As a young university student training to be a science teacher, Alice Leung was sent to a boys’ high school for one of her practicums. She would stand in front of the class, teach the lessons and guide male pupils in how to conduct scientific experiments.
Her supervising teacher warned her: “If you want them to put 50 millilitres of acid, say 25 millimetres because the boys will double it.”
Alice Leung in Parliament House ahead of the awards on Tuesday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
It was an early lesson for Leung, who attended Randwick Girls’ High School, in some of the nuances of how boys and girls approach science.
“Girls are much more likely to read the instructions carefully and record the data,” she said.
By contrast, boys simply jump in.
The Concord High School teacher was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching in Secondary Schools on Tuesday night for her creative teaching strategies to equip students from diverse backgrounds – including girls – with STEM knowledge and skills for the future.
Among her achievements is establishing a Minecraft club for girls. The game teaches users the basics of coding through block-based programming and exposes them to computational thinking.
“What we found was that, when we have things like online gaming and coding and things like that in a co-educational environment, often the boys will dominate,” she said.
By contrast, girls did not have that same confidence and were more likely to put a lot of pressure on themselves to get things perfectly right, sometimes excluding themselves from the full spectrum of STEM subjects and opportunities.
Leung has been a teacher for 16 years. She was on track to do well in her HSC – so much so that her careers adviser questioned whether she should choose another university course – but she was adamant she wanted to be like her own school science teacher, who made her fall in love with biology, human evolution, and immunology.
‘Low floor, high ceiling’
Today, some of her TikTok videos have hundreds of thousands of views, but being a teacher is harder than it looks, and Leung has learnt plenty of other lessons in the science of teaching. One, she said, stands out among the rest: having a clear and consistent lesson structure for her students.
Leung’s lessons start with a “retrieval practice” activity relating to content learnt months beforehand to strengthen long-term memory. New content is taught so it has a “low floor but a high ceiling”, meaning everyone can feel some sort of success, but students can also explore a topic in as much depth as they want. Each lesson concludes with a learning intention success criteria self-evaluation.
Her lessons are connected to the real world, with local scientists regularly invited to speak.
They are also fun. In chemistry, students make ice-cream sandwiches with rainbow flavours and chocolate biscuits to demonstrate complex mathematical concepts.
“It’s to make it memorable. And I think having that fun component, you make it exciting, you make it engaging, and then they want to understand it,” Leung said.
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