Winter Break Reading

One of the best parts of winter break is that I actually have large chunks of time where I can sit down and read – rather than just the 30 minutes of SSR time at school. After racing my way through The Hunger Games trilogy, I spent a chunk of time last night and today reading articles about education. Specifically, I had come across a link to an Alfie Kohn article talking about educational research and some of the ways it is used improperly. As a scientist who is always on the lookout for ways that scientific data is ignored or misrepresented in the media (teachable moments, you know!) I thought it was interesting to look at educational research in the same way. It’s kind of a long article, but if you have the time its worth reading. The last portion – a more in depth analysis of research about homework and its (lack of) benefits – was very intriguing.

After reading the article, I perused Kohn’s website for a while as well, and looked at a few of his other articles as well. I can understand conservative critics finding issue with his progressive views, but I surely appreciate his critical look at many “common sense” practices. In many ways, it reminds me of similar ideas in Ken Kumashiro’s book, Against Common Sense (which I read for class this past semester).

Another book I received for Christmas is called Mindset by Carol S. Dweck. I’ve only looked at the first few pages; I will give a more complete review when I’ve finished it!

I’ve also found a few articles about modeling in science; not sure if I will have time for them this break but they are on my list as well.

5TTT

The 5TTT (5 Tech Teaching Tools) program is a new professional development program being offered by the Media Specialist at my school, and those of us that are participating are given one technology task a month to complete, through the end of the year. First up is using a blog* – which I’ve already got some experience with.

The first task is to watch and post the following video:

I’m intrigued by this video, and I agree with a lot of what they are saying. I constantly struggle with the idea of what “learning” means, especially when kids have access to such a wealth of information via the internet. It seems that the idea of memorization (which is not the entirety of schooling) is a bit outdated; if students can look something up in 5 seconds rather than spending at least 5 hours to memorize it, why should they? At the same time, memory is a key part of intelligence – and until computers and the internet are directly hooked up to our brains to store of information that can readily be accessed, it is a skill that needs to be practiced and taught to students. I am not saying we need to make students memorize facts (like the fact that Columbus sailed in 1492) but in order to synthesize information you need to be aware that the information exists.

Another piece that really stood out to me was one of the guys in the video talking about what students need to be able to do:

“…the coin of the realm will be, do you know how to find information, do you know how to validate it, do you know how to synthesize it, do you know how to leverage it, do you know how to communicate with it, do you know how to collaborate with it, do you know how to problem solve with it. THAT’S the new set of 21st century literacies.”

BOOM! (That’s the sound of my brain exploding). I couldn’t have said it better myself. We spent a lot of time in one of my grad school classes (History and Nature of Science) talking about the different ways to teach kids not only how to find GOOD information, but teaching them how to evaluate the information so they know what’s good and are able to filter through the mass of slanted/biased/crappy information that’s out there as well.

I thought a lot about a mini-project that I did with my students researching water contaminants and their effects (I even collaborated with Dhaivyd to set up a website of resources, and he gave a lesson on databases) and yet all the kids wanted to do was type their question/topic into google and copy down the first resource or resources that gave some semblance of an answer. How will they know if it’s good info? Teach them how to evaluate it.

The only statement in the video that didn’t sit well with me was when someone said something like, “a shut off device is a shut off student.” Not sure I agree with that – and if we ever get to that point, I’m very curious to see what our society is like (I’m imagining the civilization in Wall-E).

Just a quick plug as well – I’m very glad that the video took a shot at standardized testing. It seems like the only ones who don’t realize it’s hurting/hindering our students is the people who are requiring the tests (aka state and federal legislators). On a lighter note, see this article.

*This is actually a repost – I started a new blog specifically for the 5TTT; all of the blogging tasks were designed using the blogger program and not wordpress. I was surprised that some features that are quite easy to use there are not so easy here… and vice versa. Regardless, I will be posting my work from the other blog here as well.  

What happened to September?

It’s almost unbelievable to me that we’re not only through September already but over halfway through October – the school year so far has been a blur. I’ll admit that I took on a challenge this year; not only have I been taking a headlong leap into SBAR with one of my Chemistry courses (which also happens to be the one that I am solely responsible for teaching, so I do all of the work on my own) but I also (foolishly?) decided to enroll in two, rather than just one, masters classes at the University of Minnesota this semester.

While grad school on top of (work) school has kept me infinitely busy in the last 2 months (as evidenced by my lack of writing here) I have been extremely pleased with the classes that I’m taking. One of them – my favorite – is on teaching the history and nature of science, focusing especially on the effectiveness of presenting scientific discoveries in its historical context in a way that accurately portrays the cultural mindset and research/investigative process that led up to the discovery. A lot of our discussions and reading have been not just about the nature of science, but also delving into some of the philosophy of science and the development of scientific knowledge. I rather enjoy it! As a part of the class, we are each developing a historical case study (on top of weekly readings, etc.) that will be able to be used in class – mine happens to be on the development of iron refining in ancient China and its relation to the Bessemer process patented in the 1850’s (which eventually drove the use of steel in the industrial revolution in the western world). It’s quite interesting, but a lot of work! If I get some time maybe I will post more about it.

My other class is a general ed class called “Advanced Curriculum and Instruction,” which I (at first) thought would be kinda boring, but it has proved to be fairly interesting. We’ve read and discussed a lot about some of the trends and reforms in education, and looked at what was happening and how they came about. It’s compelling to hear about where a lot of the policy and structure of our school system has come from, and what exactly happened in order to bring it about. I’ve been most interested in the discussions we’ve had about how influential politics are in education, which is something that has always intrigued (and to an extent, scared) me. I’ve always had somewhat of a love/hate relationship with politics, in particular when it comes to science and education.

As I’m writing, I’m getting the guilty feeling of pending work that needs to be done on my case study, which I have been neglecting for a couple of hours now. Most of those couple of hours were spent reading a couple of blog entries about the mindset of science students, start with Brian Frank’s post and then John Burk’s follow up. Good stuff!

Workshop Wrap-Up; Week 1 Worries

Last week I couldn’t wait for the first week of school to start; today, I can’t wait for the first week of school to be over and done with.

It took a good deal of time during workshop last week to finish writing my learning goals and creating tracking sheets. I finally got to a point where I feel satisfied enough with them that I will be able to distribute them to students (although I have since made some other minor changes). I was also feeling good about my other, more traditional chemistry class in which I am working with a couple of other teachers to plan; I always appreciate being able to share ideas and responsibilities with each other.

Today was only the 3rd day of class, and I’m more than ready for this week to be over. I’m ready for the students (and me) to be settled into our routines, for the daily schedule to stay the same from one day to the next and to have some consistency in the flow of day to day proceedings.

***

I’m worried about cramming 35 students into a class that is built for 28. It’s crowded; transitioning from large-group to the lab stations takes longer than I would like it to mostly because of the tight spaces where students have to shuffle past each other. There are only 7 lab stations – and 5 students to a group is more than I would like.

I’m worried about using SBG (or SBAR, if you prefer). After the initial talk about the grading system (learning goals, assessed on proficiency not points, etc.) there was not a SINGLE student that had any questions about it. I was really surprised – I’m not sure if it’s a good sign or if I should be worried… or maybe they just weren’t really listening.

I’m worried about having enough time to do everything. I think this is on every teacher’s mind, but this week it’s especially prevalent.

I’m worried about the students that I’m teaching – they are the “bottom of the heap” in terms of our different tiers of chemistry. I want to keep them engaged, I want to connect with them and I want to gain their respect. I just worry that classroom management issues will get in the way and undermine these things.

I’m worried that I will get burnt out. On top of my teaching responsibilities, I’m taking 2 grad school classes this semester. I’ve found this week that when I get home, I’m not really in the mood to think about school anymore… so when will I do my homework?

I could probably go on and on, but I think those are some of the major concerns that keep on surfacing. I’m not expecting solutions to these from anyone or anywhere, I know with time they will work themselves out. For now, it’s uncomfortable and uneasy – I guess I just need to live with it. It would just be nice if they would work themselves out soon.

The Process Pt. III

Ok, so here’s what’s up – I’ve regrouped my thoughts and laid out all of the “standards” that we cover for the year. I then grouped them into topics, and now I am working on flushing out the specific learning goals for each topic. The first one I started with is “water purification,” where we take a look at water contaminants, laboratory purification methods, and then large-scale purification methods (municipal and natural). So far, here’s the tracking sheet that I’ve come up with:

Water Purification Tracking Sheet

Any feedback you have would be greatly appreciated! I am particularly curious about the overall topic scale (1-4, first page) and the tracking of each specific learning goal. As it is now, I only have a tracking graph for the topic as a whole, but I’m wondering if it may be beneficial to have a graph for each learning goal – especially with the circular curriculum. In this particular case, the book talks about the lab purification methods first and then contaminants and last is the large-scale treatments (with a bunch of other topics sprinkled in between), so can I give them score on the topic as a whole when there is so much time in between learning goals? Perhaps I need to modify the scale, with 1.0 as knowing the lab methods, 2.0 as methods + contaminants, and 3.0 as all 3? Does that make sense? Sorry, I’m rambling a bit. I’ll just leave it to the comments to continue the discussion.

 

 

 

 

The Process Pt. II

I think I’m beginning to realize why I’m having so much trouble writing standards (even with some great suggestions from commentors!). When I first started, I grabbed the textbook for my lower-level chem class (Chemistry in the Community, aka Chem Comm… not a “traditional” chemistry book) and made a rough outline of topics that we cover within the 1st unit. After spending a few hours on that, I thought I was being too specific to one course and that I should try to make my standards more general so that I could apply them to the general (more traditional) chemistry class that I will also be teaching.

So I went to my state standards, which more directly parallel the traditional course outline (though they are still lacking). I started with them, and attempted to break them down into more student friendly “learning goals” (standards?) for each one. Whoof! Because they were awkwardly worded and incomplete, I found this to be even more difficult (which led to my first post of this process) than my original method.

After banging my head against the lab table for a while, I grabbed some of the documents I had created while in a grad class back in June that mapped out a traditional chemistry course (with learning objectives!), and we had come up with 9 topics that I chose to work from to develop the standards. After reading some tips over at the other Jason’s blog, I thought I was all set to start writing standards. But I soon realized (after, once again, some banging-of-the-head) it did not serve as an easy transition to use them as standards for Chem Comm.

Here’s what’s tricky:
The Chem Comm curriculum covers all of the same topics (but uses a different presentation method) that a “traditional” chemistry class does, so you would think the standards should overlap. What that means is the topics in Chem Comm are circular whereas a traditional method is more linear in how it progresses¹. This is one of the things that I rather like about Chem Comm, but right now it sucks.

So where does that leave me? Back at square one – topic lists for each unit to come up with standards/learning goals for the year². What will be tricky is differentiating the standard from one unit to the next; i.e. when a standard reappears later, I shouldn’t expect students to achieve mastery the first time around, right? So even if they only get to the 2.o level, when assigning grades I need to factor that in as “meeting” the standard for the time being. I think that will have to be a challenge that I tackle as it comes, there’s really no way around that.

On a lighter note: the easy part of this process was integrating the IB criteria with content standards – it’s just a matter of placing the content standards as sub-headings of the “Scientific Knowledge and Understanding” criterion. At least that’s one thing done! 🙂

¹ Traditional Chemistry Units (roughly):
Properties of Matter, Atomic structure, Periodic trends/table, Bonding, Reactions, Stoichiometry, Solutions, Acids/Bases, Gases
Chem Comm Unit 1 ONLY:
Water explorations (solutions, properties, acids/bases, ionics, basic atomic structure, reactions)

² This is more analogous to what Mylene had suggested on my last post about starting with assessments – I’ve been using the test review as a checkpoint, to make sure I’m covering everything and to make sure the assessment is where I want it to be. Thanks for the tip, Mylene!

The Process Pt. I

Writing standards is hard. Writing out clear, well-defined, broad-enough-but-not-too-broad standards that will describe an entire year of chemistry in one concise list is hard. The MN science standards for chemistry are not much help. They are definitely broad, but (in my opinion) most are neither clear nor well-defined. Not only that, but I’m trying to mesh them with the IB’s science criteria¹.

I think the most difficult part is that at the moment I am trying to formulate all of these standards on my own. Having input from colleagues would make the process much less painful, but as of now I’m the only one that’s been at school working (workshop isn’t until next week, so I can’t blame them). I would love to have district-wide chemistry standards in place; last spring our district science curriculum specialist had asked for volunteers to work on it (which I gladly said I would), but it hasn’t happened yet and the word around the department is that it won’t happen until sometime during the coming year – not exactly great timing for my current preparations!

The perfectionist in me wants to have perfect standards – which I realize is not realistic. I knew this would not be an easy transition, so I just need to be optimistic and keep working at it! I think just working with what I have for the time being will allow me to get more of my daily instruction planned out, and I can adjust as I go – right? Right! (At least that’s what I’ll keep telling myself).

¹ Even though I don’t teach IB-specific classes, all of the classes at our school are supposed to be “IB affiliated”. The criteria are the same ones used in biology in 10th grade, so students are already familiar with them.

Goals

As the beginning of the school year draws ever closer, I realize it’s time to put aside my summer books and start getting serious about school. I have been doing a lot of thinking about what I would like to do/change with my classes. I’ve got a lot of new ideas I’ve heard and practices I would like to try, so I wanted to sit down and set some goals for myself and my classes – partially so I know what I still need to do in the next couple of weeks to be ready for school to start, and partially to hold myself accountable by checking in on them as the year goes by. Here they are:

1) Alignment with new district standards of grading and reporting.
At the end of last year, my school district finalized its plan to begin implementing new standards for grading and reporting. There are 5 standards that, over the next 3 years, the district will be expecting teachers to begin implementing and switching from current practices. As a young teacher that isn’t too ingrained and invested in my practices, I feel it will be the easiest for me to jump in as quickly as possible to adjust to these new(ish) policies. It also helps that I know I am not satisfied with my current grading and reporting practices, so these will give me some guidance for constructive changes to make.

The standards are (summarized) as follows:

• Grades will communicate student achievement based on academic achievement
  So… standards based grading!  I’ve already been looking at the MN state standards for chemistry as well as the MYP science criteria (International Baccalaureate Program standards) and how my classes align with them. I still need to develop some sort of rubric for grading said standards to translate their learning into a grade. The toughest part of this will be working with our current gradebook to easily communicate grades and learning. I know the district is working with the developers (TIES) to make some changes, but I spent a couple of hours yesterday creating a back-up plan spreadsheet in case I need it.
• Non-academic behaviors will not factor into academic grades
  Easy enough. You can still assess them on “non-academic” behaviors, but it must be reflected separately – just like an elementary school report card. The standard also says grades should be also based on individual assessment and not a group grade. The big dispute that caused a bit of hubbub among teachers was cheating – the standard says that if a student cheats, they still have to do the work “or a reasonable alternative.” A lot of teachers claimed this was punishing them for their student’s indiscretions, but I don’t buy it. Cheating falls under the “non-academic” behavior, and students should still have the opportunity to prove what they’ve learned for a grade regardless of whether it means more work for you, the teacher. Suck it up, it’s your job! (Note: I didn’t actually say that last bit to anyone. Just thought it in my head.)
• Quality assessments and recorded evidence are used to determine grades
  The toughest part of this is the “quality assessments” part. For me, it means I won’t rely on previously created multiple choice/problem set tests. There are a number of issues at work here, and a lot of what I want to change comes from Dan Meyer’s “problem solving” ideas and development. I also have a lot of work to do in designing assessments that align with and analyze learning of the standards. As I said before, I still need to develop rubrics to use as guides for measuring students’ learning.
• Grades accurately represent attainment of standards and promote learning
  Biggest change here is grading scale and grade weighting – equal-interval grading scales (a la Doug Reeves), and at least 80% of the grade should be weighted on summative assessments, no more than 20% formative. I will (hopefully) be at 100% summative and have already begun using an equal-interval (4-point) grading scale. Oh, and no extra-credit (I say: duh!).
• Students are involved in the grading and assessment process
  The first part is that they should know how they will be graded (Once again: duh!). But the other part of it I think has to do with involving students in tracking their progress over time. I realize there is more to it than that, but this is what I want to work on this year.

2) Learning objectives (goals…? targets…?)
This has been the most time consuming thing that I have been working on recently. When I took my first grad class back in June, we focused a lot on developing a course as a whole; part of that being writing out “intended learning objectives” for an entire course. I also attended the Minnetonka Summer Institute, and went to a breakout session about using “learning targets” to promote learning, with many uses of formative assessment and feedback from students to teacher as well as teacher to student. This got me energized and excited to work on writing out my own objectives/goals/targets to use for guiding learning.

Any thoughts on what to call them? I think “objectives” is a decent word, and I think my high school students (should) clearly understand what an objective means. Would students benefit from the use of more “symbolic” terms, like goals or targets (things that you can aim for, or achieve, more concrete?) Still not sure about that yet. The idea is the same for all; maybe I’m over-thinking.

3) Feedback!
This, I believe, will be the most important change that I make. When I was at the Summer Institute, we heard about how students received feedback in the form of constructive comments vs. scores (I think it was Doug Reeves again, but might have been Bob Marzano). Their research showed that the students that had the best attitude/outlook and improved their learning most after an assessment were students that received ONLY feedback (the study also looked at giving only scores, and a score and feedback). I think it really speaks to the power our feedback has to motivate and guide student learning. I really want to put an emphasis on giving students constructive feedback that is aligned with the standards so they have the ability to move forward in the best possible way. Whether they actually do or not, well… I guess we’ll just have to wait and see!

Book Review: The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

Now, if you’re as big of a chemistry nerd as I am, the title alone is enough to get you to throw off your lab coat and goggles to sit down with the book. But even if you’re not, the book is full of compelling, interesting, and even funny stories that just so happen to be center around the elements on the periodic table. There were many great things in this book – I just want to highlight a few.

The thing that I loved most about this book is that it does a lot of name dropping. I don’t mean name dropping the traditional sense of self-importance, but rather giving a more diverse and colorful depiction of the players involved in the development of chemistry as a science. As and undergraduate physics and chemistry major, I remember hearing the names of countless “fathers” of science because of some major breakthrough they made or some formula that carries their name: Fermi, Lewis, Rutherford, Bose, Crookes, Meitner, Pauling, et al. What I loved in the book was getting a more humanistic view of the “fathers” through the stories of their interactions, confrontations, struggles, and of course, discoveries. I am fascinated with the history of chemistry* and find it extremely compelling to learn more about these names with which I am so familiar.

The other thing that I absolutely loved about the book was that it presented the difficult subject matter (theoretical chemistry and physics) and explained it in a way that was intelligent without being textbook-ish, and described the science in the stories to a level that someone with a basic knowledge of chemistry would have no problem understanding – without being overly simple.

I will definitely be doing all that I can to use these stories in my own chemistry class, and hope that my students find them as exciting and interesting as I have!

Some Thoughts on Teacher Education

This post was inspired by another post I read by another young teacher.

I just completed my first education class at the graduate level, where we examined the process for developing a rationale for teaching a course (yes, there’s a reason I’m teaching you chemistry!), a theme for the course (yes, the topics in chemistry are all connected!) and developing ALL of the learning objectives for the entire course (categorized into skills and cognitions and aligned with state standards). The whole purpose of this was to lay a firm foundation for the reasoning behind teaching your course – which gives a great amount of perspective and longevity to what drives the instruction, keeping the rationale and theme at the focus of everything, making it much more continuous and (hopefully) easily-digested by students.

I will be the first to admit that I am still a bit “green behind the gills” when it comes to teaching, having only completed 2 full years of teaching. But after this three week course, I feel as though I’ve learned more fundamental skills for my teaching than any single class that I took as an undergraduate. I’m not trying to make the point that the teaching program I enrolled in was sub-par; I just feel as though a class like this that teaches processes involved in laying a theoretical foundation for a course would be extremely beneficial to an undergraduate teacher seeking licensure. As I’m sure it is with many other programs, we learned the basics of lesson planning and then eventually planned a whole unit. But we never addressed how all of the units fit together. We talked about state standards, but didn’t do much to address a common theme for the course that would cover them all. Yes, these are useful* skills, but I firmly believe that understanding how to develop a rationale, theme, and objectives that are all connected within a course is an extremely worthwhile practice as an educator.

The other great benefit of this class was that we were all science teachers, so all of the work that we did was focused around science – what a concept! I realize that the feasibility of having all education classes be subject specific would be unsustainable (especially at smaller, private schools) and would also take away for the development of interdisciplinary themes, which can be beneficial to a certain extent. My argument instead is that there should be more time spent collaborating with teachers of the same discipline; my undergrad program had a single, semester long “science methods” class when all of us were together. Other than that, the only differentiation was between secondary and elementary in the second year of the program, which would be silly not to do. Perhaps it would also be beneficial to spend some time working with the elementary-level science teachers to look at doing scope-and-sequence for all levels, which we (barely) talked about. Just a thought.

Maybe someday when (if?) I become an education professor I’ll make all of these changes at my college/university and have the best, most successful teaching program ever… I can dream, right?