Turned on Students

I finally found the topic that can intrigue most students - electricity!

Here during the last 3 weeks of the school year, I started my favorite physics topic, and it turns out the students are really turned on by it too. Students who would sit at the periphery are joining in the activities, worksheets are being completed, quizzes are getting a much higher grade average, and expressions like "wow" and "eee" and "come look at this!" are common.

As usual, I've been using the Teaching Physics through Toys book, as well as some activities I've used before, which I've rewritten for this class. As something new, we are using some sections of Active Physics, which I received as a class-set a couple of months ago, and just now started to use. The students love it, and some wish they could take it home to read the Green Pages. No one has ever asked to be able to read something before! Some have even asked about where to read in the Conceptual Physics book they have at home.

We have used hand-cranked generators, batteries, magnets and the sun to generate electricity.
We've studied what happens with magnets when they come close to i(which I put into well-sealed plastic bags because of previous experience) and compasses. On an Active Physics quiz, most correctly chose "compass" when asked what to use to detect a current in a wall.
We've made magnets by wrapping wire around straws to make solenoids, which we've powered with the hand generators to make weak magnets - and they accepted that they were weak.
We've made 2 different kinds of mini-motors, and then experience "real" motors in other settings.
We've taken apart the Operation game to see what makes it light and buzz (including a motor, which not all could identify at first.)
Students can use words like power source, series and parallel circuits (which I illustrated with stories about finding the burnt out Christmas tree lights in the series light strings of my childhood - and discovered that a couple of students still use these at home or at Grandma's.) Most understand that static electricity "stands still" (based on the Latin word) while and electric current "runs" (using Spanish.)
We used some fun "energy balls" that lit up and buzzed when the 2 poles were touched to make human series and parallel circuits. I've left out the Arbor Scientific catalog so they can see where all these fun things come from.
They've used balloons to find how electrons are gained or lost, and can explain that electrons are negative, so "gained" means "more negative." I told them that it's Ben Franklin's fault getting positive and negative backwards, that causes misunderstandings, and that I had a lot of trouble with that in Chemistry, so they have an advantage over their future chem classmates because they can tell the difference. We also pulled in a bit about adding and subtracting negatives, which suddenly also made a lot of sense.
And they know that static electricity and magnetism are both similar, but very different.

But it was when I put a big box of wires, batteries, light bulbs, small motors and tools on their tables that they really got excited. First they all made a switch out of a 3x5 card, a paper clip and pronged fasteners and washers, so that they (that is, most of them) kept their circuits off while they were building them. A few got eager just putting things together to see what would happen - including burning out an alligator clip with a short-circuited battery. Some strung out all the components they could find (and most got the batteries going + to -). One group figured out the parallel circuit on their own, and then added new parallel groups until they ran out of components. Such excitement - and EVERYONE was participating. (It didn't hurt that my supervisor just happened to walk in just as the excitement was greatest, and I was showing a student how to straighten a wire with pliers.) Even the girls got into using screwdrivers and pliers, after some announced that that was a boy thing.

On Monday the groups will get to use multimeters and I hope we'll get in a little introduction to Ohm's Law before we have to move on to finals review.

I'm seriously considering starting physics with electricity next year. If I can hook them with that, maybe they'll stay connected for Newton as well!

Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL)

I spent a fascinating 3 days this week on the University of Redlands campus this week learning about Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL), a relatively new way to teach science (and other subjects) where students in 3-4 person cooperative learning groups figure out the concepts they are to learn using directed work sheets, rather than a teacher-based PowerPoint lecture. Those who have used the system report dramatic improvements in student learning, and particular, in student retention.

The system was initially used in chemistry classes at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA, where several of the boys from my high school graduating class in York, PA, got their training as engineers. Because of the great results, the idea spread to many other colleges and universities, where it has been used successfully in a variety of college courses. The original copied "activities" have now been published as work books, that the college students buy. High school teachers soon discovered the method and started using the college materials in AP classes. This started the High School POGIL Initiative (HSYPI) . You can find sample lessons in both biology and chemistry through that link. Very inexpensive workbooks for these subjects will be available in January (unfortunately.)

A POGIL lesson is carried out in 3-4 student groups, where each student has a role: Manager, PR (the only group member who may ask the teacher questions,) Recorder, Quality Control (consensus builder,) and possibly Process Analyst (who looks at the group's dynamics.) These groups are often kept together for a longer period of time, as they learn to work together.

A POGIL lesson is based on the Learning Cycle: Exploration, Concept Invention/Term Introduction, and Application, which all refer to a model, which can be a diagram, a demonstration or even a video.

1. Exploration involves very direct questions to the model, to make sure the students understand the details of the model. These might include questions as basic, "What does the dotted line represent," but go on to more detailed understanding of the model.
2. Concept Invention helps students derive the concept to be learned in the lesson based on their exploration.
3. Term Introduction gives students a name for the concept. Up to this point, they are exploring and thinking about connections. They may already have invented a term for the concept, but this step introduces the term in a new question.
4. Application gives the students an opportunity to use the new concepts and terms in a broader, often more open-ended question.
5. The Learning Cycle may start again in the same activity with a new Model, Exploration, Concept Invention and Application. 

The students learning is guided by a worksheet with the model and questions that start as Direct in the Exploration phase, then Convergent (using the material gleaned from the direct questions to the model - which have a correct answer) in both the Concept Invention and Application phases, and then the open-ended Divergent questions for more advanced applications. Divergent questions go further, and do not have a correct answer (although there may be incorrect answers!)

As you can see, this is a sort of guided discovery learning. There are also labs created according to this system. In particular, POGIL labs are used for exploration and content invention. They come before any lecture on a topic, rather than afterwards.

You can find a few worksheets on the website. Unfortunately the many activities that have been developed in Bio and Chem for high school will not be available until January. At least the workbooks then will be very affordable. (The current college workbooks cost about $35.)

A lot of teachers are creating lessons for their own use, and sharing them on the site, and elsewhere. The main way to create your own lessons is to turn the book lesson around. Start with the examples as models. Then turn the introductory material into concept invention and term introduction questions. But easiest for a beginner of course is to find existing materials. I googled POGIL and found several sites where teachers have made their lesson activities available.

As soon as I find out what I will be teaching (which depends, of course, on which school hires me to teach which subject that I soon have a credential for: Math, Bio, Chem or Physics) I will be working on finding or creating appropriate POGIL lessons. From what I can see, the students are active all the time, so there is little time for them to cause classroom management issues. Even the smart kids will be working well in their groups (for which there are always a few extension questions.)

In a couple weeks I'll be off to Orlando to learn more about Reasoning and Sense-making in math, which is a less structured concept with the same aim - to facilitate the students' owning their learning, so they have little need to memorize factoids that don't necessarily make sense.

Discovery Learning

Comics were great on science education today.
Even the New York Times was in on it with a A solution for saving the space program

What to do when there aren't any jobs and you really want to teach...

This has been a really frustrating Fall for me. After making my decision to become a math teacher at a time when everyone said that jobs would fall into my lap, and then discovering that that is definitely not the case, I have found classes at Claremont Graduate University both inspiring and depressing - the last particularly when the speaker refers to "your students," of course. But at this point, there are still about 10 of us in secondary math, who do not yet have an Internship position.

So I have bought most of the new books available from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and used copies of a variety of math teaching materials, in particular Core-Plus Mathematics Contemporary Mathematics in Context from Glencoe. I've beeing reading about Sensemaking and learning through Discovery and Problem Solving, which really "make sense" to me as a way to get students interested in what they are learning. Core-Plus, which has units in Algebra, Geometry, Statistics, etc. each year, instead of separate years, looks like a fantastic way to teach math, except that it would be really hard to implement, since any student who switches schools would be lost wherever else they went. That is probably why there are so many used materials on Amazon.

I've also enjoyed the materials I discovered at the website for Geometer's Sketch Pad, which is a fun way to do geometry (and I understand other math subjects.) I found that they have great online resources for their Algebra and Geometry books, including some in Spanish. I also discovered the Prentice Hall Multilingual Handbooks - all available for almost nothing at Amazon. They included glossaries, etc. in a variety of languages, not just Spanish. But evidently Spanish is the only language that districts want to invest in. I just found a letter from a parent complaining about the creative math texts (dating back to 1996.)

I have also been observing classrooms - I'm required to observe 25 hours, including special ed and bilingual classrooms, and I've observed more than that now. What I see is teachers doing direct instruction and students doing work sheets. In some classes, text books are stacked somewhere in the classroom, or the students have a copy at home, but they are not being used. The ones I've looked at with my inexperienced eyes seems really exciting, if you want to teach by discovery and problem solving. But kids are learning how to solve problems on work sheets - and on standardized tests. I understand that there are pacing guides at the schools, that decide, for example, that next week all Algebra I teachers will be teaching solving two equations with graphing or substitution. No need to use a text book for that. No need to discover anything, when you can just do problems. Teachers tell me that the enormous textbooks just have too much material in them - and of course they're too heavy to carry around! So all the thought that went into making them (so they'd fit most any state's standards!) is just gathering dust.

To make myself more "hireable," I just did a quick (one month) review of physics and took the teaching qualification exam, CSET Physics III last Saturday. Now I have to decide whether to take Physics IV, to qualify as a physics teacher, or Science I and II (including biology, chemistry, earth and planetary science as well as physics) to be able to be a General Science teacher. Or maybe I'll just use the physics I've reviewed to provide more "authentic" problenms for my students.

Finally, I've been writing a few lesson plans, which are assignments for this semester at Claremont Graduate University - writing a total of 3 lessons that will benefit English Language Learners (ELLs) or students with other learning issues, like dyslexia or autism. I've written lessons that involve discovery and sense-making, since I'm not in a classroom trying to keep up with the pacing guide to make sure the kids do well on standardized tests. I'm afraid that my idealism will hit the dust when I finally do get into my own classroom.