Seasons

Learning about why the Earth has seasons has definitely thrown up some of my favourite student misconceptions. Last year, I had the student who earnestly tried to argue that seasons are caused because the sun goes round the Earth and it's closer in summer. This year, it was the student who said it was because the plants needed summer to grow and so seasons started because of the plants.

Personally, I have a special love for the equinoxes and solstices, and celebrate them each year. As a teacher, I have a few odd seasons in my head too. For example, late September to November is Red Pen Season, when I eat, sleep and breathe revision and marking. It's not my favourite season.

I know that some of my students have this sort of headcanon for thinking about the world in a way that is not strictly scientific or 'true' for some values of true. It's real or sensible to them in their own perspective, though, and I think that's a valuable thing to have. I think it leads to the sort of quirky creativity that helps people get their head around things, and it's not something we should try to stamp out.

So I guess I am thinking about where to draw the line between completely, utterly, bizarrely wrong beliefs and eccentric and personal interpretations of the world around you. I think, for me, it's the recognition that my personal interpretation is just that, and not mistaking it for a universal perspective.

This differentiated, self-directed stuff is hard for us all

Today's class saw a bunch of students going "but what do we doooooooo?" and flapping their hands over their freedom. I was so tempted to flap my hands back and reply, "I don't knoooow!"

Part of the problem is that they have never done anything like this. When I rewrite the Y 7 & 8 units, I will be sure to include the babysteps version of this unit. Part of it is that they don't really believe that they are allowed to be self-directed, and another part is that they are unsure of exactly what the parameters of their self-direction are. So, right now, we are compromising. All students have lists of the materials they need and should have them by Wednesday, ready to start experimenting and refining their methods.

I still need to finish off my exemplar. Finding time for this sort of thing is like pulling teeth in this place.

Ooooh, practical thinkies

One of the things science students always say, no matter who their teacher is, what year level they're at, whatever, is that they want more practical work.

This is awesome, but also a little problematic for teachers. The reason why I am conflicted over it is twofold. First, by the time I get my grubby little scientific mitts on them, students have usually defined what practical work is in their heads and it is a pretty narrow definition. It almost always includes bunsen burners and WORKSHEETS where you fill in things (like the aim and the method) and there is always a defined end point which you know about going in (because, usually, you've covered the topic in class already and so everyone knows that the candle gets lighter as you burn it). Second, they are often woefully useless at self-preservation and so teachers spend an awful lot of time making sure that the classroom is not set alight and that no one tries to drink the acid.

But we have to perservere with this. Experimentation and investigation are essential (the justification for that is a topic for another day). So, right now, I am devising a block of work around chemistry and skin care that will involve enough practical work to satisfy the most demanding adolescent audience. Even better? There is no set end goal. There are activities on the way, but the final golaposts require creativity, critical thought, and actual original experimentation.

Today, I am so happy.

In absentia, relief

I'm not a big subscriber to the theory that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Instead, I find relief in being able to escape for a while. None of that explains what I am doing at school on a beautiful Monday in the holidays.

One of the things that I am doing is working on the units for next term: biology (genetics and then microbes) for the Y11s, Waves for the Y12s and Electricity for the Y13s. Now, sometime in week two, I will be going to Australia for a few days, but I don't know exactly when. So I'm factoring that into my relief - no practicals (you can't give practical work for a reliever to supervise) but still interesting and engaging learning. So far, I'm leaning towards either a video - pretty straightforward to do and I get to talk and draw on the board as I go - or some sort of powerpoint with audio followed by a class chat (time in Australia permitting).

Right. I will let that tick over in the back of my mind while I wait for the coffee to hit and take another look at the learning outcomes for these units.

Okay, okay, so there were some good points

One of the good things that did come out of the Curriculum Development day up here was the chance to meet the occasional interesting - and interested - colleague. I met one.

We were talking about assessing key competencies. You know, it's all well and good for everyone to howl and say "but you're not supposed to assess key competencies", but I think it's really likely that you will, at the very least, have to assign a grade on a report card, even if it doesn't carry credits. So anyway, we were talking about how the key competencies are connected, so you can't have one without the other. And then we got to talking about how you could have a day for this, dressing it up as a challenge and using a science context - for example, projectile motion for Y12 physics - to assess them all together.

I mentioned this to one of my minions, and they thought it was pretty cool too. But I am wondering how to make it more authentic and how to make it integrate more collaboration and more web2.0 thinking. But the idea has promise, if not for the informal assessment of key competencies, then at least for providing an engaging science experience in the senior school.

Exams are not my happy place

Unlike youtube, exams do not make me happy by their mere existence. In general, I find them lacking in actual applicability to the real world, and would like to cordially consign them all to a deep dark pit.

This week is going to be horrible, I can tell already.

Content creation and the NZ curriculum

Most people who work with me know that I am all about content creation. For me, it's a big part of being a constructionist practitioner. As students make their own meanings, by relating to something they already know or by being entranced by something, or through taking or whatever, then I think they should be creating their own content too.

Recently, I was reading through the summary of the findings of the Digital Youth Project, which I think has some fascinating research with big implications for education. In particular, I was really taken with their definition of youth interactions online as taking one of three main forms - hanging out, messing around and geeking out.

Here's how the researchers introduce their topic:

Hanging out, messing around, and geeking out are three genres of participation that describe different forms of commitment to media engagement, and they correspond to different social and learning dynamics. In this section, we draw from the lengthier description in our book Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out to highlight the key features of these genres of participation, supported with illustrative examples. The examples highlighted here represent only a portion of the more substantial ethnographic support for the findings in our book, which are organized according to key domains of youth practice: friendship, intimacy, family, gaming, creative production, and work. Here we draw from this material in order to highlight the three genres of participation and focus specifically on the learning dynamics that we documented.

Now, apart from the way I made immediate grabby fingers about wanting to get the actual book, I also had a few moments of thinking about what the intersection between being a constructivist teacher and a web2.0 teacher might look like.

Now, I plan to dig into this further. There are a lot of papers to be read, resources to be gathered and so on. But to me, the key to being both a constructivist and a web2.0 pedagogue lies in the concept of content creation

By that I mean not just using web2.0 tools for instruction, no matter how awesome it is to show youtube clips to illustrate concepts. Yeah, that's great, but we need to go further and have students using these web2.0 tools to create their own content. Content that means a lot to them as well as to me. Importantly, it's also content they can share with others.

So. My plan for the next little while is to delve into this and make a case for it - using web2.0 technologies in a way that encourages content creation amongst students.

Even more ideas!

I spent all day yesterday at the NZASE conference on science in primary education. It was awesome and I had a great time and learned heaps.

One of the best - and most important - things that came out of the day for me was the importance of providing an opportunity at the start of a lesson for kids to either frame their own questions ("I wonder what would happen if I made the diameter of the tube bigger?"), or to discover cognitive conflict ("X says that falling things can't have balanced forces, but that's not true"). This then gives them context for the rest of the lesson - awesome!

I do this sometimes, but not anywhere NEAR as often as I should. The conference really highlighted for me that I should be doing it more.

So... since my Amazing Adventure is on my brain, I have decided that the start segments (with the three teachers) should pose a problem or situation that is a springboard to students thinking and questioning. For example, if the section on Mexico City is on smog, then the teacher introduction will have one teacher coughing and sneezing, and the other two arguing over whether she can fix herself with medicine, or if it's a systemic problem that can't be fixed.

*goes off to plot*

Writing new schemes is awesome

Yesterday, my minions colleagues and I worked on the new scheme for junior science. There was nothing particularly wrong with the old scheme, it was just... boring. And very, very content-driven. It was all about the content.

So we wanted to do something different. We spent nearly all day working on an integrated scheme, and we've come up with the first stages of something that I think will not only be more interesting and engaging for students, but will also lend itself more readily to inquiry learning, will be rich in ICT opportunities, and will emphasise big concepts and information gathering and processing skills.

So... our eight (one for each term over the two years) big themes/concepts are:

1. Gross! A Y9 unit on just that, things that are gross or funny or icky. In this unit, we'll cover things like microbes and decomposition, the particle nature of matter (and how smell gets to your nose), goo and other sticky, ooky things, and anything else we can think of.

2. It's all about me. Another Y9 unit, this one using the students' own self as a focus. As well as all the adorable human biology and genetics we'll get to do, this is also going to have a social focus. We might consider things like tattoos and the inks used in them, or how to make lip balm.

3. In the home. This Y9 unit is all about what we find around us. I have left this with minion one to be finished, since it was her baby

4. Pretty. Obviously not the final name, this unit is about all the reasons why science makes us catch our breath, and all the ways that science and art collide. We'll look at natural landscape features, astronomy, adaptations in plants and animals, light and sound. It's going to be awesome. Can you tell that this one was my idea?

5. Amazing Race. This one came from my desire that students learn a little bit about the world outside. We have about 15 locations and students complete science activities in groups about each location in order to move along through their race. There will be a prize for the group that gets through the most locations. This will involve things like investigations into acid rain and the effect is has on old buildings (like Hagia Sophia in Turkey), or graphing smog count in Mexico City. Minions one and two and I are going to make a little series of videos to show each week, chronicling our (fictitious) progress through the race.

6. Time. This one looks at geological processes, archaeology, changing scientific models over time, and future predictions.

7. Engineering. We need a catchier title, but the key to this one is the ways that science shapes the world and the world shapes science. We'll look at lots of physics - forces, in particular - but also some genetics and some chemistry. There is lots of scope here!

8. Forensics. We're looking at shaping this one along the same lines as the Amazing Race, so students must take small steps towards solving a crime. We might take a lesson at the start of the unit to make badges or something, just for fun. Forensics is an awesome topic, full of integrated science already. We're going to have so much fun with it.

So. Life is looking good. I'll be uploading the first installment of our Amazing Race (Three Mismatched Teachers Edition) just as soon as we record the first episode.

Today's amazing feat of awesome!

Well, I haven't done it yet, but I shall.

Part of today is devoted to planning the Y11 Physics outline. We spend all of this term on Physics and I love it. Love it, I tell you! It's so much fun, at Y11, or should be fun. Y11 is where we learn the basic stuff, the stuff that rules our lives in the real world. Things like how forces act together to give a resultant force. How a body can have several forces acting on it but not be moving (that one blows the kids minds, even though it's something they have known since they were, oh, five, just from experience). How you can predict motion from the things that you know about a system. So. Much. Fun.

I have a whole pile of resources for this topic, and I am determined to use them to good effect. My students are going to inquire and think and learn if it kills them. One of the things that we are going to do is fair tests, and I will make the students do some of this online. I haven't quite decided how, yet, but I'm thinking that they might investigate experiments that other students have done and posted - like on that community on wikipedia that I can't remember the name of right now - and analyse them against a set of criteria for what NCEA defines as a fair test. Interesting? Well, I think it is.

Also on the table is the rewrite of the junior science curriculum. Fully integrated! With cross-curricula links! Nature of Science as a focus! Other stuff! It's going to be so much fun.

Teacher-only days

I love the collegiality of hanging out with other teachers and talking about teaching and learning and pedagogy. Today I have had an opportunity to talk about my favourite, favourite things - metacognition, praxis and critical thinking. Huzzah!

We're working from the NZ Curriculum, and it is made of awesome.

I really think today is going to be incredibly productive, so far as improving whole-school approaches to the Key Competencies and Inquiry-based Learning goes. Next up, ICT tools for the above, and then we break into our departments to work up a unit of learning.

I'm looking forward to it so much.

A stocktake of ICT in class

I know that lots of teachers at my school shake their heads and say that they can't use ICT, that there aren't enough applications for it, not enough ways to use it, it's not applicable and so on. So I took a snapshot of ICT usage a while ago and wrote myself a little table with the date, class and usage. I thought it might be interesting. It kind of is, partly as a little picture of what can be done, and partly (and worryingly) as a picture of how far I have to go until I am integrating ICT into my classroom practice to my own satisfaction. So, here is Feb 10th....

Y9 Science: used exploratree to record the results of a brainstorm into a diagram that can then be printed off. It would have been better with a wireless keyboard - or, even better, more computers so that it wasn't just kids calling out answers and me writing them in.

Y11 Science: used a youtube clip of a brainiac experiment of walking on custard in a states of matter experiment. You know, I'd love to give students more of a chance to give authentic responses to things like this, and to take part in real discussion. We have a youtube account, I must make more use of it

Y12 Physics: used a free Yenka resource and a youtube clip to demonstate electrostatic fields. This was done with the projector and me demonstrating, but I think it would have been far more effective for students to have viewed this in small groups at computer stations (or individually) and have shared their ideas and written their explanations collaboratively using the computer instead of me just talking to the animation/clip on the screen

So, three of four lessons that day had something simple in them. But there should be more. I should be thinking bigger, less demonstratively and more participatively. I'm going to come back to this idea, taking a snapshot - and hopefully, next time, not a month after the fact - and do it again to track how deep my ideas and techniques are getting.

How will I find the time to do anything else?

Today, while idly checking my Google Reader, I came across an interesting link via Mashable. A site that lets you check your username against the most popular social networking sites -
interesting for someone like me, who uses at least three different usernames, depending on context. Also, I realised that I didn't have an account at LastFM, and that would never do. I need new music to listen to at school - and my students can be exposed to a wider range too.

Go and check it out