Plates for Education - UK

The 'Plates for Education - UK' project aims to inspire secondary Physics teachers and their pupils by providing them with a genuine piece of research equipment (an optical-fibre 'plug plate' from the Sloan Telescope in New Mexico) for them to work with, and resources for them to investigate cutting-edge astronomical survey data.

By providing teachers with career-long professional learning sessions (CLPL in Scotland, better known as continuing professional development, CPD, in England and Wales), the project aims to engage at least 200 teachers of Physics and through them at least 6,000 secondary school pupils, to: - Increase teachers' subject-specific confidence

- Enable teachers to bring more real-world science research into the classroom

- Improve the self-efficacy of teachers of Physics, their sense of identity as physicists, and their well-being, thus contributing to an improved rate of staff-retention in this career

- Engage secondary pupils with a unique research artefact and create a sense of ownership over their school's "patch of sky" - Increase pupils' awareness of research science and improve their attitudes towards science

Our target audience is composed of secondary school teachers of Physics (S1-S6 in Scotland, Year 7-13 in England) and their pupils. Secondary Physics teachers tend to teach at different levels throughout their career, and the resources are not aimed at a specific curriculum level. Rather, they aim to contextualise curriculum items (such as blackbody radiation law, inverse-square law, plotting and graphing, redshift, Hubble law, storytelling, and more) with real research data and a scientific apparatus that is unique to each school.

Once a teacher is comfortable with the plate and the resources, it is hoped the resources will become imbedded in their practice, and resorted to multiple times throughout the teacher's career. Our preliminary evaluation suggests that is the intention of teachers too - e.g. one teacher in one of our 2019 evaluations stated "Overall a fantastic event which has energised me to include this in as many stages of L&T as possible".

Recruitment of teachers and schools will prioritise socioeconomically deprived areas as well as geographically remote areas, both of which are underrepresented in science.

The project aims for the teachers to embed the methods and ideas of this work into their practice, so that the legacy of the project beyond the initial audience of pupils will include: - Teachers trained, motivated and confident to bring research science into the classroom throughout their career - Plates in secondary school Physics departments, being regularly used for classroom learning

- Resources shared publicly for any Physics teachers to use.