One of the biggest challenges in a science classroom is to keep it moving.....and with 30+ students it's extremely difficult to make sure this is happening for everyone.
Can you relate?
I've long known it was a problem but I didn't have the ability to do much about it. I just couldn't get ahead of the lesson design curve to put together tiers of labs. Finally when we arrived at heat transfer, I could utilize some of the excellent support labs that Vernier had already developed to try the tiered assignment approach.
I broke students into three teams
- Team Piccard for students who need more time to think and work through science ideas and who need more help along the way in doing things independently and answering open-ended questions.
- Team Torrecelli for students who already have organizational and time management under control and who are curious but don't see science as their passion
- Team Terra for students who work at a faster pace, love the open-endedness of lessons----the kids who love a challenge
Layered onto the Teams were group jobs: ReaderLeader who guided, managed and ran the group; DataRecorder who was the techie heart running the software, taking screenshots and printing data files as they happened; the Materials Manager who had to keep getting more ice cubes/hot water or going to the library to pick up data tables as they printed; and the ProbeManager who had to make sure the probe was operated correctly during each experiment.
Each day I would huddle with each team--some classes having 2-4 groups at each level. This way I could check in on their progress and give them tips on how to organize themselves and establish the top priorities for that day. I tried to make sure that I huddled with not only the ReaderLeaders but also the DataRecorders to give them techie tips/tricks as well as the Material Managers who might need some help in figuring out how they were going to procure all the stuff that each group was going to need.
Funny thing.....all the thermos and baggie mitten materials were donated by parents and families from whatever they had from around their house. The MaterialsManagers freaked one day when the supplies were gone and they had to scrouge or adapt (somehow the supply lines were cut and several different things went missing from the box). It was a wonderful moment of improvision.
Students were ecstatic to be set loose to work at their own pace through the labs. Quickly they realized they were going to make mistakes and that they'd have to repeat a lab over....often it was because they didn't read for enough detail or they didn't get what they should have been doing until after it was over. No matter. They just did it again.
Time and again, I reminded the class that this go back because things didn't work perfectly was a reflection of the kind of work that real scientists do. They wouldn't be doing hard work if it worked perfectly the first time through....hard work pays off and they should feel proud when they were able to do it properly. Rarely does something work the first, second or third time....and that to repeat is to get better. Because I allowed enough time to complete the two lessons, I think they actually bought into the whole mentality. I think it worked because I was dragged over to tables to "see this Mrs. R, it worked" more times that I could count. They amazed themselves.
As I said each group had 2 labs to complete within the week and to draft a poster presentation. The first lab for each group was to give them experience with the heat transfer concept and the second lab was to apply that concept to a problem.
Team Piccard investigated and then designed mittens. Sounds simple doesn't it. But it was major ah-ha's around the room as they figured out that mittens are huge insulators....with the body generating the heat inside the glove. For many students in Team Piccard they were uncertain how to use the laptops, set up the lab and have always depended on the "smart" students to do it all for them. Many are expert at flying under the radar...copying answers and relying on someone else to do the thinking. Not in this set of lessons.
I have to say that the Piccards may have shown the most growth. All but one group rose to the occasion and the smiles on their faces says it all..."I can do this." "I get what happened and I can explain it." I see new confidence muscles bulging.
Team Torrecelli had the tricky task of mixing known quantities of hot and cold water and learning how to predict what the resulting temperature would be. I'm not sure anyone ever discovered the math behind this phenomenon, but they surely used what they learned in building their Thermos prototypes. We expanded the investigation by testing how well insulated their thermos were for both hot and cold water.
Team Terras were the other huge winners in this action research project. Here students learn how to utilize the probes and their final experiment was to track/measure and analyze how the temperature rises and falls over a 24 hour time period. This involved setting up the laptop in a secured setting (the principal and assistant principal let us borrow space to test, the library, the gym, the Spanish room, the computer lab et al) and letting the probe gather sample temperatures every 15 minutes for an entire day.
I was lucky enough to find a student's dad that has expertise in HVAC...he's a mechanical engineer...and Team Terras have been emailing him for advice in analyzing their data. The added bonus is that he's been responding to some of their questions about what it's like to be an engineer by showing them how he has traveled all over the world. In addition to emailing the HVAC expert, students have been emailing with the Operations and Maintenance Manager for our district. None of expected to learn that there are 8 different heating/cooling units in just our building and that this gentleman programs not only our 8 units but all the units in the almost 40 some buildings in our district. WOW. That's a lot of heating/cooling managment....good thing he has a computer that does all this for him.
Team Terras were the other big winners in this action research project. They took what they learned in the classroom out and vetted it with people using/designing HVACs.
Now we're in the process of each group within Team Terra sharing what they learned with a Google Doc....pooling the collective wisdom before they have to make their final presentations.
Tiering has been extremely well received....students have given it high marks on the reflection survey. All loved being charge of their own time and working with me as a consultant. I loved this experience too.
The drawback is that I cannot imagine being able to do the lesson design work necessary to write 6 different labs at differing levels of difficulty for many of our investigations. It's that darn time constraint again. In this case, the Go!Temp probe has a ton of labs that the manufacturer has written that are very high quality (which is pretty unusual) and that I could do the prep for without losing my mind. Just look at this high quality software interface and how intuitive it is....quickly all teams were able to analyze what was going on....what do they say a picture is worth a 1,000 words couldn't be any truer in these labs....
I could have talked and talked and talked about heat transfer. By doing this it way, all 120 kids got a chance to experiment with heat transfer, apply it and be a little bit independent. Along the way they also learned a ton about Google Docs, taking screenshots, turning those screenshots into picture files and sharing those with their group, emailing outside experiences, and how to prepare and deliver a scientific poster presentation. Not to mention the time management and organizational skills.
Excellent differentiation and nice choice of topics
Posted by: Tony Erni | November 24, 2011 at 09:39 PM