Engagement is always a hot top in education. From upper level missions and goals, down to the minutes of each class, we all want the students to be engaged. Sometimes our activities allow easy access to engagement while others do not.
Flash back three years ago when I taught two classes of grade 9 science. One was a full class of the 30 kids, many of which were very bright, while the other had 17 students, several which had learning disabilities.
[]One question that I’ve seen pop up again and again in science classes is, “what would happen to Earth if the Sun suddenly disappeared?”
I’ve had this question in science 9, science and technology, and in physics. I guess it’s one of those things that many people hypothesize on. I was thinking about this today, along with the idea of Essential Questions driving classroom explorations and learning. I wondered if we could use the following as the essential question for a unit on gravity in Physics 12
Marking for the end of the year is finally done, and I thought I’d wrap up my posts on Inquiry. I’ve already talked a bit about my plan and what happened throughout the year, and in this post I’d like to briefly outline my plan for next year.
The biggest change I would like to implement is that every student will be required to have a lab notebook. This notebook will contain notes for all of their labs and inquiries, and possibly reflections on their learning.
Previously I wrote about my general approach to inquiry in physics this year. In short, I tried to have the students form questions and design experiments when presented with a phenomenon to investigate. In today’s post I would like to explain where all of this led our classes.
After a few weeks of lab activities, I saw a path forward that would give the students scaffolding towards the goal of becoming resourceful and skilled in inquiry and analysis.
This year in physics 11 I wanted to really instill the idea of inquiry, and the asking of questions. Coupled with this I hoped to re-emphasize labs during the course and try to do as many as possible. As with most things I seem to do, I had some success and some not-so-much success. I’m going to break this topic down into three different posts, beginning with how I tried to set things up, how we ended, and what I look forward to do next year.
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 often wondered if all of the segmented learning objectives in Standards Based Grading results in too much reductionism and micro-managing of learning, where the forest gets lost in all of the trees. In response to this, I’ve been reading “Understanding By Design” by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, with hopes of clarifying the learning intentions with my students. Certainly my students should be aware of individual skills or required knowledge, but how these pieces fit into a bigger picture is more important.
This past week or two I’ve felt really bogged down about the progress in my classes. There are many things that I think I’m doing OK with, but it seems that for every idea or accomplishment in my practice I come across two questions or mysteries. It sort of makes sense - the more that we learn, the more we realize how much we don’t actually know. However, if life is like a game of snakes and ladders, it would be nice to feel like I’m spending more time on tall ladders as opposed to slippery snakes.
I’ve studied video as learning tool in science and physics for while, and I’m convinced that digital video can placed at the upper end of useful technologies used in education. I don’t necessarily mean for making screencasts, but using video as an analysis tool.
Frank Noschese has shown several examples of using video on his blogs, including these hi-speed videos found on Action-Reaction and Frank’s Posterous post on colliding carts. As well, I wrote a paper on this topic and if you’re a glutten for punishment you can read it here on Scribd.
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.
