I’ve been following the thoughts of John Burke and what he’s been writing and doing with introducing computational modeling to HS physics. I think there are some real opportunities with using modeling in this way. The greatest thing I see with it is that the students end up doing science and engineering. They’re not answering pseudo contextual questions from a textbook or worksheet, but actually applying their knowledge in a way that real scientists and engineers would.
I’ve used whiteboards more and more this year and it’s been really interesting. The students automatically go for them, and enjoy working collaboratively. One thing we need to improve upon though is our whiteboard meetings or summary sessions. This is when we have completed some type of inquiry activity in small groups and now want to come together as a class to go over what happened. I try to have as many students as possible present their work, but it seems like this leaves a lot of idle time for students while they are not presenting.
The Problem This past week has been extremely disappointing for my SBG grading scheme, and is forcing me to evaluate different aspects of standards based grading in general. Two things that I’ve done have seem to flopped quite badly. First, I have tried to move to a mastery/conjunctive grading system, in hopes of raising some minimum standards that students should meet. Secondly, I tried to implement some gradual Student Initiated Assessment (SIA) rules to have the students take a more mature approach to assessment.
Inspired by a post by Keith Rispin, I’ve been thinking about BYOD and the more I think about it, the more frustrated I get.
I can’t help think just how far off the mark the MoE is with their BC edplan and BYOD. Having studied technology in education for a couple of years, where we theorized on mobile devices and endeavoured to design learning environments and activities that could incorporate them, it is clear that the path forward with BYOD is severely limited.
One of my goals for this year was to encourage the use of whiteboards in my class, and to get the students move involved with them. As experienced by many teachers, I found whiteboards to be a great way for students to work together on a problem, hash out ideas, and then share what they’ve found. However, lately my classes have been having problems. A possible solution to this is to build whiteboard ePortfolios.
A couple of days ago after dinner I asked my son how he did on his current events project. Everyone in his Grade 4 class takes a turn at presenting a current event. Grady took this project very seriously. He initially researched some artifact from Nazi Germany that was in the news, but decided that the topic wasn’t appropriate for the younger Grade 3s in his class. He then researched some news about a sasquatch and wrote a few pages on it.
One of my biggest goals for this year (if I have a job) is to continue down the path of less notes and more inquiry. While I was pretty happy with how things went last year in my first full year of teaching, it was easy to identify areas for improvement. In particular, I thought that in Physics 12 we spent too much time doing notes. Physics 11 was more collaborative but perhaps too de-contextualized.
Yesterday afternoon I attended CBC’s open forum which sought to discuss the topic “is public education in BC broken?” It was moderately interesting to attend and some of the comments and questions raised were very interesting. Some of my favorite moments included Chris Kennedy responding to a Little Flower Academy student, saying that it is not public education’s job to sort students for universities. I couldn’t agree more. Another comment that was inspiring came from a French Immersion teacher from Burnaby who told of the creative, engaging and differentiated learning that happens in her classroom - learning that happens without input from the private sector.
I have been reflecting on how I taught Physics 12 last year, and I’m not super happy with how much lecturing I did. In the big picture it probably wasn’t too bad and I didn’t give a lot of notes (which is a good thing). I used peer instruction from time to time, and I liked how that turned out. In contrast to this, Physics 11 is much more inquiry based course, which is great.
I recently had a discussion with a classmate of mine about the Flipped Classroom, and I think my comments are worth sharing. In our discussion, I pointed out a couple of problems I have with the FC, which deal with a few fundamental issues in education.
I should start off with saying that I do agree with the idea of moving the long lecture outside of the classroom. Where I disagree with the FC is that the lecture, or its replacement, should be moved home.
