NABT Day 2

Today's workshops were quite interesting. I shall share a little of what I have learnt and some thoughts about my own classroom teaching.

Topic Sense: Guiding students to science fair success

The speaker shared some ideas on how to help students come up with good topics to start their projects.

1) find things they like to do
2) go and read something about the new idea
3) go and talk to parents, friends about it, teacher - group students together of similar interests
4) narrow down the themes and project
5) now they have an idea - ask good questions
6) encourage kids to keep a logbook and use their smartphones to take pictures

I think science fairs are big things in some schools and it provides a platform for students to engage themselves in scientific inquiry. I was reminded of the SRP we have at Anderson Secondary School, which all our Secondary 2 (or 8th grade) students take part in. One of the teachers' frustration was looking for topics. Although there is no silver bullet to this problem, the speaker shared a science fair project by a 15 year old that made waves in the scientific community and I wanted to share the TED talk here.

Perhaps an idea to change the way our groupings work for SRP is to group students of similar interests, rather than group them based on friendship or other concerns. Have some time to ask the sec 1 students what their interests are before the year ends and group them based on that. Hash out a topic and send them out to read during the December holidays before coming back in January to give a literature review.

Measuring Student Proficiency

So it seems the US education system is very interested in standards these days. Everything is about getting students to a certain standard. There is the Common Core Standards addressing the minimum standards for language and mathematics, and then there is the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) for science. And yes they love acronyms just as much as we do. 

How do you measure standards, it seems the popular way is to make rubrics and use it to track students' performance. Making a good rubric is not easy and it takes a lot of thought. It shouldn't be ambiguous - having terms like some of the time, most of the time. Or having language that is too difficult for the students - unless it is sufficiently unpacked. But what I really liked is the idea of each student having some sort of growth chart that tracks their development in these skills and proficiencies. I think in Singapore we lament the idea that students' academic results are properly tracked - with marks and grades for everything, except for skills and proficiencies. Well at least I lament. So what if we design some form of developmental tracking. I think the easiest to implement is to look at our SPA (School-based Practical Assessment). The SPA accesses students on several science practical skills such as conducting the experiment, planning, collecting data, processing data and analysis. What if we can design a tracking form for each student so that they can indicate after each lab or each session how they have performed and what they did well (or didn't) and the form follows them from secondary 3 to 4? Students will perhaps feel more confident when SPA comes and they can review these skills. I shall have to talk to my teachers about it.

Alternative Assessments - creativity and critical thinking

These 2 biology professors shared 2 ideas on how they engaged their students to think critically and creatively on biology topics

1) Biology in the news - turning in journal articles that illustrate the applications of biology to real life situations

Specific directions
- include the article: so that we can use it in the future if it's good
- highlight: makes information easier to read and review (eg. highlight a section that you felt was the most important thing that you learned from reading the article. Explain why you chose the highlighted passage. Highlight a section that you felt was the best part of the article. Explain why you chose that section. How could you, your family members, or the local community apply the information gained from the chosen article?)
- select 2 key ideas that are most closely related to the chosen article. Explain why you chose each of the ideas. Use specific passages from the article to support your selection. We could use the biology syllabus and ask the students what is the connection with what they are learning.
- Find a connection between the chosen article and your own life, your community, popular culture, or media. Explain how the chosen article relates to the world beyond the classroom.
- What are 2 questions you have about what you read?

2) Cells are Us
Task: Design an ad for an Organelle
- priced competitively (compared to other organelles)
- be presented in such a way that potential customers must want to purchase
- accurately describe the organelles
- show an analogy to something that customers are already familiar with in their life
- visually and colorfully appeal to the eye
- contain neat, well-written and easy to read texts
- give a reflection of the process

I thought these ideas are interesting to explore. We could probably scale it down to match the abilities of our students - but hey they can always surprise us at how much they can do.

One other side idea they shared was to give the students a form in the beginning of the year to have the students share their interest, personality and skills. I thought this will make a great database on the kids so that we know how to manage them better.

NABT (National Association of Biology Teachers) Professional Development Conference. Day 1

Exhibition

Paul Andersen www.bozemanscience.com

This year, the conference is held at Atlanta in the Hyatt Regency. The hotel is relatively new and located in the city itself. It reminds me of the Oriental hotel back in Singapore. I missed the opening session because I only arrived at 10am, but I did manage to catch a "celebrity" teacher by the name of Paul Andersen. He was featured on TED and has been posting biology lesson videos on the website: www.bozemanscience.com. No prizes for guessing where he's teaching. He shared mostly from his life and how he evolved as a biology teacher. He has been working on using the blended learning approach with his students (using a blend of online videos he made, face to face lessons and classroom assignments) - the latest trend in classroom pedagogy. However, something he said resonates with what I believe about blended learning. His experience showed that teachers cannot just give students a video and expect them to learn automatically. He has been trying what he termed the blended learning cycle (catch his video here) in which he scaffolds the entire learning journey for the students telling them which links to go to and what to look out for so that students know what to do and how to learn. He also mentioned that it would be very challenging to use these methods with unmotivated students

I attended many other breakout sessions - some more useful than others - and I learnt quite a few interesting ideas. 

The 5 practices (actually 7)

This is a framework to help teachers plan lessons so that students can benefit from discussions in the classroom.

A: Setting Goals (process and content goals)

B: Selecting or designing tasks
- should have multiple approaches
- should allow students to collaborate
- should require critical thinking

1: Anticipating students' thinking
- possible misconceptions
- possible student approaches to the problem

2: monitoring students work
- watch and listen
- document student artifacts - a form to capture some details

3: selecting examples of student work
4: sequencing the examples
5: connecting the ideas across examples 

I think this is a good framework - not that we don't do it but it is just a way of describing what we do and putting words in a certain order that makes sense. But I am a bit curious as to why we need to select examples of student work to share - maybe it is due to a lack of time but I thought we should give every student opportunity to share and learn from one another. 

Know what they know, engaging hands-on formative assessment

Another interesting session was about using games to engage students. A majority of it are simple to play - using homemade cards to play matching games, or "Quiz, Quiz, Trade" having cards with a question and an answer and students pair up and quiz each other before switching cards and finding other partners. I think the main idea is that the students must take the time to discuss the reasons before their answers and ideas. Another one I liked was this "I have, who has" cards. Imagine a card with 2 columns, a "I have" box which gives a term and a "Who has" box that has a description. The idea is students have to find a corresponding "I have" to their own "Who has" box. And eventually the whole class will be "linked" in this way. Teachers can have competitions between classes to see which class or group can link up the fastest. There was another find a corner game as well. Students are given cards with certain descriptions on it and are tasked to find the "corner" of the class that fits that description or word. After that they then share with the other students in the corner justifying why they belong there. Fun things to do.

Exhibition

The exhibition was fun too. I just visited a few booths today and some of them were very interesting. There was a product that is a handheld photospectrometer - costs only US$50 - and it is calibrated to read the concentration of certain concentration of ions in water. It needs to reagent to bring out the color of the ions in the first place but I thought it will give students a nice way to collect data in the field. Unfortunately it is not connected to any mobile device so students will have to manually transcribe the data. But still interesting.

There was another product that allowed students to transform bacteria and they can design the gene sequences in the plasmid. Of course the gene sequence are harmless sequences that expresses colored proteins in the E.Coli. Students can determine which genes are attached and in what sequence so that when they grow out the bacteria, different results can be seen. I was thrilled at seeing such technology being used in class. Of course it was not cheap - US$400 a kit which will allow 15 groups of students to work on something but I think it's an interesting idea. Most of the stages of transformation are chemically mediated so there is no need for expensive equipment - only the incubator to grow the bacteria. Well, maybe we can find some money to do this...

NABT Professional Development Conference

The Hyatt Regency