The scientific process and other monolithic entities

So many students think of the scientific process (okay, if they think of it at all) as a set of data-in/conclusion-out, cookie-cutter, pre-made experiments. They get called investigations, but the outcome always seems pre-determined. The teacher always knows what the answer should be (even if your crappy following of directions has resulted in something quite, quite different).

One of the things I am loving on at the moment? The exemplar I am making involves me in my favourite part of the investigative process - the bit where I do some mini-tests and alter my method accordingly. I'm not recording data, just playing around within the limits of my investigation to make sure that my method is going to work. I love it.

I hope to have some success soon though - all those internet tutorials made it look easy! Here are two pics of the dismal failures so far. One was using a hot iron, one a cooler iron. I think maybe I need to let the baking paper cool before I peel it back *sadfaces*

Good teaching, good learning?

So, today I did a rather adventurous activity with my Year 10 science class involving mixed ability grouping, student-directed activities and a peer-assessment survey to follow up. One of the things I did in the peer-assessment survey was ask about how well I did. Specifically, I asked how well I explained my instructions, how well I explained the content, and how well I responded to questions.

After seeing these results, I am doing a little reflection on how I actually do respond to questions. Two of the three groups gave me an unfavourable ranking for my question-response skills.

My default, whenever I am asked a process question (like, "how do I fold this paper?"), or even a content question, is to refer them to someone who is successfully doing the process or task. My view is that students should turn to each other for advice, so long as the questions are appropriately difficult for them. If no one gets it, then I am definitely at fault and should explain. Otherwise, they can work collaboratively to find answers, and this includes asking someone else for help on what a word means or what a question is asking for.

But it occurred to me that students still think that teachers are the founts of all knowledge and that an answer from me is 'better' than an answer from a classmate, even if the content if exactly the same.

Since I don't want to have to answer the same questions fifty million times, I guess I have to take some action. Here are some thoughts:

1. Work on my instructions. In particular, make better use of bullet points and short, sequential sentences in a list rather than a short, paragraph-style set of instructions

2. For each class, assign two or three people (in a rotating roster) who will be experts on explaining tasks. Then the role can be filled by people who have a good track record on understanding the type of task we're doing that day

3. Do more examples and modelling and make more use of templates

I shall continue thinking on this and making improvements.

Fail person is fail?

Recently, I have been teh fail when it comes to blogging. I would like to blame any number of things, but I think it mostly comes down to the heat drying out my brain. Seriously. Northland is in the grip of the worst drought in years and it's miserable.

However, being back at school is not all doom and gloom. For one thing, I am excited about how the new junior schemes are going, even if it is only early in the term. Of course, the fact that I am getting to set up a crime scene on the front desk may have something to do with it - and the entirely spurious transcript of my 'interview' about it. I love this sort of creative work.

Hopefully, I will have resources soon. That is also exciting. I love the diy ethos we've got going in our department. We make things up and recreate them in different shapes and formats. We fix things and break things. It's refreshing, to work in a department that takes risks and works hard to make them worthwhile risks. I'm pretty happy, all things considered.

Wow. Exams impede actual thought, for realz

Let's be frank. I hate exams. I loathe revision. I hate teaching students canned facts because they have to regurgitate them onto a standard paper under standard conditions with standard answers and standard marking. I was going to tweet about this, but, really, my loathing won't fit into 140 characters.

The full post about why exams suck is for another day and time. The post I've been thinking about, about edupunk and DIY in teaching, is for another day too. The brainwave I had about forensics is for another day too. For now, the parts of my brain not eaten by revision are absorbed in my NaNoWriMo project.

BRB, working now.

Professional development, and an object lesson in inertia

Generally, I love professional development. Nothing is more awesome than hanging out with other teachers and talking about what excites us and makes us eager to teach and learn.

Yesterday was not one of those days.

The Ministry of Education released the final Curriculum a few months ago. The document has a front end that is vast and sweeping in its scope, with real room for change and transformation in the teaching and learning process. It's coupled, somewhat awkwardly, with a back end of learning outcomes that aren't much different to the existing curriculum.

I should state, straight up, that I believe in the transformation of education implied by the front end of the NZ Curriculum. It was disheartening to go to the professional development yesterday and listen to teacher after teacher dismiss the changes, stating "but we already do that", or "we're not actually going to change the way we teach, we'll just add a few ticky boxes to satisfy the inspectors".

Today, I feel kind of despondent about being a teacher, when my colleagues are so visibly unenthused about anything that threatens the comfortable practice they have built up.

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.

Java problems make me scowl

So, I wanted to send you to wordle to see the awesome vocabulary activity I made for my Y10 students. But I'm having java problems *scowls* I will wait and see if it works at home, and then I will know that it is a school problem and can start to fix it.

*meeps* Generation Y, web 2.0 and EPIC FAIL

At my school, the principal is really invested in teachers working to understand and cater for generation Y students. One of the ways we do this is through watching/reading/listening to research into generational change and some of the points of misunderstanding. One of the best I've seen was this presentation to the Australian Secondary Principals Association conference in 2008.

I love thinking about generational change and the huge cultural shifts that we see taking place as young people grow up and make sense of a world that is completely different - socially, economically and politically, to the world that their parents and (most of) their teachers were shaped by.

As a young teacher myself, I sometimes find myself acting as a translator to other teachers. Oddly, I also find myself acting as a translator to my students. Many of my students are not as computer savvy as a casual read of the literature would imply. A closer look at the literature reveals a more complex picture. I'll get into posting on that another time, when I can really engage with it.

But what triggered this today? It turns out that none of the students in this particular class had ever used or heard of *meeps* - or, for that matter, *hugs you* or any of the other common actions, encased in asterixes, that indicate an action in the middle of exposition. I use them all the time in blog posts and IM conversations and it really had not occurred to me that my students might not know what it means.

I would facepalm, but I don't think they'd get that either.

Nevermind.

*facepalms anyway*

Task sharing and collaborative learning in an ICT environment

As in the two previous posts, I have been caught up with my Y9 Science class and their final group project on communities. Today we finally got down to the activity. My time spent on Tuesday drilling them about their roles in the task were not wasted, and I saw some awesome work produced. It's a shame that they didn't actually follow the instructions - you know, the ones that asked them to put their results into a googledoc that I had set up for each group *facepalm*

Nevermind. I am not giving up on the utility of googledocs as a tool for collaborative writing of reports and authoring of presentations online. I am going to keep experimenting until I get it right, dammit.

Internet down, teachers depressed and emo

The internet was down at school on Friday, thanks to a severed cable in town. Also down were teachers, filled with frustration, annoyance and a desperate lack of ways to occupy those snatched moments of leisure.

Okay, so I had to hastily re-write one lesson, but pretty much everyone I heard bitching about the outage was doing so because they couldn't get on to Facebook. Or whatever.

At least my students were sympathetic.

The good, the bad and the paper

Paper = the bane of my life

I sometimes feel like I'm awash in papers, old and new and bizarrely inexplicable. My desk is deep in them, worksheets and assessment papers and marking schedules and schemes and reports and reminders and - is that a shopping list?

Note to self: make more use of the iGoogle to-do list. Also, keep the recycling bin close at hand. Consider making a student follow me round with it for any time I get given useless paper. Consider changing all assessments so they can be one on the computer and I don't have to handle bits of paper. Okay, so the last one is a bit of a pipedream, but I can live in hope, right?