There is a lot that we as educators can learn from other professions. Horticulturalists know that if you want to grow an apple tree then you need to plant an apple seed and financial advisors will say you need to invest wisely if you want high returns. So if we want students to be able to think, question, create and have self belief then we need to plant the right seeds, and if we want to see high returns for our investment then we need to use ‘time’, our most precious commodity in education, wisely.
Our science faculty had always felt that we were planting the right type of seeds and investing our time wisely. However, analysis of our curriculum found that we were planting seeds that were predominantly about remembering and understanding content. Two things came along to disrupt this, firstly, our school moved to developmental skills based assessment and secondly, practical investigations became a major component in senior science.
The timing of these changes were ideal in that we were able to develop a skills based developmental rubrics for practical and research investigations which is consistent across all the sciences and from primary to senior school science.
Moving to a skills based assessment has really revolutionized everything that we do because we now give focus to the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’. Open investigations are now core to our teaching program and with over 600 practical investigations and more than 1000 research investigations it makes for a very busy faculty. But we are already starting to see some pleasing returns. We have found that students have made a significant improvement in their ability to answer higher order thinking questions  (effect size of 0.80) and students are more engaged, consistently listing ‘science’ as one of their favorite subjects. The last two years has been ‘big’ in terms of all the changes that we have made – but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I can’t wait to see our ‘tree’ when it is fully grown as our investment is already starting to pay dividends.