Joel’s Hypernet Infodump

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.

I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but I am feeling really stoked after the first two days of my new placement.

7th grade chemistry class might be the perfect forum for teaching “Big Picture Science” (Behm, 2001).  I say this because although my new students look like miniature adults, they really do not yet possess a great deal of knowledge on the subject of science or chemistry.  But what they do possess a great deal of enthusiasm, curiosity, and energy.

So quickly the conversation regarding Nuclear Fission, and Fusion jumped to other really interesting science topics.  Students were engaged and really eager to express their prior knowledge, which was great!  But, there was little more than factual knowledge being presented.  A few students were hitting on really interesting science topics, like sun spots and solar flares (following the discussion of Nuclear Fusion driving our star).  The best part of the session was a willingness to allow students to struggle with vocabulary.  It really felt like a science DISCUSSION.  We touched on a lot of big ideas.

While their initial enthusiasm compels me to dive deep into what I can teach them about Fusion and Fission, the atomic bomb, World War II, and all the rest, I am realizing that they need the Big Picture first.

However, I am struggling with when and  where do I draw the line for myself and my students?  How deep is too deep?  I dont want to pull students away from something they find interesting, but I cannot allow them to go astray either.  They might synthesize more misconceptions!

I am going to try and start thinking about something that we have not talked much about.  Lesson limits.  The Warner LP does a good job at integrating really powerful connections into lesson planning, but it does not have us think proactively about what we ARE NOT GOING TO DO.  When having a rather open scientific discussion, how far are you going to allow the topic to stray before intervening?  Are you going to add fuel to the fire?

I think my own childlike curiosity and enthusiasm will need some wrangling.  At least I will be aware of setting myself some boundaries.  I need boundaries just like my students need them…for Structure.

Behm, C. (2001). Big Picture Science. The Science Teacher, 68(3), 36-39.

Class this week brought me a new understanding of the NYS Chemistry Core Curriculum:

http://www.emsc.nysed.gov/ciai/mst/pub/chemist.pdf

I have been getting familiar with this document for some time, but one Monday, things started to make more sense.   The visual flow chart put it together on how to align Major Understandings with Lesson Objectives and Performance indicators and Key ideas with the Goals.

It was an epiphany of bureaucratic documentation style I believe.  Understanding how the document is written is like cracking a code.

Interestingly, this highlights a barrier to knowledge within the educational system itself.  Pass a chemistry core curriculum document off to a trained chemist (me), and watch as he struggles to make sense of how it is structured.  I don’t consider myself a mental slouch, and I had a hard time reading and interpreting this document and aligning it effectively with lesson goals and objectives.  It took a teachable moment to help me crack the final piece of the code and understand the bigger picture.

This is what I need to do with students.

Using a tool to get at the big picture learners to understand the Science Barrier:

Science and teaching science looks like a maximum security prison from the outside.  It looks so nasty and formidable that most sensible people choose to ignore it and keep shuffling by wary of its searchlights dancing.  In the current system, only those who see this fortress from the outside and wonder what lies beyond the stone gargoyles at the gate seek the training society sees necessary in order to enter the front gate.

But the reality is that the ” Science prison” is not keeping bad things from the rest of the world, it is keeping many wondrous things from the people who need them most.

So why erect a wall of jargon, a mote of definitions, guard towers of theory, and chains of lofty publications?  What are we scared of?

We all know that science benefits from diverse inquirers, so lets get the big picture rolling!  Don’t ignore the standards, but use them to your advantage when thinking of how to get the hook on students and feel free to break down communication barriers!  Those scary prison walls need to be chipped away at from the inside, where there is a real understanding of what the wall is doing to science itself.

I am going to try and reach the big picture science learners in my classrooms and give them the foundations they need to study the world like scientists, regardless of their career choices.