About
About Charles Wardle
I am a New Zealand educator, secondary Biology teacher and resource writer. My work centres on helping students understand difficult biological ideas and show that understanding clearly in practical, written and assessment tasks.
My work
Biology knowledge and the decisions around it
A student can know relevant science and still struggle to use it in the form a task requires. The difficulty may be the concept itself, the language of the question, a missing causal link or uncertainty about what counts as evidence.
My recent classroom inquiry examined this problem through explicit teaching of command words, question demand and mark-scheme thinking in secondary Biology. That work now informs the notes, practice studies and resources I am developing here.
- Subject knowledge first
A strategy cannot replace secure Biology. - Make decisions visible
Model how a question is interpreted before it is answered. - Feedback must lead somewhere
Give students time to revise, check and explain a change. - Test ideas in practice
Use classroom evidence to decide what should be retained or changed.
Selected practice
Show the process, not only the finished resource
A worksheet is more useful when another teacher can see the problem it addresses, the choices behind its design and the limits of the evidence. The practice section records that process in enough detail to test or adapt it.
Resource design
Made to be used
I start with a specific difficulty I have seen in a Biology lesson, then make the decision behind the response clear. The aim is to share enough of the process for another teacher to judge whether the material is useful, adapt it and test it in a different classroom.
The public examples use original or anonymised material. Where classroom evidence informs a resource, I state what it can show and where the limits remain.