[video]
A few weeks ago I posted about the poster that I had created for the new computer programming club that I am running in my school. “Code Monkeys” is a way for me to get the most interested students some programming experience. We do not have a computer science course. We used to (I wrote it), but I wasn’t entirely psyched about the dynamic, it being populated with students who weren’t really fellow travelers, and not uniformly dedicated to learning the task at hand. So this year, I thought maybe a club would be a better way to get my grubby little hands on the students who are most interested in actually writing code.
The club, which is really an internal, communal, codeyear group, meets on Friday’s. To make things interesting, I decided to set up a few gimmicks that add to the mystery:
We had 20 students at our first meeting. It will be interesting to see how thing develop over the rest of the year. The grand scheme is to stoke enough coding interest that when the new AP Biology Computer Science course launches in a few years, I can populate a section with students who actually have some understanding of what it means to program.
A link from a former student, accompanied by the following email:
So, I found this thing and it’s really cool and you should totes look at it. I think it’s super duper awesome, but you being the science teacher have probably seen cooler stuff….have fun :D
While I haven’t seen this, I have seen similar things. This one does as good a job as the others, if not better. I love me some scale demos.
I concur with the opinion that it is “super duper awesome”, indeed!
Day 6 (Harvest Day) (Taken with instagram)
As you might have gathered, I’m a big believer in letting students develop their scientific skill set in my classroom. A big part of this involves working to provide my students with opportunities to try out that kooky, crazy, mixed-up endeavor of human experience that we call the “scientific method”. To that end, I’m always trying to find ways to have my students spend more time giving the process a shot. This week provided one such example, the subject of this post.
We are in the beginning of our metabolism unit, and this week was all about enzymes. One of the major labs that students do in AP Biology is a lab to investigate the effects of a variable on the rate of an enzyme-mediated reaction. The official College Board version of the lab (for another month or so) involves students investigating the effects of declining substrate concentration on the rate of the reaction (spoiler: the rate decreases). The official version is pretty much everything that I dislike about the “cookbook” style of laboratory experiment. Students are given a protocol for a particular assay, which is somewhat baroque in structure, and they work through a series of steps to accomplish that protocol. It takes a lot of effort on the part of the instructor to make sure that students really understand what they are doing and why they are doing it, and even then a lot of students don’t really “get” it. To conclude the process, the College Board lab manual has students fill in the blanks on a series of questions, construct some prescribed graphs and call it a day. It sucks.
There are many ways to bring more inquiry to labs. Lots of work has been done on the levels of inquiry, and lots of good people are writing about it with frequency. Often, I dwell pretty firmly in the realm of “guided inquiry” in my own labs (something that I have written about before). In a “guided inquiry” setting, the instructor gives the students a protocol and allows students to modify that protocol or apply it to a particular question of their own conception. I am a big fan of this approach, but here, at the halfway point of the year, I wanted to push my students a bit farther.
So, this year, with this lab, I decided to take a slightly different (read: vastly different) approach: I had students do everything. I told them that they were responsible for developing an experiment to test the effect of an environmental condition on the rate of an enzyme-mediated reaction. I gave them an “experimental planner” that noted a few, fundamental things (they would need to isolate an enzyme, use a reasonable protocol which generated quantitative data, and they should feel free to adapt any protocol that they found online to suit their purpose). I gave them a four days to do the necessary research before meeting with each group on Wednesday.
During our meetings on Wednesday, I discussed the experiments with each group. We determined if the experiment was feasible, what modifications might need to be made, and we established which materials they would be responsible for providing (enzyme and substrate, mostly) and which materials I would provide for them (lab equipment, pH buffers, heating and cooling apparatus, various other niche items for particular circumstances). Out of five lab groups, four were prepared enough at this point to advance. One had not done much research at all. This was discussed, expectations were reiterated, promises were made, and the benchmarks that would need to happen prior to that group being able to begin work on Thursday with the rest of the class were delineated. I imagine it was somewhat embarrassing being the only group who didn’t hit that checkpoint on time.
I reserved Thursday and Friday for running experiments. I felt that two days would be enough time. I figured that some groups would finish on Thursday (and could do other things on Friday—like begin the process of writing the lab report), some groups would make bad mistakes when running their protocol on Thursday and would need to modify or regroup to run it again on Friday, and some groups would need to do some testing and protocol modification on Thursday in order to run the lab on Friday. As it turned out, I had all three situations develop. Though, interestingly, the group that I had to talk to about preparedness was able to run their entire experiment (measuring the effect of pH on catechol oxidases in apples) on Thursday.
Moving to a structure like the one that I have described above takes a real shift on the part of the instructor (and the students). It is not something that happens over night, particularly when dealing with a population of science learners who have never been asked to work through the process in this fashion prior to walking in to your class, and it involves a lot of “different” sorts of uses of an instructor’s time. At various points during the week, I had to serve as a coach, working to get students to meet certain benchmarks at certain times, and as a collaborator, helping to offer advice on trouble-shooting of methods or explaining ways of doing certain things. I had to make sure that each group was not going to do anything in their specific circumstance that was dangerous, but I had to make equally sure that I did not prevent groups from making mistakes that they needed to make to learn the various lessons that we all learn as scientists (like “don’t use up all of your enzyme until you are sure your protocol is going to work”). I know that each group learned much more about how science works by going through the process than they ever would have if I had just told them what to do and how to do it. They certainly can tell you more about what they did and why they did it than they would if they had all done some procedure that I had given them. And they have a genuine experience that can now form the basis of a formal lab report that hopefully won’t feel like pulling teeth to write, read, or grade.
I also learned a ton about all sorts of experiments to accomplish the purpose that I gave my students that I would not have thought of if my students hadn’t brought them in to our classroom (here’s my favorite: measuring the effect of temperature on lactase activity by testing temperature-treated solutions of lactaid and milk using an electronic, “diabetes” glucose meter…incredible). This is the kind of approach that the AP curriculum is moving towards for all of its labs, and to my way of thinking it is vastly superior to the other mode. As long as you stop caring about having students accomplish a particular lab in a particular way, allowing students to demonstrate their ability to think like scientists is quite possibly the most fun you will ever have running labs for your kids.
Day 5 (#2) (Taken with instagram)
Day 5 (#1) (Taken with instagram)
Day 3 (Taken with instagram)
Pop Takes Photos: My, what an orange dog you have.
Day 2 (Taken with instagram)
Day 1 (Taken with instagram)
“As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney vetoed a bill paying for kosher food for our seniors in nursing homes. Holocaust survivors, who for the first time, were forced to eat non-kosher, because Romney thought $5 was too much to pay for our grandparents to eat kosher.” Gingrich’s robocall then urges voters to cast votes for Gingrich, saying, “Tuesday you can end Mitt Romney’s hypocrisy on religious freedom, with a vote for Newt Gingrich.” — -Evidence that Newt Gingrich thinks the Florida electorate is comprised entirely of gullible Jews.
I’m starting a computer programing club at school, which means I get to make a poster, which means I get to have far too much fun in the land of subversive graphic design.
If you like the graphic, check out this link, because that’s where I stole borrowed it from (for the children).
If you’ve been checking in for longer than a little while (in which case, bless you heart!), you will be aware that I am in the middle of implementing a Standards-Based Grading (SBG) approach in my Honors Chemistry course. This is detailed here, and also here.
The initiative continues apace. I haven’t written about it in a while, but recently, I was reminded that I said I would, and I actually have something to write about. Last week was the end of the second quarter, and so it was time to once again translate student Standards-Based scores into some sort of numerical equivalency for the purpose of determining quarter grades.
This is not an easy thing to do in the best of circumstances. SBG does not really dwell in the same kind of metric space that traditional grades do. For instance, in our system, a 3 (out of 4) is the cutoff for students to demonstrate the expected level of proficiency for an honors chemistry student. A 4 (“distinguished”) is a very rare score, reserved for those few and far between instances where a student goes well beyond the expectation.
How is one to translate this in to a classical grade? Certainly, the student who has all threes is not performing at “three-fourths” capacity. Indeed, a student performing at all 3’s is doing quite well, meeting the expectation for performance that we have for students in the course. I imagine the reader can understand the issue.
As a subject, we had discussed the issue, and we did a bit of research. Somehow, we stumbled upon this approach, which is referred to as the “bump & space” method. Here is the method:
I have used this methodology for the past two quarters, and I have to say that I am super happy with it. In both quarters, my highest performing students received SB “grades” in the high 90’s, and my lowest performers received scores in the low 80’s. Furthermore, it becomes almost impossible for a student to argue their grade, once the methodology is explained. As part of the process of determining an SB grade, we have our students complete a self-analysis, and almost without exception, their self-analysis score is either correlative or (more frequently) below the bump & space determination.
The system does produce an interesting “quirk” compared to traditional grades, which I was only made aware of this last quarter. By pegging student grades to the performance of the group, instead of the traditional mode of pegging student grades to an arbitrary “perfect” score, it is quite possible for a student to increase their effort in the class, and wind up with an SB grade that is similar to or even slightly lower than it was the prior quarter. The explanation for this is that if a student improves in performance, but is outpaced in that improvement by the class as a whole, then they are in line to get a reduced SB grade. This has happened in a couple of instances. This is certainly a difference (and one that I didn’t realize would occur before it started happening), but I actually think it provides a more meaningful metric of student performance as a result, particularly when decisions about where students might be happiest next year need to be made.
So, that’s how we’ve made the translation from SBG to traditional grades. All in all, I’d say it’s as good an approach as any. It’s certainly had a lot of thought put in to it.
Usually I am. My student population, and the vibe of my room don’t tend to drive me to having to be anything else. But last Monday, at the end of four days of midterm review, I found myself becoming a bit short with a few honors chemistry students who were not demonstrating what I would consider to be a level of understanding of certain, superficial, chemistry topics (things like what are and are not elements), commensurate with having been in my honors chemistry class for half a year.
For me, the corollary is to a coach who is dealing with a player who is forgetting bedrock fundamentals. I don’t know too many coaches who would be psyched by that prospect. As a teacher, how does one signal this sort of displeasure? Most (not all) of the coaches that I know would hoot and holler.
I don’t yell when I get testy. Instead, I modify my vocal tone to project the fact that I feel that the student(s) who are on the receiving end of my attentions are not meeting me half way in terms of doing the things that they need to be doing to stay on top of the material. I move from jovial joking to sarcastic quipping. My message is essentially “you should know better.” For the student(s), it can be an unpleasant experience. Some laugh it off. Some feel a bit less good about themselves. This seemed to be the case in one particular instance last Monday, when a student who was on the receiving end of such a quip took the opportunity to move into fully disgruntled mode, which necessitated two different personal conversations, an apology for any unintended generation of bad feelings, an explanation of intent, and a reinforcement of the fact that the student in question can always feel comfortable in discussing with me any time where I have made them feel less than pleasant.
I’m not the kind of teacher who ever wants a student to feel less good about him or herself based on their interactions with me or my course. Certainly, that’s not my intent, but sometimes it can’t be helped. Sometimes, a student is not going to be psyched to realize, after four days of midterm review, that they still don’t know how to navigate their way around a periodic table that has been staring them in the face for five months. Sometimes, that’s going to be a somewhat disappointing realization, made all the more disappointing by the fact that their typically kind and pleasant teacher is sounding like he is not pleased with the situation.
This is an issue that I struggle with: when, and where, and how to turn on displeased mode. Short of a health or safety issue, or an affront to interpersonal dignity, I’m never going to yell at a student. I’ll certainly never yell at a student for not knowing how to pull information off of a periodic table. But at some point, in some fashion, I have to convey the notion that a student is not developing in their learning on the level expected of them. Perhaps I can do it in other ways? I’m not sure what they are. What I do know is that teenagers being teenagers, I’m never going to find a universally agreeable mode of conveying the notion that students are not meeting their end of the deal in studying a course I’m teaching. And in those cases, when students are reacting to the fact that I am not nice momentarily, all I can do is make sure to touch base with them, explain where I’m coming from, and hope that the experience is enough to make them think about what they are doing in my course and how to avoid being in the situation again.