Drip Feed Activities in Chemistry

On the front page of the March 2019 was a quote from Ben Gordon ‘Students are rarely given enough time to practise’. This had a resonance with my experience in the teaching of Chemistry. For some years now, in Chemistry we have been developing ‘Do now’ type activities (page 6 of the bulletin) to meet the need to practise ‘core chemistry skills’. The term we use for these resources is DFA’s….Drip Feed Activities. In other words they are providing students with the opportunity to practice essential skills on a regular basis.

The strategy to develop the DFA’s has similarities in the method outlined on page 3 of the bulletin under the section Principles of Great Teaching.

We have formalized the assessment of these core skills in our Bimester assessments. However, the real value of the feedback is that students and the teacher know exactly where the students are with their core skills and can adapt their strategies accordingly.