Will Richardson raises some very powerful points in his essay "Why School?" School is an institution that seems to be falling behind the new developments in our society and the changes that are taking place in the world around us. I think that one of the more perplexing questions that I face (and I imagine many of my colleagues have the same issue) is what to do with technology use, especially smartphones, in the classroom. Richardson brings up the very valid point that school is the only place where students can't take out their devices and answer the questions everywhere around them. I'm not sure I know what to do with this information yet but I think that does a great job of reinforcing the general idea of this text: schools are currently creating situations in which students are asked to solve questions that they no longer need to be able to answer- Google can do it for them. Richardson talks about two schools of thought when it comes to the education system. The first school, pardon the pun, is focused on helping students learn to take and succeed on standardized tests that are used to compare our nation's educational system to other nations'. I think that in some ways these tests are enormously helpful in giving us a way to measure success of different teaching systems. However, I feel that this method of teaching does a poor job in preparing the next generation for the new world that is growing around us. The second school focuses on teaching students to thrive in a world of information abundance where skills like networking, critical thinking and creativity are valued much higher than recall and test-taking skill. Students should be taught to add to add to the world by creating, analyzing and experimenting Phases of Matter, Chemical and Physical Changes and the Law of Conservation of Mass The material here has been fitted to an arctic landscape. The first part of this lesson talks about the phases of matter and I wanted to connect right away to students schema regarding the different phases of water which they are already familiar with. I also have a few penguins scattered around that ask a few questions for both me and the students to answer as a way of injecting a little of the ridiculous into the classroom. Something that I hope will help make some of the concepts more memorable.
The lesson began with students getting out of their chairs to model physically the behavior of molecules in the different phases within a taped off portion of the floor. I was actually really pleased with how well the students were able to act out the different phases, although they did resist the activity a little. Many students seemed a little uncomfortable getting out of their chairs and doing things other than taking notes or working on practice problems. A few misconceptions (or maybe just poor acting) were occasionally seen in the different periods. The "gas particles" forgot to move in a mock random way and were carefully avoiding each other. The "liquid particles" tended to fill the entire area instead of staying nearer each other and near the bottom of the "container." The solid particles didn't move at all and had to be encouraged a little to show some vibration. The part that I really wanted to get to was asking "the particles" to model what happened when they got warmer/cooler and at higher/lower pressure. Students struggled with this a lot more but I felt it really helped some of them engage in higher level thinking. After this we moved into a quick discussion about the words used to describe the changes from phase to phase. The diagram in the Prezi facilitated this discussion and students were encouraged to jot down their own version of the presentation. We also had a quick interlude discussion with the first penguin about the differences between the words gas and vapor. At the end of the discussion of the names of the phase changes students were asked to explain to their partners why the phase changes occurred in a think/pair/share. We then reviewed the definitions of physical properties and introduced the new concept of physical change. The same thing was done for chemical properties and chemical change. During the review and extension of these terms students were asked to collaborate in small groups to generate ideas and answers before being asked to risk their answer in front of the whole class. We then transitioned into a lab activity where students were encouraged to prove or disprove the law of conservation of mass. The name of the law was not introduced at this time to avoid influencing the student's process. Students were told that the y would have a few chemicals that do react in order to test their hypothesis. After giving students time to discuss their ideas and questions they were allowed to perform the experiment. A data table at the front of the class was used to record their results. After the experiment we talked about the law of conservation of mass and about how the experiment could be improved to do a better job of proving our hypothesis. We ended with a simple chemical equation and practice problem to reinforce the law of conservation of mass. The material is presented to look like it has been stapled, taped and stickied to a wall. This was done in part to help show students how information can be broken up from a larger whole into smaller chunks that are easier for our minds to digest. The red lines that radiate out from the center point to the largest 4 sections of the student notesheets that were handed out as a guide for their note-taking activities. The three yellow sticky notes that are not connected to the whole are the total objectives for the class that day and some guides for a few of the activities we did together in class. More details on these activities are given below.
Moving forward from the first slide it zooms to the objectives where I tried to highlight some of the key vocabulary words that the students would be learning. The question that is posed at the end "what do you know?" was a great way to see what knowledge the students were bringing into the classroom. One pleasant surprise was that many students were familiar with roots homo- and hetero- from the biology terms homozygous and heterozygous. This led to a short discussion on the meaning of these root words and other places that the same roots come up. The next slide reviews the definition of matter generally and students were asked to explain what matter is in their own words and then find examples of matter in the picture as a low risk collaboration activity to set them up for higher risk activities in the future. The lists that students put together were monitored by the instructor and a master list of types of matter was written onto the board for use in next activity. Activity #1: Learning to Classify Crosscutting Concept: Patterns This activity was built to help students begin to develop the ability to look for patterns and sort information into those patterns. Students were informed that it was up to them to decide how many categories they would use and that it was up to them to determine what categories they would create. The instructors moved among the students to help keep students on task and ask guided questions about why students chose different categories. At the end of the activity students were invited to share their broad categories. The instructors were careful to remind students that there were many ways to categorize the list on the board and that there was no one correct answer. Emphasis was placed on consistency of the grouping and accuracy in the naming of the categories so that it reflected well on the objects that were within the category. Activity #2: Classifying Matter Crosscutting Concept: Patterns A sheet divided into boxes that contained the name of an example of matter (i.e. water, oxygen, ozone, hydrochloric acid, saltwater, bronze, trail mix, iron, salad dressing, etc.) was handed out to students and they were instructed to cut the boxes apart and then separate the matter examples into two groups. The instructors moved around the room and helped guide the tables towards classifying the examples as either substances or mixtures without explicitly stating the names of each group. Students were encouraged to generate category names themselves and to justify why each item was placed into a category. Students who finished early were then encouraged to divide the categories into two subcategories each. Full-Sized sheets were used with magnets on the board at the end to classify into the master categories of substances and mixtures and the subcategories of elements, compounds, solutions and heterogeneous mixtures. Again, the emphasis was to get the students engaged in justifying why each item was in a certain category then giving the exact definitions of the categories. The next slide after the activities introduces the central image which should be similar to how the last activity was presented on the board. We return to this image repeatedly and use it as a road map to help guide understanding of each category discussed later and how they are related to each other. The next area that is explored in the Prezi are the master categories of substances and mixtures. The red text is meant to help students find the most important parts of the text to copy down. After each is explained students are asked to do a think/pair/share on the difference between the two. After returning to the big idea picture and showing students where the substance and mixture categories are in relation to each other the subcategories of elements and compounds. Students were encouraged to review together the definition of substances and then elements and compounds were explained and labeled. The subcategories of mixtures were handled next in a similar manner. Images were given more than words to help illustrate the key differences between each. |
Mr. TerrillI began teaching in 2015. While I majored in Chemistry I was given the chance to teach AP Physics 1 my first year. I haven't looked back yet. Archives
August 2017
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