Inquiry, Step 3

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.

My expectation will be that every inquiry or lab that the students do, they will have their work recorded.  This will include purpose and goals, inquiry questions, experimental design, data, calculations, graphs, and post-inquiry reflections and/or conclusions.  Inquiries will not be graded, but the notebook will also be used as a type of student portfolio.

At the end the of the year, each student will choose a few artifacts that they will use as evidence of of their learning and scientific inquiry.  I think some good artifacts would include a table of contents that outline all of the inquiries recorded, some good post-inquiry reflections, and at least one formal lab write-up.  1/2 way through the year I’d want each student to check in with me, to get feedback on their work and write-up formats. I’d also try to give continuous and on-going feedback as the year goes on.

My hope is that the lab notebooks will add a bit more rigour to the inquiries and labs.  More importantly, they should give the students a chance to slow down and think about what they’re learning.

The second change is not really a change but a recognition that I still have a lot of room for improvement when doing post-inquiry whiteboarding.  I’ll be honest - I don’t have a lot of ideas on how to improve this.  One idea came from Brian Vancil and Frank Noschese, where I could produce posters to put on the class walls, which help remind and guide the students in whiteboarding discussions.

The third change involves some careful planning from me. Now that I’ve run through a couple of years of teaching, I think I can go back to my basic unit plans and explicitly formalize learning cycles in each one.  This would be taking modeling curriculum and 5e learning cycles and making sure that each unit follows a path that includes exploration, explanation and extension..

The final change would be to tweak my lab practicum activity. I was pretty happy with how it went, but I think it could be changed into a two-day activity so that the students can go more in-depth and it can better reflect a summative assessment.

Overall I don’t think the above 5 changes are individually big. However, put together they should add up to more comprehensive and cohesive classroom that leverage the work that I’ve done this year.  I’ve also been working on some other ideas that will help free up more time for inquiries and reflection.  But more on that in another post…