UbD Stage 3

This week, we completed stage 3 of the understanding by design structured unit. I laid out my unit as I would any other unit, listing activities by the day. Then I labeled them according to which letter of WHERETO each applied to (many applied to both). I constructed it this way because it shows the sequence of activities as well as how they apply to each of the ides presented in the WHERETO acronym.

W- Where are we going?

H- How will we hook and hold educator interest?

E- How will we Equip educators for expected performance?

R- How will we help educators Rethink and revise?

E- How will educators self-Evaluate and reflect on their learning?

T- How will we Tailor learning to varied needs, interests, and styles?

O- How will we Organize and sequence the learning?

I think my plan showed how the spiral design is incorporated into my unit, helping the students remember to always return to previous knowledge. I think this idea helps the students truly build on their own knowledge, rather than learning a bunch of disordered facts.

I liked reading others’ plans, especially to see the different ways they put them together. I saw many of my peers post individual ideas under each letter, rather than present a consecutive list of activities. Some presented a consecutive list of activities, but only listed those that pertained to each letter in order. I saw some great potential in others’ work, and saw how their layout made sense for the type of unit they were trying to accomplish. I think this activity helped show how different level teachers and different subject teachers can use a similar form of lesson planning to accomplish their goals. I also saw that different layouts can work for different goals, but all parts are still necessary to create a viable unit plan. I enjoyed this project, and it really helped ground my planning for my first unit as a paid teacher!!

Cooperative Learning and Constructivism

In this week’s module, we read and discussed a lot of the strategies that many teachers are relying on in the classroom today. We are emphasizing cooperative learning because we know that practice will help the students learn how to work with others. The career field is looking for future employees that can work with others well, so we want our students to be able to do this. Group projects are a huge part of cooperative learning and I personally like to use them in class often. I think they are a great way for students to set their own goals and objectives and figure out a way to meet them. This helps the students become more independent and able to work on projects without the always present oversight of the teacher.

Constructivism is a very modern approach to education. Many older teachers that I know have a big problem with this method because they feel that it takes too long, and would limit the amount of material that we can cover in a year even more than it already is. They also feel that there is too much of a chance that the students could understand the concepts incorrectly, misinterpret how they can be used, or use them incorrectly out of context. Constructivism is a new concept, and very different from direct instruction. I think it is a powerful tool that we can use, because students are building their own knowledge in their own words. Each student will own the knowledge themselves, rather than feel like they are absorbing the knowledge of others.

Advance Organizers

This week, we read all about advance organizers, and helpful examples of how to use them in the classroom. My first thought was using them to organize the ideas from a lecture or textbook. Many of my colleagues had this same idea, as it is the easiest way to relate this concept to something many of us may already do in the classroom. I was interested in the idea of using the advance organizers before hearing any of the information we give them. Using the organizers to elicit misconceptions or allow students to make connections between broad ideas before going into the details of the concepts. I thought this idea would be great to slowly introduce students to the material, rather than periodically dumping big, complicated ideas on them and then expecting them to organize all the pieces.

I think that last week’s material, concept attainment, goes along very well with this idea. If we go through brainstorming and categorizing, we can go one step further to organize the ideas into a concept map, which helps the students prepare for the material to come.

Attaining Concepts

We have to help students do this every day, yet we need to determine the best way to help students do this. In the reading this week, we were given many examples of how we show the students facts and help them explore and discover the concepts we desire them to learn. The discussions my classmates and I had this week helped give all of us more examples of how facts can be strung together to form concepts.

Facts can be combined to form the concepts we are trying to teach, but it is also possible for the students to piece them together incorrectly, so that they form misconceptions that can stay with them for a long time, as the video of the Harvard students showed. This is one of the struggles we must face when helping students learn new material, or revisit material they have previously learned. We must elicit what misconceptions they already have (most students have some misconceptions- never assume students are blank slates!)  and keep them from forming new misconceptions. As we teach, we must be conscious of those misconceptions in order to help the students explore the concepts and reach the correct end point.

As one of my classmates said, once the students have reached the correct concept, they can then elicit more facts from that concept, and delve deeper into the material they understand. This continued study can deepen their knowledge, and help them make it more meaningful.

Inductive Strategies

In this week’s module, we discussed inductive strategies and their benefit or detriment to today’s students. Many people had similar ideas. I think there is a lot of benefit because the students are formulating their own ideas, rather than being made to learn the ideas of others. Many of my colleagues spelled out this same idea, adding that students can explore different ideas and develop their own from their explorations (Rossi, blackboard). I also think inductive strategies are beneficial because students can learn more than simply the topic on which the lesson is based, or even learn more than one topic at once. Because inductive strategies are so flexible, many ideas or subjects can be combined into one lesson (Sanders, blackboard). I think that inductive strategies are a great way to teach certain subjects to students, because students can use their own ideas, which motivate them to learn it because it is based around an interest of their own.

However, the strategy does have its drawbacks. Sometimes, these kinds of activities take much longer for some students to understand because backgrounds of students can be so different. Sometimes the whole class will take much longer to get to the right idea, or one group of slower students will not understand which makes planning difficult. Then, there is the issue of students potentially coming to incorrect conclusions (Seamans, blackboard) or embedding their misconceptions further, rather than correcting them. All these cons make these kinds of lessons take much longer than simple direct instruction, but I think the benefits outweigh these possible consequences because I think student built learning is much more valuable and stays with the students much longer than memorizing from a lecture or textbook.

What knowledge is of most worth?

I learned that Herbert Spencer believed that those activities that led to self-preservation and preservation of the human race. I learned that Spencer believed that science was the most important subject of knowledge because science leads to the advancement of the human race, such as advancement in health and medicine. However, he did not foresee that science could be used to make weapons or other means of war. Finally, Spencer made the radical suggestion that learning should be based on discovery, not direct instruction type activities (Ellis, slide 14-15). I wondered why he is only thinking about the human race. What about the Earth? Sustaining the Earth is a necessity if the human race is to continue existing. I thought it was a short sight that Spencer did not include this idea.

Horace Mann came up with the idea that the public need and deserve an education, so that the republic will not remain ignorant. He also thought education must be paid for, controlled and sustained by an interested public (Ellis, slide 19-20). I think it is interesting that he thinks everyone should have an education but everyone should also have to pay for it. What about people who cannot afford an education? Do they not need or deserve it?

I love the idea that my subject is of the most worth, according to Spencer. However, I think it is important to remember ethics when it comes to science. Spencer did not foresee the consequences of all scientific technology, and therefore possibly did not foresee the need for teaching ethics of using scientific breakthroughs. When I teach students about different scientific breakthroughs, such as cloning or using stem cells, we always talk about the ethical issues connected with the breakthroughs. For example, we talked about the difference between using stem cells from a fetus versus using stem cells from an umbilical cord. We talked about how the cells can be used in different ways, and how the technologies could be advanced in the future. I think in the future I can have debates, or discussions to help students see all sides of each technological breakthrough.

Meta-Reflection on Standard S: Knowledge of Subject Matter and Curriculum Goals

I feel that I have come a long way to fulfill this standard this year. I try to make all of my lessons content driven. When in class, students must solve problems in order to succeed in science and understand given curriculum standards, which may range from understanding concepts by explaining them in a different way to applying their knowledge to answer a question.

Students in my classes use different methods to learn the given material. They listen to lectures and take notes, they complete practice problems, and they ask questions when they do not understand, which happens in most classrooms, such as in my mentors’ classrooms. I have added some components to help students show their understanding in different ways. Three particular assignments have stuck out this quarter in my classes. In chemistry, I came up with a poster activity, with the help of my mentor and a few other faculty members, to help the students with orbital notation and the periodic table. Students were assigned an element, and need to figure out how to represent the valence electrons in an illustration, and how to complete the orbital notation for their element, with only one explanation of how it worked the previous day. This activity is aligned with the physical science content standard 9-11 PS2A and helps students meet the standard. I think this poster helped them practice orbital notation without doing the usual lecture and worksheet. I think these kinds of activities help the students want to learn the material rather than having it forced down their throats.

Another way to help the students want to learn the material is to introduce the material with a short video. This helps the students see the material in context, outside of simply learning the material to pass a test. I like to show my students some sort of cartoon every Friday, to help them see chemistry outside of the classroom. I make sure that each one is aligned with the current material because they are the most applicable to the students at that time. From one cartoon, the students were able to demonstrate that they understood the concept of negative ions being attracted to positive ions by explaining it.

In our stoichiometry unit, the students needed to understand how to perform dimensional analysis. We taught the students at the beginning of the year, but they struggled with the concept. I had the students practice a lot in class, and put the problems in context as quickly as I could. Once I introduced the mole and how it can be used in context with the other units of measurement the students already knew (liters, grams, molecules, formulas units, atoms, ions), then I talked about how to convert from amounts of reactants to amounts of products in a demonstrated chemical reaction, combustion of methane. I gave the students a map that would give them a picture of a two neighborhood map to follow a path to get from a given value to the value that they want. The picture depicted different paths to trace, so they can see how to use conversion factors to get from one unit to another. The next day, I organized a jigsaw in which a group of 3-4 students worked on two problems, then scrambled the groups so there was one “master” of each set of problems in a group, so students were teaching other students. We also discussed the importance of two of the problem sets, as they applied to two important chemical reactions, photosynthesis and respiration. By the end of the jigsaw, the students had eight solved stoichiometry problems. The next day, I gave a quiz, a problem almost identical to the problems the students had worked out for themselves the day before. Most students showed that they did indeed understand the concept of dimensional analysis and how to convert from an amount of reactant to an amount of product (1, 2, 3). On the final day, I gave them practice problems that they had to complete correctly for stamps, which translated into points when they turned in a packet that contained all the work listed in this paragraph.

At the end of the stoichiometry unit, I wanted to put together an activity that allowed the students to use all of the knowledge they have gained to complete tasks that synthesize their learning. We had been looking at which reactant in a chemical reaction would limit the amount of product made, and then calculating percent yield, which is product made in an experiment compared to the amount a reaction is supposed produce, according to the math. I used different resources to come up with a three part stations lab, in which the students would be looking at two different chemical reactions and comparing different amounts of reactant to discover which the limiting reactant in each was. The third station was a computer simulation in which students had to put reactants into a system, and look at what was produced. They could determine which reactant was limiting, and how much of each product was produced. I think the lab really helped them synthesize their knowledge. They understood how to calculate the amount of product from given reactants, and how to calculate the percent yield of a reaction in front of them compared to the theoretical amount of product they calculated themselves (1, 2, 3). This lesson was aligned with the physical science standard 9-11 PS2G.

 In biology, I came up with an activity where students composed a poem, song or story about what happens when salt is poured on a slug, using specific vocabulary words we learned in class. Students showed their understanding of osmosis by composing a creative piece (1, 2, 3), which is different than normal assignments. This helped them internalize what osmosis is and how it works by asking them to relate it to their lives. This activity is aligned with the life science content standard 9-11 LS1D and helps them meet it. The writing in this assignment helped the students improve their writing, as well as allowing them to incorporate their interests into the stories (see the students work included in the above link).The students were also able to show their creativity in what kind of story they told. The final assignment was an established lab within the biology curriculum, Investigating Cell Variety, where the students needed to figure out what distinguishes a plant cell from an animal cell by looking at different cells and identifying similarities and differences between them. I think this activity helped the students tremendously in understanding plant and animal cell structure, much more so than any lecture might. By the end of the lab, the students’ understood that plant cells are structured and rectangular while animal cells do not have a defined shape, shown by the drawings they completed. By answering different questions, the students showed their understanding that plant cells must go through photosynthesis to get their energy. Therefore, these plants must contain specialized organelles (chloroplasts) to complete this process. Finally, students understood that even though plant and animal cells have differences, there are still common organelles because both must contain the basic structures that make a cell a cell. This activity is aligned with the life science content standard 9-11 LS1C and helps the students meet this standard. This lab required students to use their reading and writing skills to understand the lab manual directions, and answer those questions presented in their lab manuals.

            These are all things I have done in the classroom. Through my educational technology class, I found a few other ways to meet this standard. One of the ideas I have gotten through my studies is incorporation of computer games that help students improve their critical thinking and problem solving skills into the curriculum. Another idea is to create a lab that asks students to collaborate with another classroom across the globe. The students would each complete a similar comparative investigative lab that applies to each country’s environment. The students would post their findings in an organized fashion on a collaborative site, such as a blog, and then compare with those findings of the other classroom. They could learn the content they are supposed to, incorporate reading, writing and technology, and introduce students to a new culture.

            I have learned a lot this past year about this standard and how to fulfill it in the classroom. It does not only encompass the concepts you must teach the students. This standard encompasses how you teach students these concepts, including relating the concepts to the students’ lives, and the other subjects they are learning. It also includes how you relate the content to their future lives and the skills they need to succeed once they graduate from high school. I feel that I am learning how to effectively accomplish all of these things in my classroom by watching how my mentors do it, and trying out different techniques and activities that I came up with.  These are only the most prominent ways that I have fulfilled this standard in my classroom, and I hope to continue to learn more as I go through my teaching career.

ActivVotes

I have started using ActivVotes in both my chemistry and biology classes and I absolutely love them! They are a great tool to get students to participate in class practice problems. They can be made anonymous or linked to a specific person, so students do not have to be afraid of being singled out with the incorrect answer. You can save the results of the quiz directly into your flipchart (ActivStudio or ActivInspire technology, which is linked with a SmartBoard) or power point so that you can keep the results, as a bar graph, for yourself or as a motivator for your students. I think the students really like to use them, even though they are completing the same types of problems that they would be if I had them complete the practice problems on paper. In addition, you can export the flipchart with the saved results to a jpg or pdf or a word doc. They show up as pictures, so it is necessary to adjust you formatting if you want to see the original question beneath your saved results graph. Below I linked some examples of questions I asked (and the students’ responses):

Biology: 5, 6, 7, 8

Why I teach…

Today was one of those days that I live to teach for (5th period anyway). I came in a little upset because of previous classes and a couple of my students noticed. I was smiling within 5 mintues of just chatting with my students. Right now we are in the middle of cell reproduction. We have just finished mitosis, and are working on learning about karyotypes as an introduction to meiosis.

Yesterday, we started off with a short multiple choice question review on chromosome structure using the active voters (small remotes that have multiple choice answers so students can answer questions from their desks and feedback can be immediate). It was the first time we had used them, and the students were very excited. I was able to see immediately the the class remembered everything about chromosome structure. We then discussed the different types of chromosomes (autosomes and sex chromosomes) and the different types of cells (somatic cells (all cells in your body except sex cells) and sex cells (eggs and sperm)). The students were asking lots of great questions and we did not get through very much material because they were asking such great questions. At the end of the period, I had them write a “clear/ unclear” statement, which was also a first for this class. I have had them write summaries before, and answer specific questions, but I have never asked them to write about what confused them. This was extremely beneficial because I could see exactly what I needed to re-address, or what I needed to go over. I also had some students ask great questions in addition to explaining what they didn’t understand, most of which will be answered once we start meiosis on monday . Examples of students responses will be posted soon.

Today, I used the warm up to start a conversation about the concepts covered the day before. I included a visualization activity in which the students were asked to close their eyes and think about the chromosomes in different parts of their body, so they would get an idea about how many chromosomes they have in their entire bodies. It was great because I got a lot of students saying “ooh!” because they get what they did not understand the day before. Then, we talked about karyotypes, both what they are, how they are put together, and what they are supposed to look like. Again, the students asked great questions and starting great discussions. Finally, we talked about chromosomal disorders, issues with the number of chromosomes people can have, using karyotypes of specific disorders. The students were so interested in the different disorders that as soon as I put up a picture of a new karyotype, they immediately wanted to know the symptoms, and would barely let me describe the chromosomes before berating me with questions about the symptoms, even though I was about to list them. The questions the students were asking were so great. As we were talking about disorders, I breifly introduced meiosis, just to get the students thinking about how you inherit each chromosome. One student had a great “aha!” moment. She asked “so is that why pregnancy takes 9 months? Because the baby starts out as one cell, then divides exponentially? Like it starts out as one cell, then becomes two, then becomes four, then becomes eight and so on?” I said yep, and she exclaimed, “ooh! that is so cool!” Then the girl behind her says, “This stuff is so interesting! No offense, but I wasn’t so interested in previous units, but this unit is so cool. Well last unit (mitosis and DNA) was cool too, but this is really interesting!” The last thing we did was use the active voters to see of the students understood how the karyotypes showed disorders. From the few slides we got through, it was very obvious that the students really grasped the concepts. Today was one of those days that I live for. My students all were super interested in the material, and they made me feel like I was really doing a great job teaching them to love biology.

Planning for enhanced student learning

As I am planning the next concept the chemistry students must master (stoichiometry/ dimensional analysis), I am trying to determine the best type of activities to help the students understand and master the material. In the beginning of the year, my mentor taught the students basic stoichiometry, with simple metric conversions and other conversions the students should already have been familiar with (1 dozen = 12 pieces, etc). Now that the students have learned about the mole, we can incorporate the mole conversions into stoichiometry. The student had a hard time with dimensional analysis the first go around, and the mole is a hard concept for students to wrap their heads around because they cannot see it. I am trying to use small group work to help the students teach each other how to solve the problems. Sometimes, however, I find that the students are not motivated to learn the material unless I give them a quiz, or somthing similar. I am trying to think up ways that I can intrinsicly motivate the students without threatening them.

Ideas so far:

Showing students a map of paths to get between different units and having them use it to guide them to the correct conversion factors.

Using a demo (combustion of methane) and working through problems as a class- choosing students to give answers by drawing popsicle sticks- each students’ name on a popsicle stick.

Having students work in small groups to help each other learn how to solve one problem (each group with a different problem), then mixing the groups to have small groups of one student teaching the other three or four students how to complete their problem.

Motivators:

Telling the students that one of the problems they are solving will be on a single question quiz the next day.

Splitting students into groups and turning a worksheet  in to a competition- whoever completes the problem the fastest, and gets it right, wins.

Having students work as a team through a set of problems. If they get all of them right on the first time they get checked off, they get full points. If they get one wrong, they go back, fix the issue and they can get most of the points, etc.