Self-reflection and students

Well, I wanted to write a blog post, so I made the mistake of asking my students what it should be about. I don't think I've ever seen such faces - there was an underlying incomprehension about what the hell I was asking them for, true, but on top of that there were a myriad of shades of incomprehension about why I would want a blog in the first place.

Sometimes I wonder that too.

But today, I have some very specific things to reflect on. Like the report I have to write about how the Science Department is going in implementing the new NZ Curriculum into our schemes. Perhaps it would be more proper - and accurate, in our case - to say that we are re-writing our schemes in light of the directives of the new curriculum.

There are many parts I like about the curriculum. I like that it explicitly states that a positive sense of identity is a key learning outcome. I like that it expects students to learn how to be international citizens and informed decision makers. I love how it values diversity and social justice.

The challenge now is how to implement all of this into a comprehensive scheme of work that leads into the highly content-driven NCEA environment, where students must absorb and regurgitate knowledge. But it's a challenge I am excited by.

One thing that annoys me is to hear teachers say "but we already do this!".

Well, sorry, no. Mostly, you don't. You drive content. Sticking a new front end onto your existing schemes is not implementing the new curriculum. That's why we're thinking big and making big changes.

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.

Learning at school

Okay, so I've only been here since just before 9am this morning, but I'm still excited and think I thought be blogging just a little bit. Twitter is all awesome and stupendous but sometimes 140 characters just doesn't cut it.

I'm in a session on the SOLO taxonomy and we're rattling around a bit in this huge room. I think people are still digesting the keynote. Now, I'm pretty excited about this spotlight because I'm all about the learning outcomes. I try to have really clear signposts for learning in a lesson-by-lesson fashion and also on a longer scale. But many of my longer term goals are a little... well, punk, in the sense that I value a bit of a rough and ready, diy, homegrown kind of learning. Sometimes, I don't talk about them too much. It makes people nervous.

But I am enjoying the slow unfolding of the SOLO taxonomy. What I'm seeing so far is an interesting, deeper take on the rather dirty version of learning I use: "I know nothing", "I know something", "I know many things", "I can do things with the things I know" and "I can create and explain new things with the things I know".

You know, I'm thinking more about self-assessment matrices and how our department uses them. I think we need to work more on developing what those last two criteria look like for students. In particular - and I know this will go down like a lead balloon at my school - we need to focus on what application and creativity looks like for girls in subjects that are traditionally considered to be boys' subjects. I know I am influenced by being a physics teacher, but it is definitely a concern for me.

Right. More thinking. More listening. More link making and integrating.

(More dirty outcomes? You bet)

So excited that I might need more caffeine

So, I have posted a lot about the integrated scheme we've got going with the junior science classes. I had a crisis of faith late in the holidays about whether we were making the right choice in abandoning a traditional model to go for something so unusual.

However, in the last week, I have collected some anecdata that has really reassured me that we've made the right choice. I'm confident that our test results and more formal surveying will bear out this confidence.

Most importantly, we've had success with at least two students who have, in the past, been notoriously hard to engage in learning. They enjoy the idea that for each bite of learning - about scale diagrams or the particle nature of matter or whatever - they do an activity that celebrates and consolidates that learning, and they get to display the artefact from the learning. What they do in class is what we base our assessment on, and these students are responding really positively to that.

On a less important, but enjoyable note, I managed to create a lesson (around mixtures, compounds and elements, with the beginning of an introduction to separation techniques) that uses mashups. In particular, it uses DJ Earworm's United State of Pop 2009. There is a video, which I've embedded below, but - even better - there is a colour-coded lyric sheet which shows the different artists who have been integrated into the mashup. So my students can watch the video and try to identify all the artists and songs, then use the colour coded sheet to see how they did. Then, we're going to show, on Audacity, how we can do things like that ourselves, making mixtures of audio clips. It's going to rock.

Of course, not nearly as much as this does:

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.

I'm all about the cross curricularity

Actually, I'm not sure that's even a word. But I am running with it.

In my quest to be a Renaissance teacher, I like to maintain a passing acquaintance with other subject areas. Of course, this is fairly easy in Maths (since I use it all the time to teach, you know, my subject) and English. That's because I'm a writer *cues flappy hands of creative expression*. I like to know what's happening in Technology. But I love love love Social Science.

Here is my latest obsession of intellectual glee. Sociological Images. They use images to explore assumptions about gender, class and ethnicity, with a short, rigorous commentary. I love it. For example, just today I learned that marriage between cousins is prohibited in 25 states in the US. *blinks* My maternal grandparents were first cousins. Perhaps I shouldn't admit to that on the internet.

We're all about health. And science. Yeah

The other day, I stumbled across a fascinating post featuring a periodic table of the elements represented by cupcakes.

Here, have a gratuitous picture of the sugary goodness:



Nice, huh?

One of the things I have found in teaching chemistry, and, in particular, atomic structure, ion formation and ionic bonding, is that students have real difficulty with the idea that removing electrons makes an ion more positive.

Yes, I am also a maths teacher, and this does make me worried.

So, I'm thinking cupcakes of the first twenty and the few extras we use. Some nice icing. Valence electrons represented by little sour jube lollies - if you remove valence sour jubes, the cupcake gets sweeter. I think this could be a really simple, if not particularly healthy, way to get the idea across.

Bring on the Chemistry!