Reflections of a Techie

Rocky Road in PBL--Failures Welcome as Part of Design Process

All this year I've been working to empower students and turn learning over to them.  We've just started my newest attempt at PBL with the rock cycle as the centerpiece.  In this first day of the work, I've seen such encouraging change in student attitudes.  They embrace the chance to try things out...they see the trial and error part of this kind of learning as tolerable and, dare I say it, almost enjoyable.  When things don't work out the very first time, they have enough experience to realize that it will if they hang in there. 

They buy into the idea that it's a design process.

So if you're a teacher or student you've seen this chart a million times.  I wanted students to take it to another level...one where they experienced it.  Clearly they're not going into the mantle or not top of a volcano.

How could they build a model to show their understanding?

What questions do they have about how this re-cycling works?

I told them that we were going to do this unit without cookie cutter lab directions and they would be in charge of defining how to go about learning these concepts.  Loads of eyerolling went on.  Hey they're middle schoolers and it goes with the territory.

As we built background information, they've developed some amazing questions.

• How does the rock cycle work in a volcano?
• Why do some rocks never go through the cycle?  Where are these rocks located?
• How do we show the kinds of processes that rocks take...the melting, the pressure, the cooling and the breaking apart?
• When you build a model of something, what makes it a good model?
• How do you make dangerous things not dangerous so it can be in your model?
• What can we melt that can happen in our classroom and that can be broken up later?
• Do other planets in space have rock cycles?
• Is this really just re-cycling and why is it called a cycle instead of re-cycling?
  

You can see that the questions were pretty far ranging.  I also think it indicates they've started going beyond the obvious questions.

One of the best parts of this phase of PBL

Now that we've been doing this kind of inquiry for a while, students are much more tolerant of the process.  They know they're going to be stumped here at the beginning and it will all become more transparent as they work with the ideas and question.

They know that I'm not going to leave them out there, grading-wise or curiosity-wise, without a net.  They believe that I wouldn't ask them to do something that they can't do or figure out.  And that it will take a bit of experimenting to figure out what works.

We've gotten to the point where they know that some of their ideas will work and some won't.  For example, one of the groups realized they would need to break down rocks in their model.  They're using crayons as minerals and bricks to represent the rocks that scrap past.  Unfortunately as they tested their idea, it didn't work.  This would have been a diaster for the group in August.  Now they realize that this idea didn't work, but if they just tweaked it a bit, it might. 

They didn't see this first attempt as a failure because they get it's a design process.

They have belief that they'll figure it out on a future attempt.  That's huge.

3 Questions for ELA/Science writing and social media implementation

I'm very interested to learn about the art of communication in science.  It seems like one of the things that my 6th graders can work towards..even if their science isn't that advanced.  Imagine my delight when my Twitter timeline held this jewel for me....from Scientific American's Blog Around the Clock a guest post by Michele Arduengo, Scientific Communications Specialist at Promega Corporation.

She wrote that she was "  I’m curious to see how the web can facilitate the development of communities across communities, particularly to see if science communities can interact meaningfully with non-science communities." 

That is exactly what I've been wanting to do with my 6th graders.  I have been trying to connect and collaborate with other 6th grade teachers so that my students can develop ideas that both classrooms study.  Maybe it would be a Skype chat or co-creating a wiki page about a lab or an experiment.  And then taking that learning and turning it into something that all people can understand.

It really is a twofold process: 

• Understanding what you know and what other people who as expert in that area can learn http://lmsblogs.org/together; and
• Communicating that to an audience of people who don't know much about your area of expertise.

To some extent we already do this in class when we have students write a letter to their grandparents to explain what they've been doing in science class.  Wonderful letters come back in response.  And it's also what you might see my students doing on our classroom blog.

Ms. Arduengo also raises the point of how social networks must not only do the work of supporting your work, but also of helping you critically evaluate your work.  This has been a huge component of what working scientists do....critiquing each other's findings until they stand strong in what conclusions can be made. 

It's the hardest part for 6th graders.  They only want to ask friends and family to critique their writing in hopes of avoiding the hard, uncomfortable growing questions.   I am concerned that the ability to personalize news pages, subscribe to particular news feeds or blogs, actually makes it easier for people to become more isolated. People connect with others across the world, but the only those who share the same interests or views.   What a fair question for not only the real-world scientists that Ms. Arduengo is working with but for all teachers who are trying to ask how to incorporate social media and networks into their classrooms.  There will be a surge of activity in this realm with the implementation of Common Core curriculum standards and the Next Generation Science Standards....all of which push the idea of connectedness and community.

I do believe these all wise issues to raise and consider.  1) What is the function of a community in giving support but also critique?  2)  How do we construct lesson design so students learn how to build networks from a wide-ranging set of perspectives?  3) How do we teach students that they've insulated themselves with "yes" people so they don't limit their growth?

July's reflection comes true

In scrambling across the web, I've found a treasure chest of opportunity.  Science for citizens is actually the name of the chest.  And it was a bit of a treasure hunt that brought me to their front door...more about that later.

Science for Citizens offers regular folks like me (if I'm regular I guess) the chance to participate in science projects from right where we live, doing pretty normal stuff and then sending in what we learn to the principal investigators.  Here's their nutshell of a mission

In a nutshell...

If you're a citizen: This is the place to find out about, take part in, and contribute to science through recreational activities and research projects.

How cool is that?  And the mission statement is this

ScienceForCitizens.net will bring together the millions of citizen scientists in the world; the thousands of potential projects offered by researchers, organizations, and companies; and the resources, products, and services that enable citizens to pursue and enjoy these activities. We aim to:

• Enable and encourage people to learn about, participate in, and contribute to science through both informal recreational activities and formal research efforts.
• Inspire greater appreciation and promote a better understanding of science and technology among the general public.
• Create a shared space where scientists can talk with citizens interested in working on or learning about their research projects.
• Satisfy the popular urge to tinker, build, and explore by making it simple and fun for people—singles, parents, grandparents, kids—to jump in and get their hands dirty with science.

Who could resist something like that?  To be sure, not me!!!  So I've nosed around the website and found at least a couple of projects that I'm already working on.  The first one is very low key and super easy.  Robins.  Yep the birds that hop around my yard all day and night...little brown and orange-breasted birds.   They are sweet, they love my bird bath in the front yards, although it's very hard to photograph them there. 

The idea is for citizens everywhere to document where and when someone sees a robin and then upload the observation report.  There's a very cool map that locates your robin observation and you can see where the robins can be found in the United States.  The scientists running the project are monitoring climate change and weather changes on where these little guys migrate.

Then on June 21st, I'm getting excited for another super simple, easy to participate in science project.   From the Science for Citizens Blog comes "Snap a picture and mesure albedo!!!"  By taking a picture of a piece of white paper...yes, a picture of white paper...you could help scientist to take measurements from all over the world on albedo.

But what's albedo, Marsha?  Albedo is the solar energy that bounces back back to space after it hits the Earth's surface.  Not all of what the sun sends out and that makes it thru the atmosphere all the way to the surface, stays on the surface.  Some of it richocets off the earth's surface & back out of the atmosphere.   

"For three years Dr. Kathleen Gorski and her students at Wilbraham and Monson Academy near Springfield, MA have been snapping pictures of white paper and using them to measure albedo by comparing the white paper to the surrounding ground surface. "  the blog reports.  So how much fun would it be to participate in a project that tries to take the most accurate measurement of something as scientific as this?  And simple.

If you're like me....well, just remember June 21st between 5-8pm is the time and place.  Snap your picture and you're in the loop....a citizen scientist.  I first came across this idea of albedo when we were studying climate...and learned the more that the earth absorbs, the hotter we become in theory.  So studying things like how much is reflected back, helps to monitor how climate change is or is not happening.

 

Treasure Hunt    So how did I find this jewel?  Well, thanks to my newly acquired Twitter skills, I'm beginning to read the Tweets of very interesting people.

Responding to those Small Strategic Steps

A teacher that I follow closely is  Shelley Wright.  I somehow feel we must have separated at teacher's college as I feel she's my twin science teacher.  Doesn't matter that she teaches AP Physics and I teach 11 and 12 year olds....we struggle with lots of the same things?

Take her most recent article at Voice From the Learning Revolution she talks a series of small strategic steps.  Right off the bat, I'm in....because I can do almost anything that's small and if it's strategic, all the better.

She talks about the shift towards being a student-centered classroom as a roller coaster ride.  This describes my personal journey towards becoming a teacher who does more coaching of students towards our science learning targets than one who pours into them.  It's full of bends in the road...you don't expect students to react in a certain way and you really have to become a nimble responder.

Students need lots of help to make this transition and when you see them struggling, you have to change your course in a heartbeat.  Doesn't that remind you of some of these corkscrew kinds of curves?

Shelley recommends

You can jump in and change everything at once like I did, but that’s slightly crazy. Instead, if you design one unit in one subject, at the end of each day, or week, you can analyze what worked and what didn’t.

While I see the wisdom in this approach, I also needed to have a strong understanding of how this learning would fit into everything else I'm doing.  I couldn't do just one.  For me, I had to conceptually get how this one change was going to fit into the bigger picture.

I think my reasoning goes something like this....my little guys are so inexperienced at science that you can be doing things differently without causing them to falter around.  So if I'm going to do inquiry, I have to do in such a way that it doesn't jolt them.  So maybe I could design a series of inquiry experiences that ease into the different skills they are going to need to do inquiry.

For example, I might need to teach them how to write a whole sentence or draw a picture with diagrams.....so when they tell others what they learned there will be information there.  Honestly my students arrive....masters at the one or two word answers.  It's back to the whole fill-in-the-blank mentality.

As some of my other colleagues say....I have to help my students "unlearn" first.  Then they can do inquiry.  And as Shelley recommends....talk about the learning.  Boy there couldn't be any better advice than this.  No matter how well or how badly something has gone...having the chance to discuss it with students to get their perspective and reaction...helps so much.  It develops their voice as a learner, as an important member of the classroom and I get more insight by chatting with them in  a class debrief for 10 minutes than if they write for that same period of time.

Strategic steps are critical to any kind of instructional strategy you're going to deploy.  Inquiry because it emphasizes student independence and pushes them to be question-askers as well as question-answerers......depends on taking small steps.

Right on Shelley.

 

Thanks to http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/682213181/sizes/s/in/photostream/  for their CC license rollercoaster picture.

How can something be a little formative and a little summative?

Like Donny and Marie, I was a little bit formative and a little bit summative in what I did with students last week.  And I think it worked almost as well as the teen wonders singing their way into the hearts of America so many years ago.

We were undertaking 3 different challenges to build models that represented different things students had read about in their textbook around the weather topics of wind and water.  Instead of giving them worksheets and a quiz, I turned the big ideas of these topics into challenges.  They had to show me they could build a model that represented their learning.

In the three days of experimenting around, students figured out lots of about how weather "works out there"...meaning outside of the textbook in my classroom.  We used video clips where they could narrate what they were learning and leave those for me to watch at night.

I can check off some process and content skills from what I already hear (so it's summative).  And I hear other things that they need more help learning...either thru questioning that leads them to consider other ideas or even a mini-lesson. 

One of the most effective mini-lessons for this group was to have them re-scan thru the textbook chapter with me...they were stuck and didn't know what to do next.  As we re-read the textbook, you could almost see that now the words had more meaning.  Parts of things that were just words before now had a reality to them that they didn't have before....and re-reading allowed them to connect this new learning to those words....which helped them realize a path that might be productive.  The whole setting a reason for reading escalted 10x what it normally is...and they saw the textbook as a helper to getting them a working model.

Building models....Inquiry learning is hard, messy and rewarding

It's hard work building models that show how weather works...or at least parts of it.  I laid out three challenges for my students to do this past week that would demonstrate their mastery of the concepts of rising/falling air, water vapor forming clouds and dew/frost formation. 

There were several publisher-written labs to perform, but I wanted to give students more control over how they went about learning how wind and water work in the atmosphere. 

Oh Mrs. Ratzel, can't we just have a worksheet?  Please it would be so much easier.

I love this.  No one tells me what to try.

I'm making a ton of things that don't work, but I'm learning even more.  I have a bunch of stuff I know that won't work.

Don't worry, I have lots of ideas left.

I'm asking my dad how to solve this problem tonight.

 
You can see that students had a whole range of reactions to this open-ended challenge where the only hints I provided were the readings from the textbook and lots of materials that I set out for them to use. 

For two days they tried lots of different ideas.  Lots of things didn't work but I don't think a kid thought they "failed".  They knew it was more of a treasure hunt so it wouldn't necessarily be the first path they'd take.  Each group had decided which challenge to attempt so in some classes, every group picked the same challenge and in other classrooms I had all three going on at once.  Eventually students realized they could share results with each other and that it would help....and so they compared data in some cases and in other they showed how they built an apparatus.

In this first video you'll see a group trying to document what they've learned about rising and falling air.  Unfortunately what they thought they could show didn't work and then they try to explain why.

 

In this next group, they had more success.  Even though this group had repeated trials where it worked before they started filming, I think they were shocked when it worked as they felt like it would.

 

In both cases, video was a huge help to me to listen in on what they're articulating about their learning...and it isn't easy getting the model to show what they learned, video tape and explain ALL AT THE SAME TIME. 

You can tell they own the learning and I think it demonstrates a couple of things:

1. Students love to be in charge of what they learn.  They'll probably learn it deeper and more forever than anything I could find in a pre-made lab.
2. Students love choice and getting to pick the challenge they must solve.
3. Learning is very messy.
4. Kids can suffer "failures" if they still learn from the experience....and I don't think they see these as failures for very long.  Rather I think they are astute enough to see that it's fiddling around that helps them learn.
5. Real self-esteem is derived from these kinds of experiences where they solved the problem.  At least way more self-satisfaction than what they gain from follwing a publisher's lab correctly and coming out with the right answer.
6. That said, I couldn't do what I do without the publisher sending me in the right direction.  I do greatly value the labs they create....I just need to tweak them to be far less prescriptive and lots more opened.  But they have done the work to find what's safe and probaby age-appropriate.
7. Doing this kind of work with 30+ students in one classroom is a HUGE challenge from space planning to getting enough materials to being safe...and giving them any independence.  Oh how I long for a classroom with only 25 students.

Three lessons learned from student debrief of tiered labs

Presentations were an amazing experience this week.  Students improved in their ability to "talk science" and their electronic posters got more and more focused.  They could tell this too and I think they walked away with a real sense of accomplishment.  In our de-brief sessions, they said time and again how much they learned about heat transfer AND how hard it was at the beginning but how they "got" it by the end....usually followed by a big smile!!!

Focused listening is crucial

Guest expertise allows students to achieve more things

Learning the pedagogy for scientific argumentation is a high art-form

• Again I learn the lesson that it helps to sit and really listen to what each group saying.  That focused attention is crucial.  Several groups had subpar presentations but with a few tweaks...."oh, that's what I should have done", they could recraft their presentation.

In order to do this I have to design lessons that allow me the freedom to become a part of the audience.  Again this back to what Sheryl taught me this summer to morph into the passion based classroom where students know they're in charge.

 

• Having guest speakers help.  We had a mechanical engineer present to the classes...and he was brilliant.  Mostly because you could tell he does presentation after presentation.  The graphics were engaging and the content was relevant.  Students loved what he explained to them....and they were able to transfer watching him present to what they should do.  It wasn't hard for me to ask them...."Did Mr. M read the slide to you when he presented?"  "No...he told a story about it and the slide had the key words."....and lightbulb moment...."Oh, that's what I should do?"  and then they were off.

The generosity of parents to participate in our classes is staggering.  This dad chatted via email with my students about their analysis of heating patterns, asked questions and suggested ways to think about things differently....all before he gave up an entire morning to come to speak with my students.  He's an engineer for a local consulting firm and he works at building hospitals....knows tons about HVAC systems.   What benefit my students gained from interacting with him and validating their ideas....nevermind the excellent role model he presented about how engineering can be a great career option.

 

• Practicing scientific argumentation is good.  Seems like a no-brainer to say that, but increment practice steps really help.  Since we've been focused on relating data vs evidence, they're really getting better at it.

Teaching for discourse is hard work.  Well worth it.  But it takes years and years to get any good at it and to develop any intutitive sense of what will work with students.  I'm getting there.  The big encouragement is that the Next Generation Science Standards are going to rely heavily on this idea....so I'm ahead of the curve on something.

 

Listening picture used permission under CC Attribution license   http://www.flickr.com/photos/40732566596@N01/109538354/

Tiered lab assignments: Success, creativity and independence

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.

Coaching data into evidence...student have a reason to analyze lab results now

Problem:  Students have written conclusions that don't have anything to do with what happened during their lab experience.  It was as if they didn't learn a thing from participating in the lab...yet if you talked to them, they did understand what happened.

So my challenge was to help students learn how to use the lab data in such a way that it compelled them to write conclusions that were linked to each other.  I've been working on this idea of scientific argumentation since 2008 when I participated in a yearlong action research project sponsored by a nearby university.  Ever since then, I've been tearing apart each piece of the process and testing ideas/refining them so they have pragmatic value to me and to my students.

 

 

Solution: in process

I have to coach them through this process of being youthful investigators...balancing their inexperience with trying to show them how science answers questions.  How they should connect their conclusions to what they see and experience...not just what they think is going to be the right answer.

You'll remember my first attempt at using an actual lab experience, Air Has Mass, to start the conversation.  I knew I couldn't be done because over 50% of my students still didn't know how to track the differences between the data they collected and then building evidence to answer their question.

Students most recently have been working on different heat transfer labs and they are now putting together their digital poster presentations.  I've given them some tips on how to do this.  I also showed them some college level posters so they could visualize what these looked like.

What has been rewarding is how they "get" my question about what is evidence and what is data.  Now that's sort of nitpicking...but the behind the scenes learning is this...

• Most students now realize they must have a reason and data to support their conclusion
• Most students realize they can't just throw numbers or observations into their poster and see that it has to make sense
• Most students are beginning to understand that it's the analysis you do with the data that creates the evidence you use to support your conclusion.

I'm so thrilled at their realization that is their analysis which transforms the numbers/observations into something useful.

What I've also discovered is that using Google Presentation Docs are a wonderful way for me to blend the formative and summative part of this into one document.   All along the way I have access to their poster and I can make comments to the whole group on the document (the formative part of this learning cycle).  When we get to the end, I think the posters will be much better than normal because of the continuous attention that I've given them AND the fact that what I suggested continues to be accessible 24/7 to them in those comments.  It's easier for my 11 and 12 year olds to remember what needs to be fixed if my suggestions aren't just a conversation that they have to remember.

Here's one beginning draft....it's not finished but they have a good start, I think.

Getting it just right

Next week the proof will be in how well these presentations and their arguments hold up.  They'll be doing partner presentations....two groups partnered and presenting to each other.  I've designed a rubric they'll use to evaluate each other's conclusion, data and evidence....which should help facilitate a more fact/logical reasoning conversation.  Keeping my fingers crossed.

 

Balancing picture used under CC license attribution http://www.flickr.com/photos/frozenhaddock/3947478553/sizes/l/in/photostream/ 

Finding evidence in all the lab data & using scientific argumentation

Distinguishing evidence from all the data is a tough skill to learn

One of the hardest skills for a 6th grade to learn is scientific argumentation....and a big part of that skill is knowing what is the evidence to support your conclusion.  We worked on that when we did the "Does Air Have Mass" lab.  Sadly as I read student conclusions, I realized they were not consistently using what they had learned from their experimentation.  They were relying on what they believed or what they thought would happen.

Reading professional journals and learning from other teacher's experience helps

Fortunately I had just read "Data Versus Evidence" in the most recent Science Scope magazine by Mary Grace Viillanueva and Brian Hand.  They did an excellent job of finding an analogous situation that would make sense for a 6th grader.  The authors suggested using the student's familiarity with police shows where detectives must take an abundance of information and figure out which pieces of evidence help find the criminal.  The article has a wonderful suggested activity which I will incorporate the next time I start this process, but I was able to shorten and do the whole thing in about 3-4 minutes.  (This is an image from my SmartBoard that I was able to export as an image file...something I find incredibly helpful when sending copies of notes to special ed teachers or to help a student that is return from an absence.)

Quickly students were able to use this graphic organizer to sort through their information....break it into data and evidence.  I scribed their thinking in a blog post for the science class.  I think it helped them to write this post....one sentence at a time they would describe and then we'd figure out how to write it down.  We're not there but we are on the way.

Taking a good idea, customizing it and making it even better for my students and my classroom

This article was a huge help and it reinforced my existing belief that it's the processing you do after the lab that is most critical to building science understanding.  I was able to take what I'd learned from a previous lesson outcome and use that to create a better learning experience this time.

The other thing I realized was that students didn't know how to write a conclusion sentence.  To help them out, I wrote a "frame" to help them learn where and how to use the evidence.  This was still hard for them.

As we read aloud the conclusions, though, it seemed like most people were figuring it out.  Lots of erasing and re-writing....but I think that's what learning is all about.