• About
  • Archives
  • Categories
  • For Lack of a Placement…

    2010 - 02.04

    For lack of a placement, there is not much to reflect upon beyond the readings, which we have already done to a great extent.  There is not much to rant about because getting worked up over this will not help anyone.  So…

    Another week of resource-sharing!

    • First, go here and get your free Human Genome Landmarks poster!

    • Next up:  At your wit’s end about what to do with your kids to accomplish your desired outcomes?  Mooch off of Greece!  They publicly post quite a few of their activities on the web.

    Grade 6
    Grade 7
    Grade 8
    Living Environment
    Physics
    Chemistry
    Earth Science

    • Can’t think about Warner stuff anymore?  Feel like your brain is about to explode with all the planning?!  Enjoy some good old-fashioned Star Wars…  This is a rare full-version of the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special.  Meet Chewbacca’s family!  Hear Leia sing!  Relax!

    • Next…  Have Latino ELL’s in your class and want to be totally sure they have a handle on lab safety guidelines?

    Go to this Flinn Scientific Safety website to see English and Spanish versions of safety contracts and safety quizzes.  They come in two versions: High School level and Middle School level.  How cool!

    ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

    That’s all for this week folks!  Valentine’s Day is coming – if you have someone special, plan now so you can get your work done and still have date night!  :-)

    Playing Catch-Up

    2010 - 01.30

    To those of you who have been keeping up with the Oneonta Listserv’s (and the accompanying inordinate amount of spam) and paying close attention to dates and detail, I salute you!

    And to those of you who have not, come hang out with me; you’ll be in good company.

    I finally decided to go through the monstrous Inbox folder that has been autofiltering my Listserv email to a separate folder where I don’t have to pay attention to it.  Here is an abbreviated recap of everything the Listserv has posted in the past month or so:

    Professional Development Opportunities:

    Nazareth STANYS Conference on March 4th: Go here, email this guy at (mherzog98@frontiernet.net), and go!

    NSTA Philadelphia Conference from March 18th – March 21st: Go here for more info, register as a student for $70, and go!

    Cool Videos:

    Video simulation of Flight 1549 (ditching in the Hudson):

    Video of water droplets (watch this – it’s way cool and really illustrates surface tension)

    And on a final note:

    April 25th is DNA Day!  Please try to make an effort to make sure your students understand the gravity of this day!

    Dancin’ With Myself

    2009 - 12.04

    Please click on the link below then read the lyrics…  Listen to the song from the link and take 4 minutes today to clear your head, breathe deeply and just lean back in your chair and think about all we’ve accomplished.

    _____________________________________________________________________

    It had to be Blue,

    Our lovely Team Blue,

    We faltered around and finally found inquiry true.

    And every girl grew;

    We assessed so we knew…

    Even stayed up all Wednesday night stressing  for you.

    ~*~*~*~*~

    Some other grad schools

    Try to focus on rules

    Might try to be boss

    No matter the cost

    But that won’t do…

    For nowhere else could I learn skills,

    With another chance, I’d do it still.

    It had to be Blue,

    Our lovely team Blue,

    It had to be Blue.

    STARS 2009 in Photos

    2009 - 12.02

    I wanted to officially and publicly celebrate the growth that our STARS girls on Blue Team have accomplished in this series of photos.  The images have been organized to show our inquiry from beginning to end.  They have achieved so much and really matured as women and as scientists over the past few months and we are so proud of them.

    Our First Week of Low Attendance in STARS

    2009 - 11.14

    It was really disappointing to me this week that we had low attendance at such a crucial time for STARS.  Up until this point, we had never had less than five girls in attendance and this week we hit a record low of two. However, three of the absentee girls actually came with legitimate excuses to miss and apologized for missing STARS this week before heading out.  It was really encouraging to see that STARS was important to them and they weren’t just skipping out on it.

    At this point in STARS, we were interested in finalizing the inquiry with the girls and getting input from them as to how we should design our videos via storyboarding.  Although we only had two girls, we used a really thorough packet to help them summarize their results, with areas for reflection via writing and drawing.  Their illustrations were really insightful as to how they saw the progression of the inquiry.  I also wanted to do some final temperature checks with all the girls to see how confident they felt with about their data analysis and conclusions they reached last week during the graphing activity.  Hopefully, having an extra week in between meetings will not result in the girls forgetting last week’s discussion and conclusions reached.

    I am also now worried for the summative assessment given that we only had the input of two girls.  I feel if they had been able to collaborate and plan out the video together, they would have felt much more invested in next week’s activity of creating it.  I am really enjoying using this media outlet to gauge how much progress we made with the inquiry as well as tracking our pedagogical success via this mode of assessment; however, with so few girls present, they will be coming into this blind.  We will really need to scaffold this activity and introduce it thoroughly so the girls don’t disengage and clam up on the video.

    I was worried when this academic year started that we might have low attendance rates in both my observation and STARS due to the swine flu.  I guess these are the kinds of things I might need to plan for; when students miss class, I will need to catch them up and be accommodating to make sure they don’t have gaps in their learning.  With STARS meeting so infrequently, missing one meeting means missing a major portion of the inquiry and achieving our objectives.  However, I am sure with careful planning that we can catch up those who need it and proceed with the summative assessment as planned.

    This Week’s Daphnia Lab

    2009 - 11.08

    Next week, I will finally be guiding my first inquiry with my 8th graders.  Our CT is finally letting my co-teacher and I have some authority in the classroom beyond doing mini-lessons and helping with homework.  I am really looking forward to this!  We have our Daphnia ordered from Ward’s and were supposed to begin this series of lessons on Monday, but unfortunately, Ward’s will only deliver live specimens Tuesday-Friday.  I am glad I am having experiences with this now so I don’t plan something for a later lesson and expect to be able to have live specimens immediately available, even with overnight shipping.

    We will be doing an “Effects of Caffeine” lab exercise, basically to reinforce the skills they have learned this week on proper microscope usage and on measuring under the microscope.  This will also provide a content bridge from the microscope usage to the things that can affect cellular processes and eventually lead us to organismal organization and cell biology.

    Given last month’s “Does A Worm Have A Nose?” lab, they showed that they are really in the beginnings of learning about testable questions and designing an inquiry.  So we know that we will need to highly scaffold this.  I feel though that maybe we should deviate from my CT’s preferred method of lab write-up with a very rigid 7-step lab write-up and perhaps let them have a little more freedom.  They have lab notebooks, but typically these are used for in class for their quick-writes and the like.  I hope to encourage more reflection on the lab process and end with a summative assessment perhaps of a short narrative of the inquiry from start to finish.

    STARS – I’ll do algebra, I’ll do trig, and I’ll even do statistics, but graphing is where I draw the line.

    2009 - 11.07

    This week’s STARS basically dealt with synthesizing our data into graphs.  We had a feeling we were really going to need to scaffold this up because the girls had such varied experiences with these skills coming from various grade levels.  We also knew how dry and unengaging graphing can be, so to mix things up, we found some really killer demos to reinforce their nature of science understanding and keep them excited during the day.

    Fortunately, an impromptu verbal APK during the pizza session showed that they indeed had much experience with graphing and were really looking forward to seeing their data illustrated.  Each girl had their own variable they were tracking and they really seemed to assume ownership over theirs.  Upon making the graph, they were able to collaborate on their data and make inferences about which chemicals were worst for the plants.  Once I got them started on making the giant graph with colorful markers and stickers to show the day by day growth in each variable, it was hard to get them away.

    We thought we were going to need to break up the monotony of the 50-minute graphing activity with demos to get the girls thinking and firming up on our collaboration NOS objective, but they were really engaged.  When I finally got them out of graphing mode and let them do the tie-dye milk demo themselves, they started coming out with some really great questions, asking what would happen if they added more of a certain reagent, if it would do the same thing if it was hot, if the demo would have gone differently with skim milk.  I also related their observations and drawings back to the concept of convection and they really took to it with the visual of the milk moving.

    Towards the end of the lesson, the timing was running late and suddenly I realized that I only had 15 minutes left to set-up and perform our last demo and get them thinking about NOS.  Doing STARS solo involved a lot more rushing, and I am realizing that between co-teaching and having a partner for STARS, I am not getting that much solo practice.  However, my CT has made it clear that she thinks it will be essential to have solo time but that we should transition into it over the course of this month.

    I ended up pretty much making our last demo “It Needs A Battery” a magic trick.  Considering the girls knew nothing about electrochemistry and had only a very introductory knowledge of pH and acids and bases, their questions were eclipsed by  “Wow! That’s so cool!”s.  We really had to rush through it and although it impressed the girls, by the time I finally got the demo completed and had asked the questions, the girls had about 3 minutes to discuss while milling around the room and collecting their stuff to get the late bus.  If I had kept better track of time, we could have made this demo not only impressive, but cognitively meaningful.

    Safety issues – Not in the lab but in the home

    2009 - 10.18

    Last week at my school, my co-teacher and I had a conversation with our coordinating teacher about safety issues.  This all stemmed from a worm being launched from one desk to another, landing on some poor girl’s shoulder.  When our CT attempted to confront the boys, one of them took this strange stance of masculine dominance and started casting hateful looks at her.  He seemed on the verge of violence and to be honest, I was a little confused to how you would deal with a bristling teenage boy.  After the class ended, we started talking about the potential of weapons being brought into school as well as our CT’s reservations sometimes to call home about disciplinary issues in school when she suspects violence in the home.

    ___________________________________________________________

    One story she told us involved a girl asking to go to the nurse.  Our CT’s typical procedure on nurse trips involves going out into the hall to ask the students what is wrong, then sending them on their merry way.  On this occasion, the girl came out into the hallway and whispered, “I don’t really have to go to the bathroom, I think so-and-so might have a gun and I’m scared.”  My CT, not wanting to look suspicious, wrote the girl her hall-pass which was really a note to an administrator or sentry or anyone the girl ran into first that, “Classroom 285 might be in serious trouble, there is the potential of so-and-so having a weapon, most probably a gun, in the classroom hidden in his binder.”  Our CT explained that zip-up binders were often really good hiding places for weapons and that the suspected students had the weapon in one of these on his desk.  She came into the room and acted calmly and an administrator promptly got there and asked a few random students to come out into the hall, the suspected student included, and to leave their stuff.  Fortunately, the situation was diffused.  I only share this story because I think that perhaps we could benefit from a solid example of what to do in case you suspect a weapon.

    _________________________________________________________

    Another story our CT shared with us was that of how to deal with students who won’t do homework or who are having disciplinary issues when we suspect parental/guardian violence in the home.  She explained how she used to have a student who she had witnessed come in roughed-up in the past and how his speech and manner suggested that his father might be beating up on him.  When one semester despite all her urging, he still had not turned in all his assignments by end of marking period and was going to receive a failing grade in the course, my CT decided to give the student a B+ to avoid getting this student a beating at home.  The day after grades were submitted, our CT and a counselor had a meeting with the boy and explained, ” We really don’t want to get you in trouble with your parents over this grade, so we are giving you one week to get all these assignments in.  Otherwise we will be forced to report an error in the report card and send home your actual grade.”  The student took her cue, shaped up, and finished his assignments by the next day.   I am not advocating that you falsify grades for any student who might have a strict parent but in this case, her logic and generosity of spirit were well-directed.  She knows sometimes after a phone-call with a livid and often descriptive parent that something awful might happen.  Our CT was conscious of the signs of child abuse in students and hopefully after our Child Abuse Prevention workshop, we will also be able to interpret these kind of signs and avoid calls home, etc.

    __________________________________________________________

    I needed to share these stories because I feel like sometimes at Warner, we are so busy getting deep on pedagogy and social justice, we avoid thinking about the brutal realities that are present in urban schools and it is essential that we know how to avoid violence, both in the school and at the home.

    My Week to Lead STARS

    2009 - 10.16

    This week, my lesson plan goals were to impart inquiry skills and learning while still scrambling to set-up our complex procedure with making dilutions, planting seeds, and establishing a protocol for data collection.  In writing my lesson plan, I knew it would be really difficult and frenzied to try to accomplish all this, but with smooth transitions and scripting, I was sure we could make the day work.

    By setting up easily accessible materials in giant Sterilite boxes for us at Wilson as well as at East, with recyclable bottles for our chemical dilutions and a Ward’s Rapid Radish seed pack and Seed Starter grow kit, we had our investigation quickly underway.  The seed pack and kit made it easy enough for our girls to get the planting session; they were done and raring for more in under 5 minutes.  It was really nice to not have to spend the majority of one of our few sessions with the girls on potting plants.  We also found it was really smooth for the girls having the screw-cap bottles available for transport of the chemicals home.

    Another thing that I think really aided the lesson was having our transitions and teaching periods scripted out with our objectives in mind.  We specifically asked questions of the girls to channel the conversation towards our desired topics and I think they really benefited from it.  By also leaving a minute or two extra per session, we also were able to address the girl’s questions and “I wonder…”s.

    Pizza ran a little late and kept us about 5 minutes behind all day until the end, whereupon I converted our 5 minute Ticket-Out-the-Door to a video-taped group discussion.  That left enough time to do all of our activities while still getting the formative assessment at the end that I wanted.  By asking questions about how they would go about shifting their inquiry if their data did not come out as they hypothesized, the girls showed that they understood the basic phases of an inquiry and indicated which variables they would change to further investigate.

    Overall, the day went pretty smoothly and accomplished all of our objectives, both for learning and for completing procedure.  Were I to do it again, I might try to cut something from the schedule so they girls could have more time for a more fully-formulated cognitive change before I try to move on to the next topic.  It did feel a bit rushed.  If we had maybe pre-planted all the seeds for the girls and brought in seedlings for the lesson, the girls would have had 10 extra minutes to learn dilutions and the purpose of the controls more thoroughly.

    Blue Team Clan Ain’t Nothin to Mess Wit

    2009 - 10.09

    The more I get to know these girls, the more I see future scientists in each of them.  It is really encouraging when we ask the girls, “Who are scientists?” and one looks up and responds “Well…  Everyone can be.”

    This week of STARS was yet again really purposeful in regards to addressing the testable question we formulated last week:  Do residual cleaning supplies in the water table change the growth of plants?  Julia was in charge of the lesson this week and she came up with a really good demo that directly related to the water system learning that we wanted to get done this week.  We needed to assess the girls knowledge of the water system, amend their knowledge where need be then discuss the future of the inquiry based on their knowledge.

    Julia created a really nice visual to explain the subsequent dilutions that cleaning products undergo in the water system.  We started by each making a poster of the steps that the cleaning products would go through in the water system, from bottle to sink to pipes to sewers to water treatment plant to lake.  We (Julia and I each did one) showed our posters and explained what we drew then began a series dilution demo with highlighter water and cups of water.  The nice visual that Julia created was having each serial dilution cup over it’s respective poster (see below).

    Serial Dilutions in the Water System

    Serial Dilutions in the Water System

    By the end of the dilution series, the water looks clear.  However, when we held it under the black light, you could see the “chemically affected” one glowing.  The girls were finally able to put it together: we (the American public) are dumping gallons and gallons of cleaning chemicals down the sink every day and even though the water may come out “clean” on the other end, the chemicals are still there.

    Moving on to video conferencing, I cannot be more appreciative of the support staff that April had come help us.  I was coming into STARS simply dreading the idea of having to make Julia solo (although she very well could have) while I am in back fighting with a computer from 1999 and trying to install testy web-cam drivers that don’t want to work.  Thankfully, the computer support person managed the streamline the whole conference and the girls seemed to really feel like they were working as a team with their East counterpart.  Morgan even remembered my name and said that she missed me (/teacherblush).  The girls pooled their findings and opinions and decided to test a laundry detergent, Comet cleanser, an eco-friendly detergent, and bleach.  Yay!

    Very good day overall…  Next week is mine for leading, and I worry that we really didn’t get enough done this week in terms of a potential procedure to do with the girls.  As fun as games and everything are, I think the girls will enjoy finally being able to sit down and do real hands-on science at last.  I feel like we have been showing them a lot of demos, but if we come in with soil and grow-lamps and plant seedlings and the variety of cleaners they decided they wanted to test, they will really get into it.  I am thinking of framing the procedure for an inquiry lesson as a cooking lesson; having them write recipes for their soil, “Add 800 grams soil, 1 liter of water,  250 grams Comet cleanser; mix well; dry in sun.”  Do recipes sound like a good idea?

    In any case, I have a lot of planning and acquiring of resources to get done for this weekend if I intend on having a lesson next Thursday go smoothly, so happy weekend to all!