Let me give you a little background into what is going on in my classroom tomorrow. I am super excited to lead two instructional pieces tomorrow, and to get that Warner LP written, I started with my output and then worked backwards (I think) to the Lesson plan details.
The first activity is what the CT calls the periodic table lab. In this lab, students are paired up and given 19 element cards. All the cards have on them are the symbol of an element from groups 1, 2, 13-18. The students are coming right out of a unit on atomic structure.
The students will be filling out the missing information on their cards and then cutting them out. they will have to arrange them in a manner so that they can identify the most patterns in the numbers of protons, neutrons, atomic mass, atomic number, valence electrons, and lewis structure.
The reason why I am excited about this “lab” activity (which I really think is just an exercise in organization…not science), is that I feel like I have scooped together all of the relevant district curriculum requirements and state standards into a moderately engaging activity. I am moving them (the students) coherently from one curricular unit to the next, hitting some of the local standards for the class on the way.
Anyway, I am getting side tracked. In reading Understanding By Design, I got the impression that Big Ideas dont require big explanations. Its quite the contrary in fact. Big Ideas are so broad they require very little verbage to explain their essence. This essence in turn is quite nebulous and purposefully so, Big Ideas make you think and look for answers. They do not give you any factual tidbits or “knowledge”, and they are timeless and limitless.
So I thought that the Big Idea for this unit on the Periodic Table is really as simple as this…Recognizing Patterns.
I know this sounds more like a mathematics Goal or Big Idea, but thats really what all of the standards were asking the students to do. There were process skills requiring students to “understand” the periodic table. Well its just a pattern!
The reason why I put understand in quotes is that I am not sure that students will really understand the periodic table in the sense that they have hit all 6 of Wiggins and McTighe’s Facets of Understanding (2005). Instead their curriculum goals ask them to remember that the periodic table is a patterned arrangement of the elements, and that this pattern is reinforced by multiple atomic characteristics, nature reflects this pattern in that elements of the same group have common characteristics.
At this point in these students’ careers, they are deeply entrenched in understanding a topic as a single faceted jewel, Explanation.
Maybe someone out there can help me understand how to get at Understanding the Periodic table from each of Wiggins and McTighe’s six facets because I am coming up blank on some of the more metacognitive aspects of understanding. Its a reference table to me,I know all the elements, I see the patterns, I apply the knowledge of the patterns to predictions, but What about Perspective and Empathy? I don’t know about those. The last Facet, Self Knowledge is pretty straighforward, I know the Periodic table is limited in what it can do at higher levels of chemistry, but that is not really an interest at the 7th grade level…
I am following up the lab activity with the introduction of an element modeling projectw here they will need to incorporate new content that they were exposed to in the Periodic Table Lab. Not only that, but by doing this lab activity, they should have a stronger footing to tackle the project, as it will be revisiting components of this lab (like PEN, PEA, Valence, Lewis Structure, Bohr Diagram). Oh, and I made my first Rubric for a student project! fun fun!
And, as a testament to what I think is backwards design (Please let me know If I am waaaay off base)…I have my whole lesson planned, standards chosen, and procedures written out, and I have not even started my Warner Lesson Plan (even though one is not due).
G.P. & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.