This was the first week at my second placement and what a different experience. I feel like I am in a classroom with mini adults with short attention spans. The way these seventh graders talk and present themselves is so very different from my tenth graders in the city. Not saying that they are better then my city students, I love working with them, but it is such a different atmosphere. I am excited to be working at this placement because of it being such a different experience along with the fact of working with middle school students. I have seen that you got to keep things changing to keep there attention, especially since I will be teaching blocks which is a completely new experience for me!
This week was also a big wake up call for me with regards to my lesson planning. I thought I was at a pretty good point until I received my feedback in class last Monday. Leaving class I felt overwhelmed and disappointed at myself for not being at that applied point we should be at this point. After class I spent a good chunk of time reading through my feedback and digesting everything. I have spent getting help to really understand how to take my understanding to te next step and through all of this I have learned a lot about my self. The biggest aspect is that I have approached my lesson plans being very “me-centered” and not enough of being “student-centered”. What I mean by this is not that I am being teacher centered in the classroom, but I am focusing too much on what I am doing and mostly what I will take away from the lesson. This is something haven’t intended to do on purpose, but I thinking I have been to focused on everything I should be incorporating into the lesson that it takes away from my thinking around the students. So this revelation has now gone to the top of my list of things to work on, my next steps as I like to call them. I haven’t seen the student directed value of the sections in the Warner lesson plan until now (which make me feel like an idiot) but now I am working to make that the top priority.
It has been two weeks since I finished my first student teaching placement and the feelings are still bittersweet. I really enjoyed the school, the classes, and most of all the students I was working with. As part of me is excited for a new adventure (or maybe even a new challenge), the other part is still incredibly sad that I couldn’t keep working at my first placement.
Thinking back…
It is amazing at how much a person can grow over the span of a few months. By the end of my placement I found that I had been scaffolding my lessons well, successfully practiced and saw the value of multiple forms of assessment, experienced the pluses and arrows of inquiry, and developed a strong ability for lesson planning including working with the standards and differentiation. Now I am not saying I am an expert, but these were the things that I really saw my growth in over the course of my placement. I know there is still a lot that I would like to work on with these aspects as well as others.
Looking forward…
As my next placement approaches my over all feeling is excitement, but I can’t help to dwell in the feeling of being nervous. It is not that I am nervous about working with new students, nor am I nervous about Middle school (well ok maybe a little), but I find myself nervous that I won’t enjoy the Chemistry content at the Middle school level and therefore I will not want to put my best effort forwards (since I tend to do less towards something I don’t enjoy). So I know this probably sounds stupid, but the Chemistry is my first love and I teach because I love Chemistry and want to share it with others. But my love for teaching it has always been, and still is, at a college level. The wonderful aspect of my first placement was that I was able to teach a Chemistry class that was about equivalent to a Freshman level college Chemistry course. I feel that, though important to understand in simple terms, the Chemistry I will be teaching will be watered down in order to be understand at that level and to me it begins loosing its heart and soul. I feel like I sound so silly and stupid about this, but that is how my crazy mind works. That is also why I try not to dwell in those thoughts and dwell in the thoughts of ‘excitement’ and ‘challenge’.
My next steps…
1) I really really really really want to become more organized. Something I should have done over these two weeks between placements but as usual never got around to it. My ‘pile’ system is getting a little crazy and if I don’t get it straightened out before the end I think I will be killing myself as I work on my portfolio.
2) I want to work more on my assessments. The little I did in my last placement went really well so I can only imagine the wonderful things that can come about if I do more of it!
3) I want to work with the standards more. The concept map and DKP is a good start, but I am looking forward to pulling it all together with the lesson planning.
4) I want to keep my head up high. The light is visible at the end of the tunnel and its growing brighter everyday!!
Today was the last official day of STARS and what a fun, crazy and emotional day it was. All the girls from the three schools were all gathered at East High for our last day and it turned out to be a lot of fun. Saturday is the STARS conference, so to help prepare the girls, we had them draw different aspects from the past ten weeks to contribute to the poster which will be displayed at the conference. We also had a conversation about the interactive stations that the girls are going to run at the conference.
To end the day we let the girls play with Diet Coke and Mentos. They had a lot of fun with this, especially the parts where Me and Lisa got soaked with soda. Went let them play with Diet Coke, Caffeine Free Diet Coke, and Regular Coke to analyze the difference in the types of soda, which in the end there wasn’t much. It was a great way to end our time with the girls.
65 Middle school girls who are interested, curios, and/or excited about Science
5 Authentically designed Science Investigations
10 Inquiry influenced lesson plans
Technology
Resources
Creativity
To Prepare:
1) Preheat the Middle school locations by actively trying to recruit middle schools girls who want to do science around reducing our carbon footprint.
2) Mix together the Master’s students, the Middle school girls, the authentically designed investigations, and the inquiry. Mold into a community of learners.
3) Add in the technology, resources, and creativity as needed to ensure successful, fun and engaging science.
4) Bake for 10 weeks in the respective Middle school locations. After the ten weeks, remove the final well developed and molded science investigation which includes 65 critical, confident, individual middle school scientists. Garnish with family, friend, and the community, then serve at the University of Rochester during the STARS Conference. Include pictures, videos, and some hands-on science for all to enjoy!
** Certified Organic and Gluten-free (except for the Pizza) and down right yummy!!
Video Assessment day, and all the girls that attended today were unable to make it last week, along with the two girls who were here last week, were not here today. They loved the worksheet and were comfortable with talking about the project it is hard to believe they were scarred away from the interviews.
We decided to let the girls choose which questions they wanted to answer during the video assessments. They liked being able to pick which ones they felt comfortable answering, especially since they were not able to go through the worksheet we prepared for them last week. We talked as a group before they were interview to answer any questions and calm any nerves. While Lisa took the girls one by one, we have the video conferencing set up with East. They girls were able to communicate with each other about their results from each half team which was very interesting. The girls really liked the video conferencing which was a plus for the day.
After each girl was interviewed, they came back and filled out the rubric to self evaluate themselves. We also had the worksheets the girls filled out last week around for them to work on. I relaly enjoy having creative outlets for students. I love to see what they come up with and it can also be a good way to see any misunderstanding and/or misconceptions.
At the end of the day we interview all of our girls, we were able to video conference about the final results from each half team, and have some fun with drawing.
This week we only had two students make it. It was a little disappointing, but on the positive side it was some real quality time with the two girls who were there. We had designed the lesson to have ample opportunities for the girls to review over our whole experiment and get them to feel comfortable about talking about the project for their video assessments that were occurring the following week. I had created a worksheet (boring I know, but a good way to put everything together in one and keep it individual) so the girls are creatively express how developed our testable question, how we went about testing the question, and the conclusions we drew at the end. The two girls who were there really enjoyed drawing and talking about the who project. We spent most of our time on this worksheet because the girls were enjoying the creative outlet and we had some great conversations going on during it.
Later we showed the girls the rubric we have been using to evaluate them each week and told them we wanted them to get familiar with it because after they went through the video assessment they would do a self evaluation on how they think they did overall during these past 10 weeks. Not an exciting part, but the girls were able to understand all that was being evaluated of them and ask any questions if they had any.
We were shown this speech in my Race, Class, Gender, and Disability class and I though it had a really powerful message that I wanted to share to everyone.
Sorry to say I was unable to make STARS this week. I have been fighting the flu (not swine) for most of the week and I didn’t want to take any chances with spreading it to anyone else. But after a report from Lisa I heard they day went very well. Here are two videos showing two of the activities the girls were going to experience during their time this week.
A Halloween Celebration with our STARS girls! We started off the day with the boring stuff. The girls finished their data collection… Woot! For a few minutes we had them start thinking about putting the puzzle pieces together by connecting their hypothesis with their observations along with what they learned about pH last week. They were able to jot down a few ideas in their notebooks and then we moved on. The second activity was a fun, yet environmentally educational one. We had they girls play with normal Styrofoam and eco-friendly foam and how each of them acts when in water or acetone (nail polish remover, not the harsher stuff chemists use even though the more concentrated version probably would have worked better with dissolving the regular Styrofoam). With the eco-friendly foam, you can slightly wet the foam and they will stick with each other. Therefore the girls were able to create masterpieces out of these colorful foam pieces. The idea was to show how normal Styrofoam takes harsh chemicals to be able to break it down where as the eco-friendly foam dissolves in water. The girls had so much fun playing with the foam pieces and loved building things. They had even more fun being able to destroy their creations in the water
After the girls washed their hands we moved on to the Halloween fun! Each girl picked out three candies; they were mostly hard candies like Lemonheads, Jawbreakers, and War Heads, along with Smartties, Lollypops, Nerds, and Sour Patch Kids. They put each of their candies they choose into a small cup with some water and let it dissolve for a few minutes. During this time we revisited what we had talked about last week with pH, particularly the tastes. After they had put the connection to the taste to the types of candies they were working with, we went around and added some baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) to each of the cups. Any of the candies that had acids in them (like the lemon in Lemonheads and War Heads) reacted with the baking soda and made bubbles. They were surprised at the reaction or lack there off, and then kept joking about how they weren’t going to eat Lemon heads again from the acid. We assured them that it was quite safe, but had a few good laughs otherwise!
To end the day we did Pumpkin puke. I had carved out a pumpkin at my programmatic advisory group the night before and then we did the elephant toothpaste reaction with green food coloring inside the pumpkin. When the reaction happened it looked like the pumpkin with spewing green stuff all over the place. All of the girl’s faces lighted up and they were fascinated by it. What a great way to send them off for a great Halloween weekend!
Below is a video that was what I wanted to do with the girls, but I didn’t think the explosion part would be appropriate considering the setting. But enjoying watching it!
