Tuesday Update 1-31-12

Good morning - I hope everyone is well.

If you get a chance, please read through the NY Times editorial on ADHD and medication.  It is very interesting.

I so enjoyed reading your blogs on the "Changing Education Paradigms" video.  We will be looking at more Ken Robinson material in the future, specifically a couple that focus on nurturing creativity in education. If you get a chance and want to view an excellent discussion of the video by one of your fellow groups please see Nicole, Katherine and Alexandria's blog at

A good discussion of Changing Education Paradigms

I would wager that most people think that education practices need change.  Not only to address test scores but to attend to changes in what students need in the 21st century - commonly called 21st century skills.  I don't think many of these are different from the past - including being creative, asking good questions and having the means to investigate these questions.  But the amount of time that we give students to work on these has decreased.  So, one of our jobs in our class is to think about how we mesh learning important content and skills with opportunities to solidify this learning through processes that resonate with individuals and the group as a whole.  That is - let's learn about physics in some traditional ways (maybe even some lectures) but build our knowledge in ways that are meaningful and robust for individual students.

Couple of more things: The ADHD issues was somewhat of a focus on many of the blogs (and I haven not finished reading these) but I actually think it was only a minor part.  Not to say it was not important; just that there was a lot of other interesting ideas presented.  Secondly, we are kind of stuck with the system we have.  I would love to think we could make whole scale changes in the education landscape; take back our classrooms, rebel and stand up to outside forces that really don't have a clue about educational practice.  But I suspect that will not happen any time soon.  The challenge is to find a way to work within the system so you can decide what to do in your teaching that you know is best for your students but still work within the confines of the present school structure.  It can be done.  I know teachers that are quietly working within the system to re-claim their classrooms and practice.  It takes will, knowledge and skill but is doable.  My vision and hope is that your generation of teachers will constitute the game changers and bring sanity back to the classroom practice.  A big job!

Thanks - see you later this AM.

Matt

Ritalin Gone Wrong - NY Times Editorial

Good morning - I hope everyone is well.
Here is a New York Times editorial regarding the use of behavior modification drugs for kids.  Very appropriate (if you are on this side of the argument) regarding our viewing of "Changing Education Paradigms".  I definitely defer to those of you who may have had direct and possibly positive experiences with application of these medications.  But you have to wonder about the long term impacts and benefits.  Here is the URL

Ritalin Gone Wrong _ NY Times Editorial 1/29/12

I will be blogging more today or tomorrow.

Matt

Class reflection_1-26-2012

Good morning - I hope everyone is well.

I have watched the "Changing Education Paradigm" RSA video many time, both in- and outside of class.  I have great respect for Ken Robinson and believe he is somewhat of a visionary regarding educational policy.  Of course, there are aspects that you may not agree; perhaps you have more direct experience with ADHD that supports the application of medication to improve student performance.  I certainly have heard stories but have not seen outcomes.  What I find interesting, stimulating and motivating is the prospect of change - clearly there are some issues with how we educate students as evidence by high dropout rates and low test scores.  And, on a larger scale, how our society values different paths is certainly mirrored in our education system.  It is my belief that large scale change starts in individual classrooms and I challenge my students, both those who are going to be teachers and those who are not (they will still be impacted by the educational system - and have been impacted) to get a little rebel in them.  That is strive to be the kind of teacher that you remember as a great teacher.  Stir curiosity in your students.  Challenge them to think, to question, to investigate.  Work within the system but put your fingerprint on your students' education.  Your teaching should be more than test preparation - it should be developing that individual who might be the game changer.  In our present environment there is nothing easy about the path you have chosen but it could be the most important one!  As a class this semester let's use this learning opportunity to be enthusiastic learners ourselves so we can become fabulous teachers tomorrow.

Our connection to the video in class perhaps was subtle - I mean how do you connect a burning candle to changing the entire education system?  However, what I hope you see and apply is that creativity, thinking divergently, is what we are trying to do by taking a simple object and framing an inquiry around simple processes.  Essentially this is practice, which will be vital to our future efforts that are more content focused.  And using something we are familiar and nonthreatening will build confidence and skills.  But this is hard - developing interesting, testable questions (about a candle? - actually about almost anything) is very, very hard.  So, if you are struggling with this, be patient with yourselves.  Over the next 4 days or so you might consider reframing your question if it does not seem testable.  It should not be just a yes or no question (closed).  It should provide the opportunity to collect numeric data in order to answer your question.  I will be emailing people/groups individually to shore up any questions about your questions.

I will end this post by including the Word Clouds (wordles) from our group observations.  Have a good weekend and see you on Tuesday.

Word Cloud - Round 2

Word Cloud - Round 1

Greetings - I hope everyone is well.  I believe the QFT (Question Formulation Technique - that is what we did on Tuesday) worked pretty well.  It was a bit of a trial to get through all the directions but I am hoping it will be a useful tools throughout the semester and perhaps serve your needs in the future.  My original intent with this effort was to focus on doing and learning science but, at the last minute, I added teaching.  And, not surprising, that was what most of the questions were about - teaching and learning.  There were not too many questions that focused on science process - but that is ok; I learned somethings from this process and hopefully you did as well.

Here are a couple of word clouds that I constructed using the questions.  This one is using all of the words:

Word Cloud for QFT Questions - 1/24/12

 It is pretty clear that nearly all the questions were about science followed by interest in learning, teaching, technology and student.

Here is a word cloud when I took out science

World Cloud for QFT Questions w/o Science - 1/24/12

Once again, no surprises here - teaching, learning, technology (actually that was kind of surprising and encouraging since we will be using a lot of technology in the class), students were part of many questions.

I should remind everyone that we will be talking mostly about science content in this class and not about how kids' learn science, although we will do some work with that.  But I am pretty happy with the outcomes of the QFT effort.

I would also like to remind people to blog about the QFT experience, especially with respect to how it might have changed you view of science as described in the first blog.  Did the process make you think more about the importance of questions in learning?  That is the essential question.  Please take some time to think about this.

I also talked about the higher-level critical thinking that has to go on with question development.  The first one was divergent thinking - looking outside of the box and creatively about an issue or concept.  That is what we were doing when I asked you to generate a lot of questions.  Second, there is convergent thinking; that is taking broad ideas and chiseling them down to a few more important ones.  When did we do this aspect of critical thinking?  Right, when we were prioritizing.  Lastly, the process involves metacognition - that is thinking about your thinking.  We kind of did this throughout the process.  Generating questions really makes you focus and THINK about concepts and issues.

Tomorrow in class we will be looking in more detail at science as practice frameworks - mainly the Activity Model for Inquiry and the Understanding Science diagram.  We will also be conducting a controlled experiment that has a content neutral focus.  More details tomorrow - it will be fun.

Have a good night - see you in the AM.

Matt

A good post - this is the type of detail I am looking for - this would score a 3/3

Science to me is like experimenting with different things. You make observations of what you think is going to happen given a situation and then you wait and you see the results and you write what you observe then and if your predictions were right. It's a way of knowing and understanding more about I guess everything. Honestly, I do not enjoy science very much but I took one of the other physical science classes last semester and it was a lot better than just a regular science class. I tend to do better when I do things hands on, which we did a lot in that class and I'm sure it will be the same here. Last semester we did this project where we had a system in the body and we had to create a power point for it make a written out plan of how we were going to teach it, and we also had to have an activity to go with it. We were in groups of 4 and we each had to present a certain part of our system. I don't like getting up in front of people and talking/ presenting but that was not that bad and it actually helped me a lot. I am not really sure if I have a bad experience, like I said science is not my favorite subject, so usually I just put the effort I have to and nothing more, but with these physical sciences I really tried to go above my own expectations. I also do not think I used a scientific approach in my life to help me out, unless I did not realize. Well I do not know if this counts, but my sister had a baby in November and a few days before we all made predictions about when he was going to be born and how much he was going to weigh. We looked out how it was her first child, and usually they are late or the mother is in labor for a long time, we also looked at how big he was then and how much we think he would grow. We each put in a dollar and who ever was right got all the money. We observed my sister and the baby to make predictions about when he would be born, so in a way, I guess that was a scientific approach.

Updates

Good morning NTSC 261 Bloggers

I hope everyone is well.  Nice to have some rain this AM although it makes me wonder how I will bike this AM without getting totally soaked!  Wish me luck.

A note about our efforts with technology - be patient!  The blogging will be a very useful tool for us but takes time to get all the logistics down and for me to get following everyone.  And you to follow me.  We will catch up on this today.  I also rely a lot on email, so you should get int he practice of checking you gmail accounts fairly frequently.  I wanted everyone to blog about science and sent out some questions; some people completed the assignment although several did not.  NO WORRIES - we can do that this AM.

This week will be spent looking in detail at the idea of science as practice.  Today we will explore questions related to science as practice using a questioning technique called Question Formulation Technique.  This is a new tool for me and I am both excited and nervous about using it.  Wish me luck.  We will then do a bunch of activities that build on our knowledge about science practice, read a couple of articles and do some more blogging.  It will be busy!   And fun.  This is also a new approach for me so you will have to be patient with any glitches that come up.

On Thursday we will conduct some investigations that force us to track our progress through the scientific method.  Our aim is to make it clear that science process is a strategy to answer questions (about the natural world) with a general aim to build evidence to support "stories".

See you at 11 AM.  I look forward to continuing our learning adventure.

Be well

Matt