Sunday, October 26, 2014

Week 7 - Stations Lab for Newton's Laws & A Science Tech Symposium

A week late, but still worth sharing.

Through the connections I have made on Twitter I have come across some very interesting ideas, concepts, people, and many fun moments. In a recent #flipclass twitter chat (Mondays 8pm ET) someone questioned how a flipped physics class can address misconceptions and it lead to Katie Lanier mentioning activities/labs that they do for this specific purpose. She was nice enough to share the one that she uses for forces and I used it after introducing Newton's 3 Laws. The students enjoyed doing it and said the next day that it was helpful for clarifying the ideas. I took some videos of them and have linked them with brief descriptions below. Some of the video is better than others (i.e. sometimes I asked students questions, and sometimes it is a just a shot of them doing it). [Please let me know if the links are not working]

Station 1: Flick a piece of cardboard off of a beaker that has a penny sitting on it.

Station 2: Determine which of two boxes is heavier without picking them up.

Station 3: Balance a metre stick (weighted on one end) on your palm.

Station 4: Pull the "table cloth" out from under the "dishes".

Station 5: Try to pull only one square of toilet paper off using one hand.

Station 6/7: Use a "tapping device" to move a ball (one is starting it moving, another based on changing its direction and controlling how far it goes).

I would definitely do this again and would love to find more of these types of activities for other units (even if they are simulation based) to help with other misconceptions. These are exactly what you hope to find time to do by flipping a class :)

One thing I might do differently would be to make at least some of them a bit more PEOE style (predict (explain) observe explain) so that they have to put thought into it BEFORE trying instead of just after seeing it.

Thank you Ms. Lanier!

Last Saturday my board posted a Science & Technology Symposium. There were some interesting topics discussed and it seemed like everyone walked away with something new in their minds (which is all we can ask really). I went to a session that was about getting students to use concepts and ideas to come up with research projects that relate to the curriculum that will also involve primary research and then actually coming up with community action to create awareness about their topic. The second keynote speaker was a professor that he had worked with that was doing research on students using this process so it was a nice tie in and made me wish that I was teaching Gr 10 Science so that I could try it myself. Maybe I can convince my colleagues to try it themselves ;)

Monday, October 13, 2014

Week 6 - We Will All Be Numeracy Teachers

This past Friday was a PD Day - and since the new push in the board (and the province) is numeracy, we got to kick the day off with some numbers fun. I was part of the cross-curricular numeracy committee that was charged with planning the morning sessions of our day. We are lucky to have some very passionate teachers and administrators and came up with a plan that we were hopeful would achieve our goals.

We set out to do two things:
1) Try to get everyone to relate to numeracy and realize that it connects to their subject area
2) Accentuate the connection between a growth mindset (which was a focus of ours last year) and success in mathematics - ideally getting staff to recognize how our culture is fine with saying "Oh, it's OK, you're just not good at math" but would never dream of telling someone it was OK to not be good at reading at a young age.

Here is what we came up with:
- Fishbowl: Numeracy team discusses their attitudes toward math and how they got there
- 4 corners: image of 4 different weather that staff chose to match their math attitude - discuss these attitudes within these groups
- Create a graphic organizer to compare "Mathematics" and "numeracy" in cross-curricular groups (ah-ha moments were shared with the whole group afterward)
- Sort skills as "Literacy" or "numeracy" (these came from board/ministry documents that we cut up and gave to groups in an envelope, ah-ha moments were shared with the group)
- Break
- Shared reading of our board's Balanced Mathematics Instruction K-12” poster
- Online mindset inventory to get staff thinking about their own mindsets
- Brief video clip of two different student mindsets when asked a question in class & share some quotes about mindset
- Brainstorm ideas of how to improve mindset within our classroom, school, and parent community (gallery walk to share)
- Brief Michael Jordan video & his story

It seemed to go pretty well. There was a lot of discussion throughout the morning among the different groups of staff for many of the items listed above. It seemed to evoke a lot of thought around the ideas we were hoping for and allowed a lot of them to relate personally to the overall ideas. We have asked everyone for feedback via Google Forms and the responses I have seen so far have been more positive than negative. We are hoping to be able to come up with our next steps from this feedback so that we can keep things as relevant for our staff as possible.

If you have any ideas or suggestions to share with us please leave me a comment below :)

Friday, October 3, 2014

Week 4 & 5 - The Passion for Teaching

As a proud Queen's University alumnus I eventually read through all of the issues of the Queen's Alumni Review that make it to my mailbox. I have been inspired by a couple of articles over the years about a couple of stellar professors there that are using more modern teaching styles that are more student-centred than the typical lecture. In the 2014 Issue 3 edition there is a letter from the Principal, Daniel Woolf who talks about his experiences as a teacher. He talks about teaching coming natural to some but always felt he had to work at it. One of my favourite lines in the letter:

"Having now been on the instructor's side of the desk for three decades...and having taught dozens of courses I have noticed huge changes in technology and pedagogical methods - the overhead projectors I used for years are largely a thing of the past in the era of Moodle and YouTube. One thing, however, hasn't changed. Effective teaching depends less on delivery methods, or technology, or even outright mastery of the material, than it does on a passionate enthusiasm for the subject and ability to arouse the same interest in students."

I have to say, he has hit the nail on the head - and people still recognize this. Two weeks ago I hosted an info night about the flipped classroom, a few different families were in attendance from one of my classes and a class of my colleagues, and by the end two of the mother's summed it up nicely "It is obvious that you are passionate about this method of teaching, and that probably makes you a better teacher when you use this method, and that is all we can ask for." It was the highlight of my night, and made all of the questioning worth it.

I have seen this a lot in the other teacher who is using the flipped model (on a smaller scale at this time) in one of her classes. She could have retired a few years ago and is so excited to be trying something new. She is so excited that even her fears of trying it before I was teaching the same course as her could not stop her - she is diving in and her students are loving it. Today we were talking about a PLC and she said to me - "My friends keep asking me why I am doing this, and I tell them that I was tired of doing the same thing for 26 years. I needed a change, and I feel passionate about it again."

The only surprising part of what she said was the indication that she had started to lose her passion - as she has always been a very dedicated teacher. I love getting to work with her and it seems as though we are beginning to influence more teachers in our department to look at using parts of the flipped model in their classes. I love that I can find in teachers, at various point in their career, what I hope to find in myself at all points of my career. I keep saying that the day I am not trying to get better, the day that I don't want to try something new, is the day I will retire (but hopefully, it will be the day before that happens). :)

Here are some in-class highlights from the last two weeks:
- tried PowToon to have students communicate a choice between two job options
- observing student discussions about physics (i.e. correcting quizzes without seeing an answer key collaboratively)
- Grade 9/12 activity day (a quite successful one I must say)
- using Gizmos to develop an understanding of adding vectors
- using examples to dispell misconceptions about relative velocity
- trying Prodigy Game for the first time
- super ball investigation (using a bouncy ball to measure the height of a tall room)

Happy October everyone!