Get Real! Science

As I said in the comments, Nice Job Chris!  Thanks for sharing your resources as well as your ideas… Thanks for integrating your perspectives along with those shared in class.  Nice.

Remember, you can always go back and edit the resource you created, so if you come across new insights or new resources, PLEASE update your post.  This will serve as a resource for you long-term - certainly for the writing of your final reflection (seminar this semester), your portfolio (next summer) and hopefully beyond!  Integrate your readings if you can!

Just to make sure everyone (or as many as possible) gets a chance to scribe, now that Ashley has been selected for next week, here are those who are probably dying for the chance - let me know if I am forgetting anyone:

anne

donna

debbie

dylan

heather

jason

jim

Part 1:

This week we had an awesome guest, Dr. Lorriane Sheck, who teaches chemistry at School Without Walls, and is also the Chemical Hygiene Officer at SWW. Previously she taught Chemistry at Edison, and was also the CHO there.

Dr. Sheck provided us with a great overview of safety in high school science classrooms. This is a topic that I didn’t even think about for a second when I was applying to Warner and trying to imagine myself as a high school science teacher. I thought about explosions and cool demos, but I didn’t think about students with asthma, dealing with goggle or apron shortages, or where the buck stops with regards to safety responsibilities. A few of the most  important things that I took away from her talk were as follows:

• Ultimate safety responsibility falls to the classroom teacher - no matter what circumstances “force” you as the teacher to deal with, the school’s Chemical Hygiene Plan makes you, the teacher,  responsible for the safety of your students. This means you may have to cancel a cool demo, or replace it with a video if you aren’t able to get the proper equipment or a safe location for a demo.
• Chemicals that require special storage can’t ever be kept in a classroom for more than a day, unless your room has safe storage. This means more planning for you as the teacher, for labs and activities that stretch across multiple days.
• You should adopt a firm “no eating” policy in labs, and model this for your students, so you don’t find yourself on a slippery slope.
• Hand-washing after lab must be enforced - even if you have to do a sniff-test before students leave the room.
• If you are aware of any problems or violations of the school’s Chemical Hygience Plan, it is your responsiblity to document them and notify the administration. Even if the principal does not do anything, you need to do this and have it on record, because you as the teacher are the one who will be held accountable if there is a problem.
• A safety lab is a great way to start off the year, to make the safety rules explicit for your students. (Dr. Sheck handed out some nice examples of activities and labs that address this.)
• Save the notes and handouts from Dr. Sheck for the safety paper that will be due next spring, on April 6, 2009. (that’s 146 days from today, Nov. 11. I used this handy tool to calculate this.)

Below is an embedded version of Dr. Sheck’s powerpoint presentation. (FYI - the ‘embed’ feature of Google Docs, which lets you embed powerpoint in other web pages, is not supported by WordPress. I used Scribd.com to upload and embed her PPT.)

Groups for Professional Development (Nov. 18)

Due Dates:

• Nov 18: Tech Professional Development
• November 25th: STARS Report due
• December 1st (and possibly December 8th): Presentations
• (there is probably somethign else I am forgetting - so don’t assume this is everything that is due)

ps - I choose…. Ashley for next week’s scribe duties - only because I think she might have fewer papers and lesson plans due than the rest of the pre-service teachers during these next 2 weeks - apologies if you are actually more busy than everyone else.

I have been informed that Kristin already did it (and I have confirmed this because I realized I didn’t click the previous entries link when I was scrolling through the blog to see who had done it).  So, instead of her I will choose Chris to do this for next week (and cross my fingers that he hasn’t done it - I think I checked everyone) since he had such an awesome lesson.

So… sorry for the very late post this week, but it’s been crazy and I’ve been too stressed to even think about writing this.

Chris gave us a wonderful example of inquiry-based instruction with his description of a mock town-hall meeting he designed and conducted with the students at his placement.  He found a real-life example of a salt mine collapse near our area, wrote roles for each of the students to take, had each student come up with position statements based on their character, and carried out the town-hall meeting, which was wildly successful.  He identified a concern initially that this would seem fake to the students because they were assigned roles, but quickly found that the students got really into the assignment and the lesson and had quite spirited town hall meetings.  This lesson is an example of inquiry-based instruction because the students were engaged in investigating a real-life scientific problem, had to prepare evidence-based arguments to support their positions, and presented their arguments in a relevant and meaningful context.

We also considered four other aspects of inquiry-based instruction during class, specifically, aspects of guiding students through modeling, helping them analyse data, helping them formulate investigatable questions, and helping them present their arguments.  Everyone in the class had great suggestions for specifically how to guide students in learning these skills.  I believe that there is a website forthcoming that will incorporate all of these specific suggestions, so I will refrain from listing them here, and will try to remember to link to that website once it is actually created.

Oh yes, and I need to nominate someone to take over my role next week (hopefully someone who will do a better job than I did) — so….. (drumroll please)…..  I choose Kristin because I was at her apartment last Sunday (it’s your reward for being such a wonderful host ) — have fun with it!!

Announcements

·         November 4^th: Final Unit Plan for STARS due – We will be given time on Monday to grade ourselves with the rubric Orlando e-mailed us.

·         November 25^th: STARS Report due

·         December 1^st (and possibly December 8^th): Presentations - Everyone needs to send April an e-mail on their preference for the presentations.  One option is to have a one minute teaser to encourage classmates to check out your tri-fold poster or option two is to all do a 7 to 8 minute powerpoint/keynote presentation.  The third option is a compromise between the presentations, we can have half the class do option one and the other half do option two.

·          Reminder: Tuesday November 11^th no STARS (no school)

·         Homework: This week we have a choice and are to choose two readings.  There are four categories for the readings: race, gender, multiculturalism, and disability; you and your partner are to choose two each.  Then once you read your two readings, write your critical synthesis and send it to your partner.  This week you are not sending your papers to blackboard.  Your partner will read and grade your critical synthesis and bring you paper to class on Monday, November 3^rd.  This way each person will then know the information from four of the eight readings.

Mike DuPre – A Matter of Style

Mike DuPre gave a great presentation on learning styles by the Silver-Strong Learning Style Model as a Tool for Differentiation.  The information we learned will be very beneficial for our classrooms.  This could be an activity to start the year off.  This would give a teacher the baseline for what learning styles are present in their classes.  The four learning styles in this model are: sensing-thinking (ST), intuitive-thinking (NT), sensing-feeling (SF), and intuitive-feeling (NF).   Then you can modify your teaching instruction to include more activities and labs for the dominate learning style.  This does not mean to only teach to the dominate learning style.  Students are able to learn in the other three learning styles, you teach to a students’ profile not just their dominate learning style.  A students profile is the combination of all the results in the four categories.  To complete this exam in your classroom, it will be about 3 dollars a student.

                To prepare for Mike DuPre’s presentation we had to fill out a worksheet.  The at the beginning of class we were given a post-it note to write our scores for the our worksheet.  These were then posted on the front board in the quadrant we had the most points for.  Then at the beginning of the presentation we were each give a packet including his powerpoint slides on them.  There were blank spaces on most of the slide, so you could fill in the important information on the slide.  This was a nice way to take note, you are still adding the important information to the slide but you do not have to rush to make sure you copied everything down.  This creates a lot less rushing and frustration for students and they will be able to pay more attention to the lesson instead of worrying about their notes.  Then while describing the perception and judgment functions, examples that would be familiar to the students were given for examples but Mike’s are just about out of date.  Good examples to use for explanation would be popular cartoons or tv shows. 

http://weblogs.newsday.com/entertainment/tv/blog/jerry_seinfeld1.jpg

                Once the functions were combined into the learning style quadrants, their TEMPO(S) was discussed.  T=Thinking Goal  E=Environment conducive to learning  M=Motivation supporting each style  P=Processing approach: how each works  O=Outputs or products S=Sickness (psychologically speaking!)  The processing approaches for each of the learning style are: ST = step-by-step, NT = doubt-by-doubt, SF = friend-by-friend, and NF = dream-by-dream.  This information would be great to know about the individual students.  A teacher would be able to create an activity that could reach out to their students.  One activity that we were given to try is a Task Rotation.  You are really creating a small menu for the student for one activity.  This gives the students a choice to choose a questions or assignment from their learning styles.  Even if you are not sure which learning style your students fall under, you could still use a task rotation to give the option to the students on the type of assignment they have.  Another resource we were given is a worksheet with examples of the assessments for each of the learning styles.  A teacher should make sure to incorporate different types of assessments to reach all students, instead of repeating the same type of assessment over and over again that only reaches one type of learning style.  Mike’s presentation relates to the readings that were due on October 27^th.  By incorporation many methods of assessment you are assessing their understanding, not just memorization.  This makes the assessment process more authentic when a student has the choice of the type of assessments they complete. 

                We could complete the task rotation and send our work to Mike for him to check it over.  He gave us his e-mail, if anyone needs the e-mail address contact me.  Mike is a great resource; make sure you have his contact information!

Reminders

·         Series of three lessons do not have to be our three assigned lesson on NOS, community, and inquiry

·         We need a 30 minute video of our teaching on one or more days of our series of three lessons to hand in with our action research

·         We only need one Warner lesson plan by the end of November

·         The modified version of the Warner lesson plan has been sent out in an e-mail, if you need the modified version contact me and I will forward the e-mail to you

I will continue to pass the scribing touch around my group to Suzanne.  Feel honored to have joined the group of scribes for theories and methods.

Announcements:

• Change in the reading for technology week (week 11): Luehmann & MacBride (instead of Frink) on Blackboard
• Homework for next week: Learning Styles Inventory
• November 25th: STARS Reports Due
• December 1st: Presentations
• December 8th: Submissions & rest of presentations

Objectives: Students will be able to-

• articulate multiple purposes for assessment
• articulate multiple benefits for writing detailed lesson plans
• connect strong grounded practices with theoretical support
• draft 3 possible foci for mini action research

Conversation with Jenny Peck (7th grade science teacher @ Rush-Henrietta)

Jenny has implemented a “menu” style curriculum into her classroom. She created this curriculum in response to her concerns about making grading and assessment explicit and accessible to her students. The menus allow her students to choose activities to work on as well as provide them with all of the information they need to know in order to obtain the grade they want. She sets up the menus with three levels and grades correspond with each level. Mastery of level 1 will equate to a C, levels 1 & 2 a B and levels 1-3 an A. After the students complete the activities in each level, they conference with the teacher and take a quiz. If the quiz is mastered, students can process to the next level. This menu-style curriculum was generated in response to Jenny’s action research question “How does using a menu impact student motivation?” She found that using this format which utilized transparent grading and student centered activities that the intrinsic motivation of her students increased dramatically.  

Possible Action Research Questions (Things that “feel weak in my practice”):

Remember to keep these questions small and reasonable since we are only studying them for an abbreviated period of time. Also, a good place to start is “What do I want to do better?”

• How does increased wait-time (I & II) impact student engagement?
• How does building on “wrong answers” change participation?
• How does involving student in rubric construction change the use of classroom Q & A time?

Possible data sources for action research:

• Teacher checklists
• Grades
• Student perception surveys
• Student interviews   

Here are some of the things that my group came up with that we thought John Van Niel did well during class last week to make our classroom feel like his own:

• Scaffolding the process of skull identification
• Setting up expectations for brainstorming
• Using humor
• Great artifacts & accessibility to those artifacts
• Student construction of knowledge
• Obvious passion for the subject matter
• Student choice in the activities
• Introduced a wide variety of knowledge
• Addressed misconceptions in a positive and constructive way
• Efficient use of time & smooth transitions

Writing detailed lesson plans – rate your confidence on a scale of 1-10 (implementing John’s lesson plan for 7th graders)  YOU and JOHN
 ·     I can describe why objectives of my lesson should be shared with my students.
·     I can articulate and carefully phrase the learning objectives for the lesson, including which are more important in case time gets cut short.
·     I know how to start and incrementally build on students’ contributions to move my lesson along in the time and direction I need for meeting my objectives.
·     I can describe multiple ways I will assess students in order to help them and me monitor where they are in their understanding - at multiple benchmarks throughout the lesson.
·     I can list the likely misconceptions and stumbling blocks students will face in meeting these objectives (for example “sharp vs. flat” as a heuristic for distinguishing herbivores from carnivores)
·     I can identify multiple ways that I will meet individual students’ needs as they arise.

Planning – anything that teachers do when they say they are planning; thinking is what really matters.

What value is there to MAKING your thinking visible? (some ideas)

·     Make it available for feedback from many others
·     Make it available for future reflection
·     Construct meaning as you write
·     Develop a new discourse – especially of reform
·     Develop routines

I also wanted to add a link to a cool article that I came across when I was researching authentic assessment for my research methods class. I just love using stuff for more than one class! Here’s the link on the library website: http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.comezp.lib.rochester.edu/hww/results/external_link_maincontentframe.jhtml?_DARGS=/hww/results/results_common.jhtml.29

Just in case the link doesn’t work (since I’m not 100% confident in my blogging skills!), here’s the info about the article: “High School Students’ Perceptions of Narrative Evaluations as Summative Assessments” by Sylvia S. Bagley, published in American Secondary Education, 36(3) Summer 2008. 

Now that my scribe responsibilities are all done, I’m going to pass the torch to my groupmate Andrea for next week. Have fun with it!  

Hi all -

REMINDER: Please complete both sides of the learning styles inventory (bright green sheet) you were given in class.  That will make our time with Mike DuPre most productive - he can focus more on diversifying instruction and assessment and less time on tallying & addition

The next two comments are just for pre-service teachers - Emily, Ashley, Donna & Jason, feel free to read, but these things don’t really pertain to you.

CLARIFICATION:  I made a mistake about “official observations” for Fall.  Only your supervisor will  formally observe you in the fall BEFORE your 4-week student teaching. Michael will formally observe you once during your 4-week placement and once during your 8-week placement.  That will reduce the amount of scheduling that you need to do - just set up a date with your supervisor.

ANNOUNCEMENT: As I announced at the end of STARS yesterday, in response to your feedback and in an effort to allow you to spend your very valuable time doing what you do WELL, instead of doing a million things, I have changed the requirement regarding “Warner School” lesson plans.  I want you to do only one Warner-style lesson plan sometime before the end of November, and turn  it into me for feedback. You can use the MODIFIED version for any other lessons including observations with your supervisors as well as for your series of three / inquiry, nos and community lessons.  The MODIFIED version was created in collaboration between Michael and me based on your feedback about what you feel is essential as well as what we feel is really important.  Again, INVEST what you need to make it a meaningful learning experience for you. (The MODIFIED template will be available for you on blackboard under Course Materials by Friday. I want to pass it by your supervisors for their feedback before I post it.)

hope this is helpful!

*April

Just in case I’m not the only one that was confused, this is the information April sent in response to my question about our homework for tomorrow:

Authentic assessment assessment -Designed for 2 purposes:

1. to give you an excuse to CAREFULLY read the description and rubrics for project 2 (an example of an authentic assessment); and

2. to give you a chance to mindfully consider characteristics of strong authentic assessments.

So you are to read all the “stuff” I gave you on Project #2 - in-class teaching of an inquiry, nos, and community lesson & series of 3 action research project, and then chat with a peer about things you want to get out of the project and things you think might be difficult if not thoughtfully attended to (e.g. Nature of science needs to be addresses explicitly in class; or lesson plans should demonstrate what the teacher knows about the nature of science).

Then you should score Project #2 using the questions on the sheet - either alone or collaboratively. You’ll probably learn more in discussion with someone else - especially if you and that person can stay as positive as possible. If the other person is a grumbler who has difficulty in seeing the learning potential of experiences, do it by yourself. 

 

Authentic assessment is work that allows students to see “what adults really do with their knowledge” (Wiggins, p.25).

Teach People, Not Science.

So let us not forget the human factor to teaching science.

The agenda for the day started as follows:

• Types of Assessment
• Authentic Assessment
• Innovative series of 3 lessons

When we plan our lessons we must remember these 3 components

1. Objectives- What we want our students to learn or take away from the lesson
2. Assessment- How do we know we have meet our objectives
3. Activities- What additional things can we do to reinforce our learning objectives

Why Authentic Assessement? Reasons included (not limited to) student motivation, instructional tool as well as feedback tool, and supports the teaching and learning of the nature of science (messy, open-ended, and others).

It’s important that we ask ourselves why authentic assessment is important, and how can we use it effectively in the classroom.

So what are some types of assessment we discussed in class:

Formative Assessment: This should be done frequently and consistantly. These are assessments done as you go.

Summative Assessment: These are done at the end of a unit and are meant to assess the overall knowledge gained by our students.

Formal: These include quizes in the formative case. Or exams in the summative case.

Informal: These include asking questions in the formative case. Or field identification after a unit has been covered in the summative case.

We then discussed what makes an assessment authentic:

• It should focus on why, not what.
• It should be beyond recitation, but focus on meaning.
• It needs to be relevant to students.
• It needs to include open-ended questioning, with opportunity for partial credit.
• More than just right and wrong answers.

Good Examples people came up with:

• Informal Formative: Frequent questioning, Facial Expressions, Student dialogue.
• Formal Formative: Word Wall, ticket to leave, POE with Demo, No grade quiz, pair and share
• Informal Summative: Skills Check, Field Trip Observation, Q&A Game or Session
• Formal Summative: Exam, Project, Debate, Practical, Poster Presentation.

Good Work Guys and Gals!

We received a hand-out on our innovative series of 3 lessons. We then got a “homework” assignment that asks us to evaluate the rubrics on the handout with a partner.

Then John Van Neil from FLCC came and let us play with skulls.

Orlando then handed out some more papers about assessment.

I’m sure I’m missing things but those are the main points.

For next week: I think I will pick on one of the non-stars people, I choose Emily to be the next scribe. Have Fun!!

Hi Getreal!Scientists,

http://www.edhelper.com/Chemistry.htm

Here is a nice link to a chemistry online page from www.edhelper.com there are links for secondary earth science and bio.  There is a fee (20/ yr) but I believe there is a free trial to use, or we could get one rich person to join and then log in as them for ever.  There’s stuff for middle school as well… but I couldn’t find a lot for physics on this website. : (