Putting problems back on the shoulders of students has been an interesting process. I realized that I was not letting my students do enough and that I was making them teacher-dependent. If they had problems interpreting results, they looked to me to solve the problem, figuring out what had happened and what they should do to fix it. I had succumbed to their pressure because I felt like I didn't have the time to linger and give the breathing space to them to figure it out for themselves. It's such a struggle because the curriculums and support materials AND the pacing guides set us up to believe we must go
faster, faster, faster, faster, faster.
It's really not the fault of our curriculums. It's that I've let myself become so distracted with all the testing talk, the pressure to conform to the norm and to march in the exact footsteps of other teachers around me. Some of that pressure is real and much is self imposed by my desire to have my students be well prepared.
Connecting learning to current events...finding patterns...is it worth the invested time?
But another huge problem is that we don't connect the learning we're doing to what happens outside the classroom. What I desperately need is to have a better awareness of how real science is done...how do scientists struggle with the pressures of producing results faster, faster, faster and faster.
How do I get students to realize that things don't just happen for one class period and then they're over....all fall they groaned whenever we studied another hurricane as if it was riduclous to do it again? Their world has no connection to the pacing of the happenings of the real world...and that's the beauty of my job. I get to help them make those connections. So we're studying another hurricane and another earthquake and soon another spring storm/tornado. Eventually the realization does come, though....that under the general label there are differences. It may be called a hurricane but every one has a different personality based on the water temperature, the air pressure and other factors.
Do you think my students will get that they know these nuanced differences? Do their parents? Is that even important? Am I doing the right thing to linger and teach these kinds skills?
Big science ideas matter...lots to if they'll be able to hang in there with science beyond 6th grade
And I needed to stop and reflect on what how students were learning along the way as long as they are
"mastering" curriculum indicators. When we were learning about density (yes, again but what else is one of the driving, underlying concepts of earth science if not density????), I realized they weren't measuring displaced volume accurately.
I can hear you groaning. And I know it's SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO boring. But it's really not about this one lab or even about measuring displaced volume. It's whether or not my students will know that their data is all messed up and shouldn't be used to draw conclusions from, if they can hang in there if I tell them they have to repeat their investigation, and if they can come up a process by which to get better results and then perfect that process. 
And that's the heart of what a science teacher should, can and must do, I think.
So to get at this problem, as I checked lab notebooks I had them entered their personal results for density of the 5 samples into an Excel spreadsheet...which means we collected information from all 120 students. And you can imagine the range of values for density....we had almost no consensus on what the density of a mineral should be.
Which means that we had to have a discussion about whether or not the density could change with the size of a sample. yes...they had read the book and memorized the fact that density doesn't change, but it wasn't real to them yet. They hadn't bumped their heads into it and touched it in a concrete way. And until they do that...they don't own the idea. This all means we had to go back and talk about what a "definite chemical composition" means and that brought us back to talking math (and I hear you sigh again since now we've got math in science....). So we talked about making orange juice with cans of water to cans of concentrate...making one batch and then making many batches...Was it still OJ? with the same composition? 
Well....I could go on and on about our conversations. I won't (and I know you are cheering)...but I will say this. It took me 4 extra class periods to double back to revisit these ideas, to let them argue with me and among themselves until we had a process that could "work". We had to uncover why the villian in our measurements was that pesky displaced volume...why some rock types were harder to measure than others (imagine that the rocks that float have the nerve not to displace water unless you "force" them to)!!! and so on.
But they did come up with much better measurements that were pretty close.
Takeaways from the whole experience
For students:
- they could do better quality science
- I think they were satisfied with themselves at the end of the day
I'm not sure they saw as much value in it as I did but they tolerate me well and most played along and worked at trying to be more accurate.
- I KNOW they had to think more and that they felt like they had mastered more of the mind set of thinking and not just blindly following along
For me as their teacher:
Here again is where I need help.
- I need to have a better grasp of how the real world does this. I know that the science community publishes their work and other scientists look to see if that experiment could be replicated and if the data seem reasonable/accurate. If it does, then the "results" are accepted and knowledge moves forward.
That's how I tried to set up this whole re-learning process. I divided the kids into separate
lab groups...and within each group they had to produce individual results that matched with each other...and then the group "published" their group reports which had to be scrutinized by the other groups. And if it looked like everything was similar, we accepted it. But I think 12 year olds think that's a lot of rig-a-ma-roll...and just teacher stories to get them to do the work.
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I would love to have outside eyes to tell the scientific stories of how this works and/or to look at the data.
It seems pretty unrealistic to me that we could find enough earth scientists who have time to do this kind of thing...but maybe through the magic of technology we could/should write new curriculums that connect students together to do this kind of analysis. Then sprinkle in a few interactions with real scientists and I think this could be a rockin' kind of curriculum. Sort of a modified science fair kind of idea.
- So I need to find other science teachers who want to do this kind of work. Social networking is going to be the key for me here.
What started off as a way to explore the definition of a mineral turned out to be so much more for me. Again, I find everything I do with students makes me think more and more about how they learn best and what I should be doing to improve their learning. It's what keeps me young and engaged in this profession.