Last night was our third teaching seminar. Attendance was dismal. At 5:30 there was only one teacher. At 6:00 we had six teachers. As Abby pointed out, it’s a pretty ridiculous use of resources to have four of us (Lane, Abby, me, Amy) there for six teachers. It seems like we need to rethink the structure with the informal discussion over dinner first because it just encourages people to show up late.
Zhomes Debrief:
We started with a debrief of the tour of Zhomes, guided by the question “What did you learn that you could use in your classroom?” There was an interesting range of responses about possible student activities, ranging from asking students to follow the energy in very specific aspects of the house (e.g. the super-insulated walls or the geothermal heat pump) to asking students to design a house (or a high school) that balances many complex and competing factors (energy savings, cost, water use, esthetics, community, etc.). A lot of the discussion focused on teachers’ own ideas about weighing complex factors in design. I was impressed to hear that after the tour Jeff had gone home and looked up the statistics behind some of their claims. He found several sources that gave values for the “average” energy use of a home, which had a lot of variation, but all were much lower than the value of 22K kWh to which our tour guide had favorably compared the Zhome energy use.
Reflecting on Journals:
Then Lane led the group in sharing their reflections from their journals. The exercise Abby had given them in the first teaching seminar was to jot down in their journal things they had learned about student thinking. Tonight they were supposed to share one thing they had learned. When we planned the first teaching seminar, we knew that this exercise would be difficult for them and that they would probably misinterpret it. We knew that really hearing student ideas is difficult, that this is our goal for what we hope they will be able to do at the end of teaching seminar, and that we don’t really expect them to get it the first time. So why were we so surprised and unprepared when it went exactly as we expected?
Perhaps because it started off so fantastic that we weren’t expecting the sudden dive off the cliff…
Lisa went first with a discussion of an activity in which she asked students to try to define forces. She noticed that they were initially defining forces as energy. I will need to go back to the video to remember exactly what she said, but I was really impressed with her respectful curiosity about her students’ thinking. She never said or implied that anything about this student idea as wrong or bad, but got really curious about where it was coming from and how they could use it productively when they got around to discussing energy. I was particularly impressed to hear this from Lisa given her previous history. She took E1 in 2009, E2 in 2010, and has been to nearly every teaching seminar we’ve ever had. During the first year of teaching seminar, she was part of a group of Bellevue teachers that I loathed listening to, because all they ever did was bitch about how dumb their students were and all the things they didn’t get. I don’t know how much Lisa herself participated in those discussions, because I tried to avoid listening to them and she didn’t stand out to me. But if she had been engaging with student ideas in 2009 the way she was last night, I think she would have stood out to me. So I suspect that what I observed last night was some pretty amazing progress.
Then Lane shared a student idea of how a cfl bulb works, which launched the teachers into all sorts of tangents about light bulbs, electricity, and energy conservation, but not about student ideas. This went on for way too long before we cut it off.
Then Laura shared about giving her students a pretest and posttest on electric circuits and being shocked by how poorly they did on the posttest, even though she had just given them a totally clear lesson and it seemed like they were getting it. (She also brought in copies of her students’ pretests and posttests for Keeley probes). Her discussion was totally focused on how they didn’t get it, and not really on what the students were actually thinking, but I felt like this was a fantastic starting point. Recognizing that your students aren’t learning what you think they’re learning is a critical first step to really hearing what they are thinking. This feels to me like something we can work with. (Never mind that we didn’t.) Laura took UE1 in 2009, and hasn’t been back to any Energy Project classes until Teaching Seminar this year, so it seemed like a nice confirmation that maybe we’re having some effect that she wasn’t as far along in her thinking as Lisa.
Then Jeff talked about a lesson on energy transfers and transformations, and he talked for quite a while, but I didn’t hear anything at all about student thinking, even wrong student thinking, just stuff about his lesson. I asked him what specific student ideas he learned, and he continued to talk about his lesson. Neither Abby nor Lane remember me asking him about student ideas, so maybe I wasn’t clear. I definitely wasn’t forceful enough, because I didn’t ask a second time or point out that he still wasn’t talking about student ideas.
Then Ingrid talked about an activity she did where her students looked at energy used in different sports. Like Jeff, she focused on the lesson and not on student ideas. I also asked her to tell us a specific student idea. She said one group had a hypothesis about the energy of running on Astroturf vs. cement, but then did an experiment to test it and discovered that their hypothesis was wrong. I think there was something like a student idea in here, the thing the students initially thought, but her focus was on how they tested it, not on what the students were thinking. I think we could have worked with this productively to tease out the student idea, but we didn’t.
Then Jean told a really inspiring story about a student she was working with who had been really difficult and rebellious and was suddenly turning around and getting really excited about science. This story wasn’t really about student ideas either, but it was so inspiring that nobody really had the heart to interrupt her.
Then Kim told a story about a lesson about burning almonds, which I think she hasn’t even actually given to her students yet because she’s still trying to figure out the chemistry of it herself. There was nothing about student ideas, but I didn’t have the heart to ask because everyone seemed anxious to move on.
By the time everyone was done sharing we only had a half hour left for a lot of other stuff we had planned. The instructors had a little pow-wow while the teachers were reading the big ideas article for the next section, and we decided Lane would give a little speech at the end explaining again what it means to write down a student idea.
Big Ideas:
The last section was looking at the Thompson article about big ideas and trying to figure out how to form groups to look at big ideas over the rest of the year. There was a lot of confusion about how to form groups. It’s going to be a difficult task because there is so much diversity about levels, topics, and how frequently people show up. Lane is going to set up google doc to help people figure it out.
Wrap-up:
We ended with Lane’s little speech in which he emphasized that what we want teachers to do is to “Focus on a single student idea that surprised you.” Kim asked, “Regardless of whether it’s right or wrong?” and we said yes, whether it’s right or wrong is not the point at all. This seemed like a good question, that indicated that she might be understanding the assignment. Lisa asked, “Is it OK if it's not surprising?” pointing out that she’s been teaching for a long time so she’s not surprised by much anymore. We said that’s OK.
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