The Scientific Teacher

The school year has come to a close, and I finally have time to blog again! This year I experimented going paperless in my science classroom by using digital science notebooks- an online version of the classic science notebook that I set up using GoogleSites. I’ve already blogged about setting that up, so I won’t go into the details here, but I’ve received so much interest from teachers about digital notebooks that I plan on making some how-to videos this summer, so stay tuned! What I’d like to do in this post is start sharing my thoughts on how the digital science notebooks worked (especially in light of my goals from the beginning of the year), and how I’m planning on improving them for next year. There’s a lot to reflect on, so I think I’ll post it one nugget at a time.

#1: Digital organization is much easier (most of the time)

My first reason for going paperless was to help students stay more organized, without consuming class time with menial tasks like sorting papers into binders or gluing sheets into notebooks. To accomplish this, all of my “handouts” were Google Docs, which are easily shared with students using Hapara. My students had three folders on Google Drive which contained all of their documents: Science Class, Science Lab, and Science Homework, and could access these documents either directly through Google Drive or through their digital science notebook on GoogleSites. So opening up a document wouldn’t take longer for students than passing out a stack of papers. Each time we completed a unit of study we did a little clean up with their folders to put all their documents in a sub-folder, which would take about 5 minutes in GoogleDrive. The biggest digital advantage over paper is that students never lose documents- so that excuse becomes totally  obsolete. Another handy benefit is that students who are absent in class get the documents digitally anyway, so they can get caught up even before the next class.

On the teacher side there is a nice organizational advantage as well: no more time wasted at the beginning of class collecting assignments. Since GoogleDrive tells you when the document was last edited, and Hapara shows you this data for your whole class at a glance, it’s super easy to “collect” docs and see which students have missing assignments. For projects and assignments that students might edit and improve, you can also tell right away when they’ve made new changes to the document:

A student’s geology documents in their digital science notebook

One simple improvement for next year is the way I named student’s documents. I used the Hapara feature of including the student’s name automatically in the document title, which makes searching up a specific student’s document a cinch, but I should have also included a number at the beginning of each document title (01, 02, 03, etc). This would make documents appear chronologically in on students’ digital science notebooks, which unfortunately only lists documents in alphabetical order. Numbering the docs would not only make new documents easier to find, it would maintain a clear chronology of learning for students to see, much like a paper science notebook would.

The main drawback is when computer issues get in the way. Occasionally a student would have trouble connecting to the Wifi network, or their laptop would need to be charged, or their computer would take a long time to log in. Little snags like this can be annoying- do you pause the lesson to help solve the student’s technical problem, or continue on without them? Since this is my 6th grade students first time in the 1 to 1 program, they aren’t extremely tech savvy yet, so often I would choose to wait and help them out. But next year I think I need to spend more time developing students responsibility and critical thinking around technology. For example, bringing your laptop charger to my class is just as important as bringing a pencil used to be, so I need to make that expectation clearer from the get-go with a technology agreement and prepare for the inevitable day when a student still forgets, which will bring me to my next reflection about technology rules…

Read Full Post »

After my initial read of the Next Generation Science Standards, I decided to dive in deep into the elementary standards and treat the draft standards as though I was going to have to teach them next year. The result was less than inspiring… Although I am a firm supporter of the intentions of NGSS as I wrote earlier, there are a lot off issues that need to be addressed in this draft. Because it’s an overwhelmingly large document to break down (even when just focusing on elementary), here’s a visual version “for dummies” of my NGSS criticism:

Here’s a key to my icons:

• Tacked on: these topics have performance expectations do not fit well with the central idea of the topic and in my opinion they add unnecessary breadth to the standards. Unfortunately, this “tacking-on” seems to be rampant in the standards, and I’d love to be able take a red pen to them. Example: The 1st grade Structure and Function topic focuses on… structure and function of plants and animals (duh) until it starts tacking on random expectations about heredity, parent behaviors, and communities.
•  Bloated: these topics have so many big ideas slapped together that in my opinion it would impossible to address them together in any meaningful depth (without taking an impossible amount of time). For some reason is a problem in with 4th grade: Life cycles, Earth processes, and Energy are in need of some serious editing. Example: the 4th grade Earth Processes unit tries to combine weathering and erosion, fossils, and geological hazards all under one topic- yikes!
• Disastrous: these topics are a complete mess of barely related performance expectations, and contain no clear central idea as far as I can see. All 3 “disaster” topics are in Earth Science, so they’d better find a new team of geologists to fix these! Example: The 5th grade Earth Systems topic is all over the map including the different earth “spheres”, the workings of climate, the importance of the ocean, the water cycle without the cycling, and environmental conservation without climate change.
•  Repetitive: these topics contain central ideas that are already addressed in an earlier grade’s topic, and without enough additional depth to justify further study. This could be cleaned up easily by combing some of these topics for more depth in one grade level. Example: In 2nd grade there is a Pushes and Pulls topic which overlaps a lot with the 3rd grade Interactions of Forces- why teach similar forces units two years in a row?
• Not age appropriate: these topics should be moved up to a higher grade level because it would be more fruitful to be able to investigate them in more depth with older students. Example: The Kg Weather topic would not include any quantitative data collecting like temperature and rainfall. Why not wait until students are ready to use meteorological tools to analyze the weather?
•  Very good: these topics are clearly focused around a central idea and would allow for rich, inquiry-based learning. If only there were more of them!

Overall, I believe the NGSS draft still has a long way to go to achieve its stated goal of more depth and less breadth in US science education, balancing emphasis on content with skills and cross-cutting concepts. The structure of the standards with 4 topics per grade level after 1st grade is a simple barrier in itself- it seems to imply that 4 science units would need to be taught each year, and many of these topical units are very broad in content as currently written.

I would love to discuss the topics in more detail, and hear others’ takes on the standards. If you’re interested, check out the #NGSSChat on Twitter this Thursday at 8pm Eastern being organized by @FredEnde. That will be 3 in the morning for me in Qatar, but I think I’m actually nerdy enough to wake up for it!

Read Full Post »

It’s the day after Halloween, so it’s pretty fitting that today I’m coming back from the dead and finally blogging again! The past few weeks have been crazy for me, as I attended not one but two international science ed conferences which had me jet-setting around to Athens and Barcelona (don’t you feel sorry for us international educators??).

My travels (and subsequent opportunities to do some reading) has left my mind buzzing with new ideas- I’ve probably got enough material to post for the rest of the year. So here’s a little teaser of some things to come:

• Nuggets of wisdom from Dr. Fran Prolman’s outstanding teacher leadership institute including strategies for building effective teacher teams and how to deal with “difficult conversations” with parents or other teacher
• Thoughts on how to reinvigorate the tired elementary science fair, including a new online student manual that I’m creating for the NESA Virtual Science Fair which my school is involved with
• Reflections on progressive education and radical school reform after reading Alfie Kohn’s The Schools Our Children Deserve
• Forecasting the future of textbooks after being inspired by Al Gore’s iPad app e-book thingamajiggy Our Choice 
• And finally wrapping up the discussion of pre and post assessments, with some statistics for dummies

Read Full Post »

A few years ago I attended a  presentation at my school called “Thinking about Knowledge” by Martin Skelton, and one brief comment he made really changed my whole outlook on assessment and reporting. He simply said “true assessment must be pre and post”. In other words, how can you claim to assess learning and report on learning if you don’t know what students know beforehand?

This set me off on a tangent thinking about the future of report cards. Sure everyone’s on the standards-based bandwagon now (including myself), but wouldn’t report cards be even better if they were student-based, that is they report the actual growth of the student’s learning, not just a final snapshot of how they measure up to some arbitrary standard? I understand that have some benchmarks for evaluating one’s progress compared to the “normal” expectation is important, but I think the evolution of learning is trending towards even more personalized learning and assessment, and soon we should be able to track and report on learning in a truly student-based way.

Anyways, I digress! The point I’m trying to make is that teachers need to do a better job of pre-assessing their students. While some may think pre-assessment is a waste of time, the opportunities they give for personalized differentiation and assessment of learning progress are many and valuable: Pre-assessing allows you to identify the students who already have a grasp of certain concepts and will need to be challenged in other ways to continue learning. Pre-assessing exposes student misconceptions that may interfere with learning and need to be addressed. Most importantly pre-assessing gives the teacher and the student a clear“before and after picture” of their learning, which is useful for student reflections, parent conferences, and teacher improvement as well.

For the past few years we’ve been doing pre and post assessments for all of our science units K through 5. It’s taken a lot of trial and error to refine them, but we’ve improved them to the point where they are useful and important piece of our curriculum, so I’d like to share the product and the process. Since it gets a little technical (and it’s getting a little late for a sleep-deprived new parent like me), I’ll break this up into a two-part post: the pre post and the post post.

I’ll use our 3rd grade Sound and Light unit as the example, since I can share some of the pre and post data that’s already come in this year (if you’d like to see examples from other grades- just let me know). Here’s the Sound and Light  pre-assessment, a short written assessment with 6 short-response questions:

The questions have been developed carefully to get a bit of assessment evidence for each of the key concepts of the unit. The post-assessment, as you will see, is much more thorough, but I believe efficiency trumps thoroughness for pre-assessments, so we’ve kept our pre-assessments short and sweet. Also, all of our pre-assessment questions are open-ended/free response, since we don’t want to encourage any guessing with multiple-choice type questions, we want the pre-assessment to be as true a reflection of students’ prior knowledge as possible.

I should add that the pre-assessment is given to students at the very beginning of the unit, with basically no prompting other that “I’d like to find out what you already know about sound and light. If you aren’t sure of something, it’s fine to just write ‘I don’t know.'” Students unfamiliar with pre-assessments will need reassurance that it’s not graded as well!

Teachers don’t need to spend time rigorously assessing these pre-assessments, they simply give them a look over to help them identify the students who already have a lot of prior knowledge about the subject and will need their learning differentiated. We have a pretty high-achieving student body, so there’s always a few in each class who need this kind of extra challenge (side note: I once had a 1st grader identify on a pre-assessment the scientific name and function of each of a fish’s fins! Good luck differentiating that one!).

Then pre-assessments are passed on to me. As the science coordinator at my elementary school, I use the pre and post assessments to evaluate the success of the unit. So take a random sample of 5 students from each class (random.org is a great site for generating quick random number sequences for this) and score their pre-assessments. Like all of our assessments there’s a 4-point standards-based rubric for this. A 3 is meeting the standard, a 2 is approaching, a 1 does not meet, and a 4 is exceeding or excelling. Here’s the scoring guide for the pre-assessment:

I record all of these scores into a spreadsheet, because I want to be able to compare the scores of the same students on the post-assessment after the unit. This year I’ve been using GoogleDocs for my spreadsheets, because it’s great for sharing the results with teachers easily and without cluttering up their inboxes. Here’s a snapshot of what the spreadsheet for this pre-assessment looks like:

As you can see, besides the 4-point scores, I also like to pick one question and record their responses. There’s always some interesting prior conceptions that pop up… for instance you can see here some students are already making connections about sound and air, and sound bouncing off things, and a couple of the students are already aware that sound in made from vibrations (differentiation anyone??).

Lastly the pre-assessments are saved so students can look at them again after the post-assessment at the end of the unit. But more on this later in the post post… stay tuned!

Read Full Post »