strains and stresses, can only grumble. This is particularly true for early career colleagues who don’t have a mortgage yet, and can make the most of the freedom that entails. They might be cheaper to hire, but the higher attrition rate might make up for that. If a school can’t retain physics teachers then it’s a warning sign that other colleagues would be leaving if they felt they could.

It may feel unfair to pay them more money, but if your Head of Science tells you that your sole physics specialist is doing all the jobs that are shared between three biologists, it’s easier to see how that’s unfair too. If you lost all your Spanish teachers, you would expect the Head of MFL to make choices about which languages were offered to your new Year 7 students. That can’t be done with Science, so show you respect their specialism by supporting matched timetables instead.

If you’re responsible for workload and retention across a MAT, you can use economies of scale to show how investing in resources pays off when it comes to staving off teacher exhaustion. Of course, these problems are not unique to physics teachers. It’s just that we notice the effect of the attrition factors for them first. If when you model the workload effects of new initiatives – and I’m assuming you do – some teachers are hit harder than others, what’s your plan to reduce that impact? How are resources like IsaacPhysics supported across the schools in the trust to reduce the barriers to uptake? When you choose new platforms for retrieval practice or worked examples, do your staff know that they’ll be available for long enough that it’s worth investing in them?

Alongside Ofsted surveys monitoring staff job satisfaction, wellbeing and concerns is going to pick up a lot of noise and occasionally an important signal. You can’t keep everyone happy all the time, but aiming to keep most colleagues grumbling a little rather than a few constantly crying in the staffroom is a more realistic aim. I’m not qualified to tell you how to manage your staff – I’m just flagging up why the physics specialists might be a more urgent concern than their numbers may suggest.

Policy and Law – government, exam boards and publishers

I’m grouping these together because the overlaps are so hard to entangle – and, frankly, I’d be amazed if any of them read what I’m typing. That’s a long way above my pay grade, but the reality is that if we don’t acknowledge who can make changes, we’ll get blamed for the ones we don’t make ourselves. Being a middle-manager and being blamed for the things your bosses do sucks, so drawing a line and admitting what’s beyond your control is important.

Defining the curriculum (government), how it’s assessed (exam boards) and how it’s taught (professional associations and publishers) are not small jobs. They’re also dependent on each other, which is why education reform is always challenging. Back when I was teaching – and over a decade there was one year when I wasn’t teaching a new spec to at least one class – I was told it’s like trying to convert a diesel train to electric without stopping the journey. I’ve now decided it’s like trying to convert every train to a different type without cancelling journeys or reducing the timetable. So what would I recommend to the government, based on this research, to address physics teacher retention?

Firstly, throw money at the problem – but aim carefully. I’m personally really pleased that the government is acknowledging the concerns raised by the STRB and doing something about this for the profession, and even more so that it’s at least partially funded. They’re looking at how pay could be varied by subject and need, which is something we’ve already seen in physics. I’d argue that a long-term plan for this is needed, and the benefit needs to be spread out rather than just being front-loaded into bursaries. A physics teacher needs to know – as I did, ages back – that I can rely on the extra cash for long enough to get a mortgage. Overall, this needs to be considered carefully, not re-invented annually, and be built on top of broader sector funding reforms that address old buildings and a crumbling SEND component – not to mention the growing problem of the inflexibility of teaching as a career, post-pandemic.

As part of that, we need to be asking better questions. Focussing on physics teachers; it’s almost unbelievable that the DfE can’t say how many physics specialists are teaching in state schools. Specialist is so poorly-defined that deciphering the stats is nearly impossible. Teaching electricity to Year 10 is physics, right, so it needs a physics teacher to count as specialist?

Turns out it’s not that simple. If it’s a Physics GCSE class, then yes. (Let’s not get into whether a D&T teacher who’s a qualified electronics engineer counts, versus a chemistry graduate who did a ten day SKE to access the Physics PGCE programme.) But if it’s a class doing what I still think of as ‘Double Science’, then any science teacher counts as a specialist. We – and by that I mean the DfE – just don’t collect enough information. (If I’m wrong on this, please point me at something more useful.) Teaching within specialism – whether from graduation or acquired by longer-term development – means better outcomes for students and less workload for the teacher. But at the moment we just don’t know how big a problem it is nationally.

Adding to this, I’d like to know why physics teachers leave by asking the ones who are actually leaving. And I mean ALL of them. Give me some money and I’ll run a nationwide anonymous exit survey for every physics specialist leaving a state school. I’ll find out where they’re going and why. I’d hope schools are doing this now, but why on earth isn’t there a standardised set of questions for every departing teacher part of the Ofsted requirement for a school? Don’t add it to the league table, but anonymised to a regional level this would be a valuable tool. Add a threshold for X% of teachers ticking the same box for a particular school which should be a warning sign for SLT and Ofsted. (Heads Round Table, call me.)

Exam board specifications and teaching resources are two sides of the same coin – and they’re both determined by government decisions, interpreted broadly in some cases. That starts with thinking very carefully about what we want the curriculum to do, and most importantly what there is not time for. Gove shoved a load of stuff in the science specification that seemed like a good idea to him and his advisors, and since then the idea of a knowledge-rich curriculum has been taken for granted by many. And it’s not that it’s necessarily bad physics – it’s just that there’s an awful lot. A few years back I wrote a Physics Teacher Guide for Hodder and felt the need to acknowledge in the accompanying SOW how cramped it would be. We need to be honest about what we fit in to the science curriculum and what will need to be left out. (Obviously this is true across all subjects, and that’s before we get into all the other things the media seem to think that schools should be responsible for.)

Creating good resources is harder than it looks, as every early-career teacher has discovered to their cost. The principle behind projects like Oak Academy are noble ones, but as all the publishers would tell you, making good materials takes expertise and time. Neither are free. Exam boards and publishers being entangled – and yes, Pearson, I’m looking at you – means that it’s very easy for specification-matches resources to be produced that then need regular updating and improving, all at a cost. This is an example of the general movement towards rental/subscription rather than ownership – which has benefits, especially for shared digital resources, but it’s not without challenges. I’m listening to Spotify at the moment, but I had to put a playlist together myself because the album I wanted has been ‘updated to a DELUXE Edition’ by the band and I want the original, damnit! (August and Everything After by Counting Crows, if you care.)

Ranting over

I think I’m probably done for now, but the above ideas show that the issues can be addressed, if not solved, in different ways. I’d love to hear suggestions about which are realistic and which are mistaken. My next post – probably at the weekend – will be digging into the survey process itself and what I learned from what didn’t go right.

The Canary in the Coalmine 3a/4

First things first; the wonderful people at the ASE have now made the published article open-access. You can read the paper via SSR in Depth without logging in, share it with colleagues (including HoDs or SLT) and generally check my working. I would emphasise that I’m a big fan of the ASE, have been a member for some years and encourage colleagues to engage with them. And no, I’m not being paid for that. I’m writing now as an engaged professional, separate from my ASE membership or IOP employment.

Recap

In the first two posts of this mini-series, I explained the context of the research and summarised some of the things we found. In particular, I discussed what can be described as

  • negative factors – what colleagues said reduced their job satisfaction)
  • attrition factors – what they said made it more likely they’d choose to move on.

That second one is particularly relevant in physics teaching because we lose so many colleagues from the English state sector. It’s important to note that because of the way data can be collected, what sometimes happens but is hard to track is that teachers move to teaching in independent (fee-paying) schools and/or internationally. I’m interested in the patterns of this migration, so if anyone has data please give me a shout!

This post will examine a third list, the things which colleagues said might be a factor in encouraging them to stay. I’m describing these as retention factors but before I start discussing the stats, it’s important to include a caveat.

Every teacher is different, and every school is different. There are many reasons why teachers leave the profession, and because we tracked intentions rather than actions it will be an imperfect report. Mark is in the process of finishing a separate piece of research where he interviewed those who had made the leap, and that will be a valuable complement to this work. It’s not as if a Head of Department can work down the list of retention factors and add them all to the school policies. And which factors matter most in individual cases may not reflect the order we have here. As I said to a colleague on Twitter, this research – like many other trends we can see in large numbers, such as the reasons girls often choose not to do Physics or the differing perceptions of careers held by parents – gives us the questions to ask, not the definitive answers. (Thanks to Paul Hunt for prompting this response, which I’ve polished slightly here.)

Happy physics teachers are all alike; every unhappy physics teacher is unhappy in their own way.”

(apologies to Tolstoy)

Part of the reason we limited our dataset to colleagues in the first five years was that when we ask similar questions of the most experienced colleagues, their answers are very different for reasons that make perfect sense. In unpublished data from previous work, a large percentage said that teaching out of specialism wasn’t a problem for them. It turned out that this was because most of the respondents fit into one of two categories; many had significant experience and so had gained the skills and knowledge needed for teaching biology and chemistry topics with confidence. Many of the others were in settings where they only taught physics; they could honestly say it wasn’t off-putting for them because they didn’t need to do it! Neither of those things are necessarily applicable to early career colleagues teaching across the curriculum.

Retention factors

Just as with the earlier questions, the teachers were asked about how important possible changes would be in encouraging them to stay in teaching. These factors were defined because we started the survey, but were based on previous studies and unsurprisingly were often possible solutions to the factors proposed in the negative and attrition factors questions.

As before, there was a fairly close match between the factors identified by all respondents and those categorised as ‘at risk’; in fact the order was identical:

  1. financial incentives
  2. increased planning time
  3. reduced marking load
  4. teaching physics only
  5. improved behaviour policy

Beyond the scope of the published article, I spent some time looking at the smaller group who could be described as ‘high risk’. The difference was not huge, but it was interesting; for these respondents, other factors become more important suggesting they’re particularly affected by the workload aspects. I’ve compared the percentages saying it would be a big or medium factor in encouraging retention with the equivalent for all respondents.

  1. financial incentives (93% rather than 92%)
  2. increased planning time (93% rather than 85%)
  3. teaching physics only (89% rather than 75%)
  4. lesson resources (86% rather than 70%)
  5. well-resourced department (82% rather than 70%)

The difference is interesting rather than ground-breaking, but to me it suggests that any solution which does not address their teaching-specific workload is doomed to failure. What I found particularly interesting is that even though they’re at much higher risk, more money wasn’t massively higher. It’s a problem, yes – but it’s not the answer to everything. And although flexible working featured in other lists, by this point they’re beyond worrying about it. Definitely think about how you can offer it, but arguably that’s often a sector issue.

I’ll also point out there was no correlation between the Index of Multiple Deprivations for the school and whether teachers reported concerns about department resourcing.)

How do we solve a problem like retention?

If it was easy, anyone could do it. And it’s amazing how many people, whether they’re celebrated opinion writers in the media or committed teachers on social media, think they can indeed do just that “with this one weird trick…” It turns out that it’s a bit more complicated than that, but this does not mean we shouldn’t try to address it.

I’m going to ignore behaviour improvements, not because I don’t think it’s important but because it’s not a physics teacher problem. We/they are particularly vulnerable to it, and SLT need to understand the challenges of working with hazardous practical tasks in large numbers when students are unable to follow instructions. But let’s be honest; not many schools will have a behaviour issue that only shows up in physics lessons. So what does that leave?

  • financial incentives
  • increased planning time
  • reduced marking load
  • teaching physics only
  • lesson resources
  • department resources

Who can solve a problem like retention?

One problem in organisations of any size is that when things go wrong there are a lot of people to blame. This is made worse when, for completely sensible reasons, those higher up in the organisation may not be able to share all the reasons for decisions that affect us. So the Head of Department gets the blame for the choice of the exam board, even when it’s a decision made at a school or MAT level, because they can’t or won’t share that explanation with their teams.

Something I have up by my desk is a reminder of the different layers in managing UK education and how they inter-relate. It’s an absolute mess and one specific to my day job, so I won’t share it here. Instead, a massively over-simplified version with layers that have decidedly fuzzy edges is below:

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So the question now becomes, what changes could we make in the system to improve retention, and critically who can control or influence that? There’s no point in asking the Secretary of State for Education to share their physics teaching resources with an ECT or expecting every new teacher to successfully demand a higher salary because physicists are in short supply. So who makes which decision?

Although the bullet points above look like a wide range, they’re actually closely related. More money could be used to address practically every concern, but there are many reasons why that may not be the first solution we can apply. Separate to that, most of the specific suggestions below are concrete suggestions that reduce the workload of physics teachers, without simply delegating this work to someone else. Many departments will already use some or all of these – others will perhaps not have SLT who realise how much they would help. (I wrote ages ago about SLT needing to know what actual teacher experience is like, and this is never more true than the experiences of physics colleagues teaching out of specialism because ‘it’s all science anyway.’) And addressing some of these will have a knock-on effect – buying in resources for the department will effectively increase available planning time, for example.

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In my next post I’m going to work through these approaches and others, but in terms of the layers of influence/control. I’ll be starting with the foundation – the colleagues who work with students.

The Canary in the Coalmine 2/4

Recap

As I said in yesterday’s post, these musings are my responses, and some behind the scenes explanations, of the article Mark Whalley and I wrote for SSR In Depth. This was based on a survey undertaken as part of my work with the IOP, but was peer-reviewed by colleagues through the ASE. The ideas here are mine rather then being IOP-approved policy, and I hope readers will see that they’re directly based on the data rather than taking a top-down approach.

Context

It’s very easy for teachers – and I’ve been there! – to feel like all schools are like their school. I suspect social media has reduced this somewhat, but it’s done that by encouraging polarisation and assumptions that all schools are variations on a small number of themes, based on those who are the loudest advocates. Getting actual numbers of active specialist teachers is surprisingly difficult, but a good estimate is that of the 30k science teachers in English state schools we’ve got between 4k and 7k physics specialists, rather than the 10k which would be a ‘fair share’. They’re not equally distributed, either – lots of discussion about this at the Royal Society of Chemistry.

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Recruitment varies but 600 per year is a reasonable benchmark, and half of those leave (the English state sector) within five years. We’re not in a good place, even compared to the general concerns about teacher supply (such as this from the NFER).

Questions and Answers

Details about the methods are in the paper, and I’ll talk about the challenges in the last post of this series. Put simply, we wrote a survey with a bunch of questions, put it through ethics review and then asked teachers of physics to complete it. Because previous data obtained through my day job had been heavily weighted towards experienced colleagues, we chose to focus on those who were in the first five years of teaching. We further specified England to reduce the confounding factors of different educational systems. More than ninety sets of valid responses were collected – choosing which were valid was interesting but again, you’ll have to wait for the final post – and Mark then did all the hard work of data analysis, looking for patterns and correlations.

We asked respondents about their setting and their career to date. We did not identify schools, going to the extent of asking them to check the deprivation index from an online calculator rather than collecting the postcode ourselves. We chose not to collect any sensitive data which means, for example, we could not analyse any possible effect of age, gender or ethnicity on job satisfaction or attrition.

The survey asked whether colleagues were planning to remain in teaching. It’s really important to acknowledge that this is about intention, and because of when many of the respondents completed it , at the end of the summer term, they may have been at a low point. (As an aside – I’d love to see responses to this question on a monthly basis through the school year to recognise a cycle of peaks and troughs.) Mark has been working on more in-depth questions with former physics teachers, but this approach naturally suffers from the problem that those who respond tend to have the strongest feelings! The headline result: 32% of physics teachers surveyed were seriously considering leaving or actively planning to leave. There was no strong correlation with school characteristics such as size or deprivation score. Many factors were important both for those generally dissatisfied and those planning to leave, but order varied – more of this in a moment.

32% of physics teachers surveyed were seriously considering leaving or actively planning to leave.”

In the survey, respondents were asked to rate different factors in terms of their effect on:

  • Job satisfaction
  • Choice to enter teaching
  • Dissatisfaction
  • Intention if any to leave teaching
  • Probability of encouraging them to stay in teaching

What made physics teachers unhappy and what made them consider leaving were, unsurprisingly, overlapping lists. None of these will be a shock, but those of us who remember the ’24 tasks’ list (and a more recent iteration) will recognise that teachers are much more likely to accept what they see as necessary professional tasks than imposed administrivia.

Factors causing dissatisfaction, in order (all respondents)

  1. poor student behaviour/relationships
  2. salary
  3. planning workload
  4. marking workload
  5. administrative tasks
  6. lack of flexible working
  7. school leadership

These are not unique to physics teachers, of course. What was particularly interesting is that some of these factors correlated more strongly with intention to leave than others. Being dissatisfied with planning workload, lack of flexible working and school leadership are clear warning signs that someone might be seriously looking at their options, not just recognising the challenges of the job.

Factors linked to attrition

It’s reasonable to expect that the factors causing colleagues to consider leaving will match the list above. It’s also predictable that when we analyse the importance of these factors, the percentages will go up when we look at those who described themselves as more likely to leave. They’re the high-risk group for attrition, so of course they’re more unhappy! What was really interesting to me is that some are much more significant, and the order changes too.

All respondentsAt riskHigh risk
salary (70%)
student behaviour (60%)
planning workload (57%)
marking workload (57%
school leadership (51%)
lack of flexible working (51%)		salary (74%)
student behaviour (68%)
planning workload (63%)
marking workload (59%
school leadership (53%)
lack of flexible working (51%)		Planning workload (82%)
Salary (74%)
Marking workload (68%)
Student behaviour (68%)
Lack of flexible working (68%)
School leadership (61%)

The takeaway from comparing the ‘general dissatisfaction’ list with this is a simple one. Teachers grumble about student behaviour, salary and other factors. As a profession we definitely want to address these, but if we want to focus on retaining physics teachers it’s effectively background noise. If we can’t fix everything, what do we choose? The signal we need to look for – the specific issues that seem to be driving people out of the classroom – are the things which are more important to them than the ‘general population’. The planning workload is at the top of that list, followed by a lack of flexible working, marking workload and school leadership.

Coming soon (ish)

Next time I get to write, I’ll be looking at what the responses suggested about addressing – not solving – the issues, particularly for those who were higher risk of attrition. In particular I’ll be sharing what I think about who might be able to make some of these changes, rather than putting all the responsibility in one place.

School Email

In my day job, I spend a fair bit of time trying to get in touch with teachers. I’m also a parent, with kids at three different schools. I’ve come to the conclusion that school email is broken, but that – perhaps surprisingly – it would be relatively easy to fix it. In fact, I think pretty much every school could sort this in a day over the summer, either directly or through the provider of their IT services. As usual, the problem is consistency.

I promise this won’t be a long post, but it’s something that’s been bugging me for ages – and exacerbated by the difficulties contacting teachers by any other route during the pandemic. Normal geeky service will be resumed soon.

Cartoon about competing standards

There are two main issues with reaching a member of staff at a school. Firstly, you need to know their name. This might mean deciphering your child’s handwriting (and spelling), or finding the right page on the school site. Names change, of course, and so do people. Emailing last year’s head of science when they’ve changed role or moved school is not going to be a good use of anyone’s time.

Secondly, every school chooses a different format for emails. Initial and surname is obvious – but which comes first? Do they have more than one initial? Is there a period in between? There’s enough variation that even if you know their name, you might not get it to them. And a surprising number of schools don’t have useful error messages to help you redirect your important message.

So how could we solve this?

It’s often claimed that businesses treat employees as interchangeable parts. Let’s face it, describing your colleagues as ‘human resources’ doesn’t exactly highlight the individual aspects of the people involved. But there is a place for considering the role before the person filling it, and this is one of those situations. Obviously if I’m going to work with a science department, I’ll need to know names and faces. But for that first contact, what I need is to reach the head of science. It doesn’t matter what their name is.

Alias

Computers don’t speak English (no, not even Alexa). A basic principle of email is that the server can be instructed to accept emails sent to [email protected] and forward them to [email protected]. The user doesn’t have to care about the path. And, critically, the forwarding instructions can be changed on the server by IT quickly, easily and as often as needed. It would certainly be straightforward to do this each term, as staff roles change.

Imagine if every school used the same minimum list of standard aliases, and their own specific context was taken care of in the forwarding rules. In one setting, [email protected] would go to the Head, Ms Tepper. In another, it would go to the Principal, Dr Jemsin. [email protected] might go to a head of the science department, the faculty lead for science and technology, or to the head of biology who’s acting up while the boss is on sick leave.

This could never be a perfect system, but it’s got to make life easier than trying to decipher the responsibility charts on a school site which are often out of date. That can happen behind the scenes. There are considerations about spam, too, but arguably this is better handled centrally than by individual colleagues. The key point is that this only works if the same addresses are used for every school. A possible list:

  • MAThead – if the school isn’t part of a MAT it goes to the Head.
  • headteacher
  • chairofgovernors – if there are no governors, there will be an equivalent panel.
  • childprotection – a really important one.
  • businessmanager – redirects to whoever handles the money, whether it’s the Bursar or the finance lead.
  • headofenglish
  • headofmaths
  • headofscience
  • headofhumanities
  • headofMFL
  • headofcreative
  • headoftechnology
  • headofyear11 etc

In a primary school, some of these would be the same but others different. Perhaps leadenglish, leadsmaths and leadscience would be useful ones to start with. It would be a smaller list, but probably one which is easier to standardise across settings.

Actions

The important thing is that it shouldn’t be hard to put together a list that covers most school settings, with some careful thought going on for the forwarding. These are about responsibilities, not the job titles or way a school has chosen to organize their subjects. If we want to be able to rely on emails rather than pressing send and hoping, then maybe it’s time to make life a little easier for everyone.

Back to Basics

It’s been far too long. It’s been far too busy. And I keep getting told that blogging is over, that all the cool kids communicate on SnapGram or TokTik or something. But the hell with that, I’ve finally got a few minutes to breathe after the weirdest 18 months ever, and this seems like as good a reason as any to get back into writing.

More posts are coming, partially prompted by encouragement on twitter and some just because I need a place to vent. I feel like I’ve been doing too much managing – which like most of us, has meant firefighting and chaos for the last little while – and not enough on teaching. So here goes, once I’ve got my head around the ‘new’ WordPress editor. Coming attractions…

  • School email and why it’s broken
  • CPD as a process not an event
  • Models and Modelling in Science
  • Why science lights the way rather than being something to follow
  • Why I hate seeing myself on video
  • Science since 1901 series – my great grandmother’s textbook
  • More than three stomachs and no brain – joining a committee.
  • Why it’s worth considering professional registration

I’m still busy with the day job, and family life always gets more rather than less complicated. But I’m asking you all to prompt and encourage me so I can get this show back on the road…

The Day Job

I have a full-time job, although ironically I’m not managing to blog nearly as much as when I was a classroom teacher, which was noticeably more than full-time. I’m fielding a lot of queries about physics teaching concerns on Twitter, which is fine, but I thought it might save me a lot of hassle if I put the same links here. Over a third of those teaching physics topics, according to data reported on p2 of this report from Wellcome, are not physics specialists. This matches the data I’ve seen through my day job at the Institute of Physics.

But before I say too much, let’s start with a disclaimer: what’s on my blog and on twitter from me is not official IOP policy or approved content. The IOP doesn’t care about the music I listen to, the political views I share, the arguments I have about gun control, mental health support or how to spell sulphur. (Well, maybe that last bit.) When I blog and tweet, I speak for myself. I’ll do my best to explain the IOP approach, for example with energy stores and pathways or the best way to support gender balance, but my bosses will only care about what I send from my work email account on work time. They’ll defend me on that – or not, as the case may be – but my off-duty self is not their problem.

Teacher support via the IOP

Whether you’re new to teaching Physics or have been heading your department for decades, the IOP has supporting material for you via the For Teachers page. Among other suggestions, this links to the TalkPhysics forum (free to join), which I recommend for queries that include more detail than the average tweet. There are several projects running to support schools, including the Stimulating Physics Network and Future Physics Leaders; these run alongside the locally-based Physics Network Co-ordinators. If you want your department to receive a little more support, you can join the schools and colleges affiliation scheme which gets you the journal Physics Education among other perks.

Detailed and in-depth discussion of pedagogy is broken down into 5-11, 11-14 and 14-16 topics on the Supporting Physics Teaching site. If you’re after something specific you may want to drop me a line on Twitter, but the content is evidence-informed and referenced. Great material for when you have a little time to think and plan.

The Improving Gender Balance project grew out of the Girls in Physics report. Lots of resources are available and my colleagues are always happy to talk to schools interested in applying these ideas. The last set of data showed that in around half of UK state schools not a single girl carries on to A-level physics; the imbalance in some subjects is even worse.

For hands-on advice the IOP supports the Practical Physics site. This grew out of the Getting Practical materials and is well worth exploring, with guides to pass on to technicians. You may also find the Teaching Advanced Physics (TAP) site useful, not least because some of the concepts are now covered in the GCSE curriculum as well as A-level.

If you’re an established physics teacher, the chances are that you do some informal coaching of colleagues even if you don’t have an official role. This is what my day job is all about, so please give me a shout so I can steal your ideas discuss the sharing of good practice. You may also be interested in Membership and applying to be recognised as a Chartered Physicist, and I have supporting materials that could help.

Other sources

I may be biased but I think the IOP materials are a good start. There are, of course, other places to look! I’ve been involved with a couple of these but others I know from using them with students or colleagues.

There are simulations available at PhET and the Physics Classroom. Understandably they take an American approach at times, but they’re well worth checking out. Double check suitability before setting for homework, as some will need Java installing or updating so may not play well on mobile devices. Both include pedagogy discussions for teachers as well as simulations for students.

STEM Learning – what I still think of as the eLibrary, and linked to the physical library at York – has loads of great resources, including versions of some of those linked above. Two collections in particular may be of interest, which organise the resources according to a curriculum: 14-16 science resource packages and A-level science resource packages. Bizarrely, the topics within each subject are alphabetical rather than logical, but that’s pretty much my only criticism. A free sign-in is required.

I do some freelance work with Hodder Education. The textbooks are obviously worth a look, but I’m not here to advertise. One project you can get for free is the Physics Teacher Guide. This is matched to the student textbook and online (subscription) resources, but may be useful even if you don’t have the budget to get for your workplace.

As an ASE member, I get the journal and magazine regularly. You shouldn’t need a login to access the Physics resources, which are an eclectic collection. I highly recommend the free downloads from the Language of Maths in Science project. Heads of Department might find membership worthwhile simply to access the Science Leaders’ Hub.

For Students

You may already pass these on to students – or have opinions about why that is a bad idea – but I think SchoolPhysics (from the author of the Resourceful Physics Teacher), HyperPhysics (concept maps linking physics ideas, probably best for A-level) and Physics and Maths Tutor (for past paper) are worth a look. Several of the above links, of course, may also be useful for them too.

A-level students can get a free e-newsletter, Qubit from the IOP. Hodder also publish Physics Review for A-level students, which is a good way to extend their learning beyond the curriculum.

EDIT: I was prompted about IsaacPhysics, which of course is a great site and one I recommend to colleagues. Questions are organised by linked topics for the spaced retrieval practice we all know is so important. Thanks to @MrCochain for the reminder. They also have funded places for a residential bootcamp this summer for students in England between years 12 and 13 who meet one or more criteria eg in first generation going to uni.

Please share any broadly useful resources via the comments; I’ve deliberately not started listing teacher blogs because I’d be here for ages. Maybe that can be a later post? But I have several others on my list, including materials to support the learning of equations and a review of an old science textbook. There’s never enough time…

 

Equation recall test

This was supposed to be a really quick job. For something I’m working on, I was looking at the equations students need to recall for the GCSE Physics exam (specifically AQA). And it annoyed me that they weren’t in a useful order, or a useful format for testing. So I’ve made a testing sheet, with pages for Energy, ‘mostly Electricity’ and Forces.

There are four columns, which are blank in the first three pages (for students) but completed in the answer sheet version. Because I’m good to you.

Download eqn testing sheets as PDF

Equation for…

I’ve given the word, not the symbol – thoughts? (Could/should that be another column?) I’ve removed a couple of what I see as duplications, and missed out momentum because I was thinking of this as for everybody. Plus it would have mean adding another row and I was sick of messing with formatting.

Which variables are involved?

For students to write in the variables in words, as a starting point. The idea would be that you can give partial credit for them getting part way there, because we should recognise the early stages of recall. You may off course have them skip this bit later on.

What are the symbols?

If they know the variables, can they write down what they will look like in the equation? This would be the other place for them to show they know what the ‘equation for…’ variable could feature in symbol form.

Equation

Formatted as best I can, in a hurry in Publisher. I’ve used the letters as listed on the formula sheet, p95 of the specification. Even when I disagree.

As ever, please let me know if/when you spot mistakes. Because it’s in Publisher I can’t upload the editable version here, but drop me a line in the comments if useful and I’ll send it your way.

Career Breaks

I recently got involved in a twitter conversation about getting back into the classroom, and what to do between jobs to make yourself more attractive to schools. This post is based on the email I put together, and I’m going to start with the same warning I gave my correspondant.

I should point out I’m no expert on recruitment; I’ve never held a promoted post in school so this is based more on conversations with colleagues and in prep rooms that I’ve had because of my day job.

Money

It’s got to start with supply (and cover supervising). This is always going to be a pain, but the good news is that you get to check out the school in advance. Different schools will have different rules about supply, but linking up with the HoD will help. There are ways to make that link – more in a moment. And exam invigilation, although less of an issue with fewer modules or AS, would still be a possibility.

You could plan to do some tutoring for now. The money isn’t great but the time commitment is fairly low. It’s best through word of mouth, but getting started with a few notices on community noticeboards and the coffee shops near colleges and sixth forms where students hang out can be effective.

The other choice is some kind of freelance publishing, possibly starting with TES or similar. If you have time, this is a good way to brush up on your pedagogy and stay familiar with specifications. Producing some generic resources on HSW or similar will be a useful thing to take with you when on supply, as it shows you’re a competent specialist. Other publishing stuff comes up online from time to time, but the hourly rate is fairly low.

Admin/Applying

Now’s the time to bring your CV up to scratch and work on phrases that will go into a cover letter. Review the CPD you’ve done and summarise responsibilities, so all the dates are to hand. Scan your certificates then put them all in one (electronic) place. Make sure you have up to date referee details, hopefully with a couple of spares.

As well as TES, make sure you’ve registered with local teacher agencies and the council recruitment page. Bookmark possible schools and their current vacancies pages. If there’s a standard LA application form – less common these days, but still possible – you might like to save a personalised copy with your information already added.

Brief digression: why the hell is there not a standard, national, teaching professional profile form? Because all the information the schools want is the same – just every form has a different, badly formatted order. Create a form, then insist every school uses it, with a one page ‘local supplement’ which teachers can then fill out. More time to spend on the cover letter…

It might be worth looking for the kind of post you’re after nationally, just to get a look at the kind of things that show up in job descriptions and person specifications. Then you can think up examples of times when you’ve done the kind of thing that matches up. This is how you can show that although you might cost more than an NQT, you’re much better value for money. (NQTs: this is where you look for non-teaching examples showing similar responsibilities and experience.)

Development

Try to see the time as an opportunity; a sabbatical, if you like! Explore subject associations and membership options. If there’s a local group, check out teachmeets and similar. If there are gaps in your skills that the CV check showed up, address them. Have you considered things like Chartered status? Even if you don’t go through the process, looking at the requirements might help inspire your next steps. And if travelling for conferences is possible, they are a great way to build your skills and knowledge. The Association for Science Education(ASE) is the obvious first choice, being teaching-specific, but don’t forget IOP/RSC/RSB either.

Quite a few universities and organisations offer free online courses – STEM Learning in particular. You can add these to your CV, of course! TalkPhysics is an example of a forum for teaching discussion where you can swap ideas, if you’d like something less structured. Or borrow some science pedagogy books, read and reflect. A nice talking point at interview…

You might like to contribute reviews on the books, or posts with developed resources, on a blog or similar. UKedchat welcomes guest posts, for example. These will start arguments and get discussions going; you might even get lucky and score some free review copies!

A different way to keep your skills up to date would be volunteering. Secondary schools sometimes want reading volunteers, but I’d also suggest looking at local primary schools. How about offering to do a primary science club for a half-term? I did this in my local primary, using the RI ExpeRimental activities, and found it really interesting. The IOP’s Marvin&Milo cartoons would also be a good starting point for accessible yet interesting activities. I had a whole new respect for primary colleagues too! You might already be a youth leader, but that’s also a possibility. Fancy running the Scientist badge for local Cub or Brownie groups?

It’s not something you want to do in September, but if you’re still looking in a few months then doing some development work gives an opportunity to get into school science departments. Choose a topic where teacher opinions would be useful or interesting, eg what resources would they use, or a survey of how they use animations in lessons. Do your research ahead of time. And then write a letter to the HoD, asking if you can visit and talk to the department to collect some anonymous data. The article will be interesting – you could even try submitting it to Education in Science or similar – and you get to talk to colleagues, sound out the school, and leave your contact details for when flu season hits…

As I said at the start, I’ve never been in a position of power when it comes to hiring, so I’d really appreciate corrections, additions and suggestions from those who have. What can Teacher X do?

Measurable Outcomes

Following a conversation on twitter about the phonics screening test administered in primary school, I have a few thoughts about how it’s relevant to secondary science. First, a little context – especially for colleagues who have only the vaguest idea of what I’m talking about. I should point out that all I know about synthetic phonics comes from glancing at materials online and helping my own kids with reading.

Synthetic Phonics and the Screening Check

This is an approach to teaching reading which relies on breaking words down into parts. These parts and how they are pronounced follow rules; admittedly in English it’s probably less regular than many other languages! But the rules are useful enough to be a good stepping stone. So far, so good – that’s true of so many models I’m familiar with from the secondary science classroom.

The phonics screen is intended, on the face of it, to check if individual students are able to correctly follow these rules with a sequence of words. To ensure they are relying on the process, not their recall of familiar words, nonsense words are included. There are arguments that some students may try to ‘correct’ those to approximate something they recognise – the same way as I automatically read ‘int eh’ as ‘in the’ because I know it’s one of my characteristic typing mistakes. I’m staying away from those discussions – out of my area of competence! I’m more interested in the results.

Unusual Results

We’d expect most attributes to follow a predictable pattern over a population. Think about height in humans, or hair colour. There are many possibilities but some are more common than others. If the distribution isn’t smooth – and I’m sure there are many more scientific ways to describe it, but I’m using student language because of familiarity – then any thresholds are interesting by definition. They tell us, something interesting is happening here.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” but “That’s funny …”

Possibly Isaac Asimov. Or possibly not.

It turns out that with the phonics screen, there is indeed a threshold. And that threshold just so happens to be at the nominal ‘pass mark’. Funny coincidence, huh?

The esteemed Dorothy Bishop, better known to me and many others as @deevybee, has written about this several times. A very useful post from 2012 sums up the issue. I recommend you read that properly – and the follow-up in 2013, which showed the issue continued to be of concern – but I’ve summarised my own opinion below.

phonics plot 2013
D Bishop, used with permission.

Some kids were being given a score of 32 – just passing – than should have been. We can speculate on the reasons for this, but a few leading candidates are fairly obvious:

  • teachers don’t want pupils who they ‘know’ are generally good with phonics to fail by one mark on a bad day.
  • teachers ‘pre-test’ students and give extra support to those pupils who are just below the threshold – like C/D revision clubs at GCSE.
  • teachers know that the class results may have an impact on them or the school.

This last one is the issue I want to focus on. If the class or school results are used in any kind of judgment or comparison, inside or outside the school, then it is only sensible to recognise that human nature should be considered. And the pass rate is important. It might be factor when it comes time for internal roles. It might be relevant to performance management discussions and/or pay progression. (All 1% of it.)

“The teaching of phonics (letters and the sounds they make) has improved since the last inspection and, as a result, pupils’ achievement in the end of Year 1 phonics screening check has gradually risen.”

From an Ofsted report

Would the inspector in that case have been confident that the teaching of phonics had improved if the scores had not risen?

Assessment vs Accountability

The conclusion here is obvious, I think. Most of the assessment we do in school is intended to be used in two ways; formatively or summatively. We want to know what kids know so we can provide the right support for them to take the next step. And we want to know where that kid is, compared to some external standard or their peers.

Both of those have their place, of course. Effectively, we can think of these as tools for diagnosis. In some cases, literally that; I had a student whose written work varied greatly depending on where they sat. His writing was good, but words were spelt phonetically (or fonetically) if he was sat anywhere than the first two rows. It turned out he needed glasses for short-sightedness. The phonics screen is or was intended to flag up those students who might need extra support; further testing would then, I assume, suggest the reason for their difficulty and suggested routes for improvement.

If the scores are also being used as an accountability measure, then there is a pressure on teachers to minimise failure among their students. (This is not just seen in teaching; an example I’m familiar with is ambulance response times which I first read about in Dilnot and Blastland’s The Tiger That Isn’t, but issues have continued eg this from the Independent) Ideally, this would mean ensuring a high level of teaching and so high scores. But if a child has an unrecognised problem, it might not matter how well we teach them; they’re still going to struggle. It is only by the results telling us that – and in some cases, telling the parents reluctant to believe it – that we can help them find individual tactics which help.

And so teachers, reacting in a human way, sabotage the diagnosis of their students so as not to risk problems with accountability. Every time a HoD puts on revision classes, every time students were put in for resits because they were below a boundary, every time an ISA graph was handed back to a student with a post-it suggesting a ‘change’, every time their PSA mysteriously changed from an okay 4 to a full-marks 6, we did this. We may also have wanted the best for ‘our’ kids, even if they didn’t believe it! But think back to when league tables changed so BTecs weren’t accepted any more. Did the kids keep doing them or did it all change overnight?

And was that change for the kids?

Any testing which is high-stakes invites participants to try to influence results. It’s worth remembering that GCSE results are not just high-stakes for the students; they make a big difference to us as teachers, too! We are not neutral in this. We sometimes need to remember that.

With thanks to @oldandrewuk, @deevybee and @tom_hartley for the twitter discussion which informed and inspired this post. All arguments are mine, not theirs.

CSciTeach Evidence

It’s odd, in some ways; for a profession which is all about leading and tracking progress for our students, we’re remarkably bad at agreeing any kind of consistent way to record what we do.

Years back I put together a Google Form for me to record what I was doing. The idea then was to match different activities to the Teacher Standards. To be honest, I didn’t use it for very long, although the process was useful in itself. Since then I’ve thought several times that a better way to track what I do is in the context of professional accreditation. For science teachers, who I work with in my day job, there are several things to consider for CPD tracking.

  1. Performance management forms are very specific to institutions, but in most cases having a record of what’s been done in between school-based INSET would help.
  2. There are several ways for a science specialist to become accredited; this is about recognising current knowledge and skills, not jumping through new hoops. CSciTeach is the route I chose, through the ASE (now also available via RSC and RSB). You may also wish to consider the new STEM Educator pathway. I have just completed the Chartered Physicist accreditation, which is available to physics teachers and teacher-trainers with appropriate experience. (I should point out I’m involved with making this better known to teachers/teacher-trainers and more information, exemplars etc will be out this autumn.)
  3. Having this information to hand can only be a good thing when it comes time to apply for new roles. I personally think it’s bizarre that there isn’t a single national application form, universal* with perhaps a single page ‘local detail’ for stuff a school feels just has to be asked. Otherwise colleagues have to waste time with many tiny variations of badly formatted Word forms, rather than their cover letters.

The thing is, who writes down every time they read/watch/observe something which ends up in a lesson? And if you do make a note of it, mental or otherwise, what are the chances of it being recorded in one central place? We end up with a formal record which has a few courses on it, and all the other ideas are along the lines of:

I think I got it at a teachmeet – was it last year? Might have been the one before. I’m pretty sure there was an article, I’ll have a look for it in a minute…

 

 

My Proposed Solution

What I’ve produced didn’t take long, and it’s only the first version – I’d really welcome ideas and suggestions for how to improve it. The idea is to gather information, reflect on impact and be able to refer back to it as evidence of professional practice.

If you want to try out the form, then feel free – this link takes you to my trial version and is not linked to the downloadable version below. You can also look at (but not edit) the resulting spreadsheet; note that the ASE guidance is reproduced on the ‘Notes’ tab. Thanks to Richard Needham aka @viciascience for some suggestions.

I’ve used the CSciTeach standards, but obviously (1) you need to do more than this form to be accredited and (2) other accreditation schemes are available.

Slide1

Slide2

Want to play around with your own version, editable and everything? You’re in luck:

1 Set-up

You’ll need a Google account. Go to the responses sheet (starting here means the formatting of the final spreadsheet is preserved.) Select ‘File’, then ‘Make a Copy’. Choose ‘Form’, then ‘Go to live form’; save the form URL as a bookmark on each of your devices. The spreadsheet URL will probably be most useful on something with a keyboard, but YMMV.

2 Capture

The form is set-up to get a few brief details fast, and then gives the option to skip to ticking relevant CSciTeach standards. If preferred, you can add the details of your reflection and impact in your setting at the same time. This completes the entry, but often you’ll want to come back when you’ve had a chance to think or try something out with students.

3 Reflect

Assuming you skip the in-depth reflection during step 2, you’ll want to return to the spreadsheet the form generates. I’ve included a few formatting points to make it work better which should be preserved when you copy it.

  • Column headings are bold
  • Columns are sized so it should print neatly on landscape A4
  • Text is justified ‘left, top’ and wrapped to make the columns readable
  • If empty, the columns for further reflection and impact are shaded red to prompt you to fill them in
  • The standards cells are shaded if at least one in that category has been ticked.

The point of CSciTeach, or any other accreditation is to recognise that ‘doing CPD’ is not a one-off event or course. Instead, it is a process, and one which should have reflection and consideration of measurable impact at its heart. This impact may be on students, teachers or both. This will very much depend on your role.

4 Share

You may prefer to keep the spreadsheet for your own reference only, using it to fill in other forms or complete applications. Sharing a Google spreadsheet is easy enough, of course; that’s the point! Just be aware that if you give ‘edit’ access, whoever it’s shared with can change your details. If you want their input – for example a professional mentor or coach – it might be better to give them permission to ‘view and comment’.

Alternatively, you might wish to search for particular examples and copy the results to a fresh document, depending on context. It would be easy to modify the form so that the Stimulus question was multiple choice, allowing you to categorise different kinds of formal and informal CPD. If colleagues think this would be more useful, I’ll create an alternate version centrally.

If, as a HoD or similar, you want to try something like this collectively, then it would be easy to adapt. Give the form URL to all team members and ask them to contribute. Whether you wish to add a question where they identify themselves is, of course, a more sensitive issue!

 

What Next?

Firstly; tell me what might be worth changing using the comments below. If I agree, then there’s a fair chance a version 1.1 will be shared soon. If you’d rather play around with it, feel free. I’d appreciate a link back if you share it.

Secondly, there are a couple of features which would be great to add. Being able to upload a photo or screenshot would be much better than copying and pasting a link, but I can’t see how to do this with a GForm. Related, if you think this could be developed into a mobile app then I’m sure the ASE would love to hear from you.

Lastly, yes, the SNAFU above* was on purpose. Those readers who understood can feel smug for exactly five seconds.