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All material is my personal opinion, and not that of any other organization. Copyright 2001. Permission is granted for individual teacher use. All rights reserved. |
Trials and Tribulations with Kits Nov. 5, 1997 We are at a critical stage in the work with the kits. The students have been exploring for about two weeks. Very few have thus far settled on a real question to investigate. So today we spent a half hour writing about what their questions are. I had them fold a paper twice, to make four sections. In the first, I had them write: I have done.... The second; I have learned.... The third; I wonder.... The fourth; I plan to.... I had them discuss in groups their results, but I am afraid these twelve year olds were not really capable of helping each other much. So I basically did a roll call, and asked each student their topic and their question, and how they planned to answer it. A few of the students had workable questions, but most of them needed some modification. For example, one student said she wanted to find out "how plants drink and eat." I suggested she choose something to focus on, such as, how much fertilizer do plants need? Or how much light or water, rather than looking at everything at oncce. By the end of the period she had gone from having four plants, and a very vague question, to a setup with 18 seeds planted, with three different amounts of fertilizer on them. Another group working with a Lego gears kit said their question was "how do gears work." Unacceptable, I said. I told them they had to find something to compare -- some way to change the setup. For example, they could look at what difference the gear size makes in how the gear works. This approach seemed most successful with a couple of students working with a Capsela kit. This is a modular toy, consisting of motors, gears and wheels encased in plastic capsules that snap together. I suggested the students investigate how different things affected the speed. By the end of the period, the students working on this told me they thought weight was a critical factor, and they were going to make different models, weigh them, and see how fast they went. This was their idea. A number of the students working with electronics are rather at sea, so I augmented their kits with some light bulbs and resistors, and made electric meters available to them. Some of them seemed to be making some discoveries with this material, but they will need some monitoring, and some assistance in developing their record-keeping practices. I have not fully reviewed all of the investigation plans. I feel we are under way, however, and we are quite a bit farther along then we were a week ago. There are several students, especially in the first period class, that I am concerned about. Some of their investigations do not seem to provide them with very much work to do during investigation time. For example, one student wants to compare infant heartbeat rates to those of teenagers. This is fine, but she does then not have much to do during our time with the kits, since she does not have an immediate opportunity to collect the data she needs. Some of the kits are problematic in this way. I will be reviewing the investigation plans and deciding if the students should proceed. In some cases I may redirect them within their topic to a new question, or even to a completely different topic. I am beginning to get a feel for what the structure of a successful kit should look like. I think the thing I do not like about the kits as presented by Pearce in Science Workshop is that they do not offer a structured access point. In other words, I think many students, especially at the 6th grade, open a box of materials, and if there is no clear path for beginning, they are turned off. What I envision instead is a guided initial autonomous exploration, mediated by a subset of materials within a kit. For example, in the Optics kit, there are a wide variety of lenses, magnifying devices, mirrors, etc. There is also an optics bench, which is a set of metal holders that clamp to a meter stick, and allow you to project images using a convex lens. This optics bench implicitly gives students a clear procedure to follow, and allows them to generate meaningful data, without any kind of sophisticated understanding of what they are doing. I anticipate that after they have done this investigation, they will have some basic knowledge that will enable them to access some of the other matrials in the kit -- to generate more questions and investigations. So my ideal kit would have an initial set of materials, containing a fairly clear set of questions, which ideally would be implicit in the materials themselves (as with the optics bench). Then it would have a deeper set of materials of greater variety, that would allow for more in depth investigation of the subject, along a pathway dictated by the students' interest and imagination. I will be spending time over the next few days processing the students' investigation plans, and more closely evaluating the kits. I intend to augment some of the kits further, and I am hoping for some help in this regard from some of the people on my development team at Lawrence Hall. Anthony Nov. 6, 1997 Response from Norman Brooks Anthony, thanks for the update. I really appreciate this. I think this is one of the important bases for or district program. I'll read your update more closely this evening but from the first part about the difficulties forming good questions it appears you're on the right track. It sounds like a perfect example of contructivism. You can tell the students a lot. You can show them a lot. They won't get it until they do it a lot. I would not tell them what is a good one or bad one. Let them do some bad ones and try to explain them. Let them watch other students and let them figure out on their own what works and what doesn't. I see the teacher's role as one who keeps them trying and excited. I would be afraid to criticize too much for fear they will get frustrated and give up. I see this as a long, maybe slow, process. It would be great if teachers could take their time and give the students time to "construct". normanb Nov. 6, 1997 Norman, Regarding the issue of how much to direct them, I am also concerned that if they only "mess around," and never really nail down an investigation, they won't learn what one is. I feel the need to set clear expectations, otherwise they are content to muck around for an indefinite period of time, never actually conducting what a scientist would recognize as an investigation. My work on the inquiry kits has taken an interesting turn today. My colleagues at the curriculum project I work on have been slow to embrace the autonomous investigation model, as they do not see it as being workable as a curriculum product. We arrived at a compromise today, however, which I am hoping will preserve the integrity of an inquiry approach, but also succeed as a marketable curriculum. Our basic plan is to divide the twelve-week minicourse into two six week sections. The first six weeks would be a couple of major hands-on, teacher-led investigations, such as the Heavy Ice and Dry Ice sequences I have created. The purpose would be to model what investigations are, give students some practical skills, and try to introduce them to a scientific framework for investigation. In the second six weeks, instruction would take two forms. Teacher-led activities would continue, but they would be focused on specific scientific process skills, like questioning, data collection and analysis, and so on. This instruction would alternate with work on four different investigation kits, each with a different topic. Thus the teacher's instruction is in a context of providing skills they need for their investigations. The reason for having four different kits is that this will first of all, give students a little bit of choice, but more importantly, it will prevent the teacher from conducting the activities "in unison." The students will be working on different topics, with different materials. (There will be four kit types, but we will have four of each kit, so the students can work in pairs.) The teacher's role will be to prepare them, then guide them as they begin experimenting with the materials. What I hope will emerge from this are the themes common to scientific inquiry. In other words, class discussions won't focus so much on the specifics of bubble-making or crystals, but rather on how you go about framing a question for investigation. What is a workable question? How is data generated? What steps follow when you have answered your initial question? The reason for limiting the kits to only four types are related to the need to make this a marketable curriculum, but do have some merit. If we only use four kit designs, they can each be very well designed and equipped. The basic structure would be to have some equipment or setup that allows students to conduct some immediate investigations, and then a broader reservoir of resources which could be accessed as the students get more deeply into their own questions. With only four different kit designs, teachers would have a better rein on management and materials, and the support material could be clearer about what to expect. This development process I am engaged in is at times a difficult one, as the ideas I hold dear are challenged very critically and forcefully, and compromise is necessary to make a workable product, at least within the context of the project I work on. It would certainly have been much less stressful to have simply returned to my classroom full time, and pursued my own ideas as I chose. But then I would not have had a chance to influence a nationally distributed curriculum, so perhaps it is for the best. I am glad to be through this major hurdle in this development process, and am looking forward to moving ahead. Thanks for your interest and support. Anthony Nov. 7, 1997 From Norman Brooks Anthony, I too am against too much "mucking around" though sometimes it's hard to tell when it's productive/ educational/necessary mucking. I was thinking that if there are specific guidelines and timelines, it allows for some of it while requiring some production. The compromise sounds like a good one. I'm anxious to see how it works out and to assist where I can. normanb |
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