Sites to remember

I don't actually want to lose these references, as they have interesting info in them, so thought I'd load them up and perhaps others might look at them too...

• Children's misconceptions about science: http://www.amasci.com/miscon/opphys.html
• Teaching for conceptual change: http://www.exploratorium.edu/IFI/resources/workshops/teachingforconcept.html

Journal Entry 2 (Week 3)

Firstly....

I got a placement at Fintona Girls' in Balwyn...woo-hoo! It's a terrific school by reputation, so I'm very lucky to be going there. Just waiting for the OTP to call back, but I'm SO STOKED! It's not too far from home, and I really feel I will be getting a view of current best practice in schools, as local goss puts them as one of the better schools in the area and their Year 12 results are consistently excellent. Hehehehe - how exciting :-).

OK, now to the reflection!

I really enjoyed yesterday's tute and lecture. Felt like I learned quite a bit. I love being able to put terms around the different ways students can work together - it helps me to remember them and you can have a conversation with other people about it without bumbling around what you're trying to say. Think Pair Share (this one was about "What Have I Learned About Science, Learning, Teaching, Myself and Year 8's") was terrific & I will certainly use that in my own classes. I think it's very important in many settings that people are given the opportunity to think first, before acting. It shares this same strength with POE - you have time to think, and thus engage right from the outset. The pair then share parts also have strengths - it was less confronting to discuss my ideas with just one person & at the same time have feedback and different ideas. Then there was also partner support during share time. You get to hear the whole classes thoughts, which I jotted down as much as I could, because they were all valuable. So, the key strengths of this method as I saw it from a learner's perspective, is that it is a structure which allows time to think first (which my slow old brain needs!), time therefore to engage, and it provides a supportive base from which to gain other people's viewpoints and share your own. I wonder if some of this also comes down to control of learning...if someone is being step by step directed in what to think, they may feel they have no input over & above the teacher and therefore don't engage. When the student is officially supposed to think, it may make them feel valued & in control of their own learning. Probably just me making stuff up at this point, but who knows!

So, I decided that I would put down my thoughts, then compare them to things I can find to read, to see what discrepancies from my experience to the learned opinion on each point, as it comes up. Here's a link to one site that discusses think-pair-share http://olc.spsd.sk.ca/DE/PD/instr/strats/think/

The key points from this article were...

• Providing "think time" increases quality of student responses.
• Students become actively involved in thinking about the concepts presented in the lesson.
• Research tells us that we need time to mentally "chew over" new ideas in order to store them in memory. When teachers present too much information all at once, much of that information is lost. If we give students time to "think-pair-share" throughout the lesson, more of the critical information is retained.
• When students talk over new ideas, they are forced to make sense of those new ideas in terms of their prior knowledge. Their misunderstandings about the topic are often revealed (and resolved) during this discussion stage.
• Students are more willing to participate since they don't feel the peer pressure involved in responding in front of the whole class.
• Think-Pair-Share is easy to use on the spur of the moment.
• Easy to use in large classes.

One great application mentioned in the article was the use of it for "predict" in the POE science experiment structure. Everything they said made sense & connected with what I experienced, although I don't think a picked up on how much better you retain knowledge with this structure - I guess it makes sense though.

OK - now to the lecture. This was JUST what I needed when it comes to curriculum! Making sense of what I learned in science 20 years ago, c.f. what is in the science curriculum now is sometimes challenging, so to see what pressures have driven curriculum change over the years was very interesting. It's easy (but voluminous!) to find what the current curriculum is, but much more difficult to determine the history that Deborah gave us yesterday. It seems like such a political bung-fight driving the changes though....

I am also very very happy that I have finally resolved something that has bugged me all throughout 2007, up until yesterday. Why has there been a steady decrease in Maths and Science performance at school, and enrollments to these subjects at Uni, when we have a supposedly improved curriculum and methods of teaching them (i.e. more context based). The really blindingly obvious answer that until now has eluded me - because it is more socially acceptable to be smart and in a field other than maths and science! These two respective industries have lost standing within society compared with other (and even new) industries. How obvious! How stupid of me!!! It was like being on the road around Canberra! You can see where you want to be, but you're stuck on a circular loop and can't get off it (this joke won't make any sense to anyone who hasn't been to Canberra by car lol!).

Deborah had some questions in the lecture for us to mull over...

1. Does curriculum reflect society, or does it initiate change in society? This is a trick question? Sometimes it clearly attempts to reflect/respond to societal changes - Deb's point of science curriculum responding to the great space race is an example of this. Another example is the use of CAS calculators in maths, reflecting the highly technological society in which we live, and the greater need for people to be able to interpret output, rather than understand the technicalities of how that output was arrived at. The flip-side of this, is that I suspect that by initiating changes to curriculum, students come out of school with a different bank of knowledge and experience than their parents did, upon which they forge their path in the world - thus it must also change society. It is a positive feedback situation, really. Curriculum must be both....and it is surely in quite a delicate balance.
   
   
2. Which pressure groups have the greatest influence on the curriculum? Hmmm - let me be cynical here and say "the ones with the most power". Usually, power = money. So, students are typically broke and don't have a voice until they're 18...I'm guessing it's not them (told you I was cynical). It's irrelevant that they're the biggest stakeholder.
   
   Politicians pay the salaries at the Department of Education, so ultimately they are a huge stakeholder. Getting voted in is of the utmost priority for them, so this is probably where the average mum and dad, and teacher gets some say - via disapproval of current political agendas for education. Having said that, politicians want to minimise costs at every opportunity, so people have to scream pretty loudly to get them to turn their hearing aids on. Teacher strikes x 2 for my girls this year is a point in case. If a new innovation with curriculum is brought in, they can sell it as an educational improvement, and hopefully win some votes.
   
   Another major power group is industry - although I must say that I don't think they've been all that successful in terms of curriculum agendas, b/c I have read that some larger corporates have now resorted to running basic letter writing and literacy classes for employees, to cover the gap in standards that students leave school with. You wouldn't want ppl who rite like txt 2 m8k letters 4 u! Most trades like their new apprentices to have completed year 12 - enter VCAL, VET etc. But really, these just replace the old tech schools, so I wonder if it has changed all that much over time (except that students stick it out longer at school, but that was a politically driven exercise too - it reduced unemployment for a short time).
   
   Universities & other further education institutions should be another group of stakeholders, but I have a suspicion their influence is reducing, not increasing. Uni's don't rely on as many prerequisite subjects any more, which means students tend to repeat subjects in 1st year, or perhaps do different subjects in year 12. Due to the weighting up of some science/maths subject marks in terms of ENTER scores, this latter choice is less of an option than you might think. So students are getting to repeat year 12 content in 1st year Uni. Why do the Uni's not have as many prerequisite subjects? Is this driven by them being dissatisfied with the curriculum taught in VCE, to the point they ignore it? Hmm... if that is the case, perhaps they don't have very much influence on curriculum at all.
   
   All this suggests it's mostly politically driven, which is very sad, as politicians are primarily focussed on changing things around so they will be re-elected. This means that education (including curriculum) will become a priority on a cyclical basis, as the focus will only be there when it is in a state of disrepair or inadequacy.
   
   Of course, there is one other voice - the media. I wonder how it's influence is felt, as they don't directly input to curriculum, but if The Age and Four Corners (or maybe Today Tonight lol!) made enough of a fuss about curriculum being inadequate, it might just make it onto the agenda at the next curriculum meeting.
   
   Can someone with a yellow hat please enter this blog?
   
   Deb mentioned a couple of other influences on curriculum. Politics and economics - actually, I think I covered both of these above, but I personally think they are inescapably linked. Cultural transmission was another interesting influence - I wonder how much Aboriginal, African or, say, Asian science will be found in VELS. That's an exercise for me to look at...
   
   
3. What evidence do I see that a theory of learning is evident in a curriculum. Well, one that springs to mind is Piaget. When we looked at VELS from level 4 through to level 6, it progressed clearly from concrete operational to formal operational (which fits with the age groups involved). For example, in space and earth science, level 4 talked about MODELS being used to explain structures, eg. the arrangement of planets in the solar system. This is concrete operational. It moves on in levels 5 to formal operational, but still with some reference back to concrete operational - "they use physical and theoretical models to investigate geological processes" (for eg.). In level 6, it is assumed all students are in the formal operational stage, and the focus is much greater on concepts and reasoning. Made good sense to me :-)
   
   
4. Why study science? Why study chemistry? Great question that surely we all should at least be able to answer for ourselves! I studied science because I loved it. Why? I think my upbringing had a huge role in this - Dad happily still recounts days of making wierd and wonderful chemical cocktails to do different things when he was a kid (like making gum nut bombs with cheese plugs at the top, to blow up the local rat plague where he lived in Carlton). Lots of funny and entertaining stories that sparked a real interest in me with the potential for chemistry. I grew crystal gardens and wanted to cut stuff up to see what was inside them, wanted to understand how methane generators worked and wired up control boxes to pottery kilns - all that geeky stuff that most kids don't want to do. But actually, it was pretty cool - methane generators are really quite interesting! What kid doesn't think poo is funny - what potential!! I really hope I can find both entertainment and relevance for science and chemistry for my students, but I think the trick is that it is very personal. Science is such a broad subject, that my reasons for loving it are unlikely to be the same as any of my students, so I have to find a way to tap into their interests and be versatile enough in my knowledge to find something of relevance to them. Why study science? Because it's interesting and relevant. But the interest and relevance is different for everyone.

Well, that was the end of Deb's questions. Other points of note in the lecture really realted to scientific literacy. I like to think there's a happy balance, that doesn't compromise theoretical science, but applies that in the real world. This has got to be the easiest subject in schools to find relevant context for all the theory - I think the challenging part is to present it to students so they remain interested, and not bogged down in too much rote learning or theory. Perhaps involving them in choosing context (via surveys of interests) and also exposing the students to science they may not have noticed around them. I'm looking forward to trying :-)

Back to tutes - investigating VELS. Looking at the way a single topic within science progresses through the levels and interconnected with other topics is a really good way of getting a handle on how the curriculum designers were thinking. I actually liked doing this activity (there HAS to be something wrong with me), but I'm also relieved to find the progression points that I have come to know and love in maths to be there for science as well (http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/assessment/ppoint/science/index.html). It is a bit more prescriptive, and I hear what Deb was saying (re: CSF) about too much information making you spend your time focusing on ticking off topics covered, but I see it as being quite a good guide to before starting a topic, and a framework from which to build interesting lessons. I don't believe the connections are lost, as long as you retain a total view as well as the micro view, which I hope I can do.

In group work, I have to assume that the teacher rarely intervenes, unless there's a problem. The role becomes one of oversight. Mandi mentioned in her blog that she did this deliberately. Also, regarding not everyone listening at share time - I don't actually see this as a major problem, because really we all have to go through VELS in detail. I think the key points to take from other people's work is that the structure is similar for all the disciplines, there are lots of interconnections between the topics and disciplines, and that you will see patterns for the topics flow through from one level to the next. We have to go through the detail ourselves though - a high level overview by peers will not cover anything more than superficial knowledge, and identify similarities and differences to the work we had each done. Unfortunately, the group I was working in was one of the key offenders in the not listening camp - sorry Mandy...

Mandi asked what it was like to be a learner in the class. Actually, that's a much tougher question than it seems - I suspect she was feeling a bit worried that none of us answered, but it's quite a deep one! Firstly, I enjoyed the class. I was engaged, didn't find myself tuning out, and the three hours disappeared into perhaps an hour of perceived time. That always shows I'm interested in what I'm up to. Why? I think it was well structured - designed to move, designed to get us thinking when we were supposed to. Thinking was broken up by doing. Doing was broken up by talking. It appealed to various modes of learning (visual - ppt, aural - lots of talking, kinaesthetic - posters). I think the success is in the design of the lesson. I guess this comes with experience, but I am definitely going to copy this structure in my own lessons. My only concern was that there wasn't enough time to finish what we were supposed to do, with the amount of thought we wanted to put in. I will think about that too, when it comes to my own classes. One interesting thing - everyone could and did start working straight away. In my maths classes last year, some students were just not capable of starting immediately - they fiddled with pencils, dropped rulers, talked, asked for help... Was the success of immediate work due to the age of the students, or is it in the structure of the lesson? Probably a bit of both, but I suspect the latter more than the former. Perhaps the think-pair-share, and POE structures will get the students motivated from the outset.

Well, I've put this blog entry together off and on over the course of this day, so I'll end it now!

Check here in a week for the next exciting adventure :P

M