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.