We meet Paul Cook stellar technician, Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics and tireless promoter of professional recognition for technicians. Paul is the senior lead technician at Ark Burlington Danes Academy and lead technician for the Ark Academy network.

He has worked as a senior/head technician for many years in various schools in Essex and across London covering all three sciences to A-level but with a specialism in physics.

He is an Association for Science Education (ASE) technician committee member and registrant champion for the Science Council and was The Ogden Trust’s first technician fellow.

Read more about his honorary fellowship here, or see his LinkedIn profile here.

Paul’s advice is straightforward in getting the most out of your relationship with your technician colleague

• talk to your colleague. Discuss how you can help each other. Your technician colleague will often have built up years of experience and your teaching can benefit from their expertise.
• include your technician colleague in your planning. Involve them in your teaching: can they help you with demos? Can they help students overcome technical difficulties?
• ensure CPD for technicians. It’s easy to focus CPD sessions on your teaching staff, but Paul stresses the importance of allowing technicians to build their expertise through practical, hands-on training.

… and with CPD in mind, Technognition’s annual celebration and showcase for school science technicians is happening on June 11th (link below!). For those that don’t know, Techognition is an organisation that Paul is heavily involved with. It celebrates the work of school and FE college technicians and promotes their professional recognition.

Thanks so much to Paul for dealing with some dodgy data links and persevering anyway.

• School Science Technicians group on Facebook
• Techognition – don’t forget the 11th June!
• Buy an Energy Stick (see video below) – every technician should have one
• The hierarchy of lesson distraction (courtesy of Alby on Twitter)
• Paul’s YouTube channel

Please share ideas or successes – or indeed questions by messaging us on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/physicstp.bsky.social .  You can also message us via our website contact form on every page of the web site at  the.physicsteachingpodcast.com, or email using the address given in the podcast (if we remember). We are moving away from X but can be found there as @physicstp.

• Season 7: Physics Is Our Business by Miracles of Modern Science.

The music is used under the Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License