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24 November 2023

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A Brain Dump extends the List It self-testing strategy we saw last week. Students spend 15 minutes writing down everything they know about a topic. Then, they review their notes and textbooks to check accuracy and fill in gaps. It’s good to date the sheet. Later, the exercise is repeated and sheets can be compared. This allows students to ‘see’ that they’re improving.

Making Brain Dumps Easier

Full Brain Dumps can be daunting. Here’s an easier version that is arguably less effective but still shows progress over time:

  1. List the topic's keywords, terms, equations, etc. (this in itself is a very useful exercise)
  2. Set a 15-minute timer.
  3. Write uninterrupted using the list as a prompt.

For example, if your Brain Dump was on the ‘Energy’ topic in GCSE Physics, a student’s prompts could be:

Energy cannot be created or destroyed but is only transferred from one store to another. There are eight energy stores. These are: kinetic, gravitational potential, chemical, elastic potential, internal (thermal), nuclear, electrostatic, and magnetic. Anything moving has a kinetic energy store. Anything raised to a height has a gravitational potential store. Food, fuels and batteries are examples of chemical stores. Anything that can be squashed or stretched has an elastic potential store. A change in temperature means a change in the internal (thermal) store. There are four energy transfers: work done (mechanical), radiation…

Maths Student of the Week

Klea 11R - for consistent hard work in mathematics, including going above and beyond to complete homework to a very high standard.

Well Done!

Year 10 GCSE Art Trip

On Tuesday 14 November, the Year 10 GCSE Art students visited the British Museum to experience drawing on location.  The purpose of the day was to help our students generate ideas for their independent project. Creating studies from the room of Enlightenment perfectly complimented the theme of 'Old & New'.

All the students developed their observational drawing skills and had a productive and enjoyable day!

Ms Goldsworthy
Art Teacher

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Assembly Speaker - 13 November
Duncan Greig - professor of Genetics, Evolution and the Environment at University College London

On Monday 13 November, our assembly speaker was Duncan Greig. Duncan is a professor of Genetics, Evolution and the Environment at University College London.

He did his undergraduate degree at UCL then doctoral research at Oxford.

Completing a ‘postdoc’ in Houston, Texas in experimental evolution, he was then awarded a Royal Society fellowship back at UCL. He worked in Germany at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Biology for several years before returning to UCL and joining CLOE, the Centre for Life's Origins and Evolution.

“It's the creative aspect of science that most excites me, and I'm interested in how new ideas spread and evolve in other disciplines.”

Duncan studied A levels in Art and Biology and has maintained his interest in art ever since. He spoke about the relationship between art and science and UCLs revolutionary BASc degree programmes where students can combine fields and showed us the process led by the art of several artists, including John Hillard and Mary Yacoob (see image below of her work on cataloguing the amount of water on a bathroom floor)

He also used the analogy of the branches of a tree to explain evolution. He likened evolution to the development of language, showing us many illustrations of mutations. He also showed us a timeline to demonstrate viral mutations such as those in SARS viruses. We also looked at the growth of mould in petri dishes.