Following Chem Workshop 3

Another terrific workshop! We did pracs :-)

It's been soooo long since I actually participated in a chemistry prac, and it reminds me of why I loved them back in the dark ages when I studied chem. I like the 'doing' and the unpredictability (say, of power cords catching fire, spectrometers not remaining calibrated etc.) and the fun of trying to find work-arounds to these problems. I like the measuring, and the uncertainty of doing something but not quite knowing for sure if it's right....in a word, exciting.

The biggest thing to strike me was the excellent way of changing pracs around to get students thinking harder. The group I was in was not given the procedure up-front; we had to work out what was going to happen in the prac before we ever got near the steps to follow. How much more thinking did we do - heaps! I'm going to try to sabotage all pracs from here on, b/c this was so much more effective in employing the higer-order thinking. It has similarities with POE in this regard.

I thought it was interesting how many people seemed instantaneously frozen at the 'emergency' of our plug catching fire - I suspect as science teachers we probably need to expose ourselves to emergency situations and find ways to quickly solve them. I really don't think fire drills cut it! It reminds me that I should know where every plug, tap and off switch is in each lab....

I had a really good discussion with Deb about assessment. It's been a common theme bugging me for a bit, and now I think I've come to a place where I'm comfortable. Assessment is against the learning continuum - that is, it's OK to mark a student harder than their peer for equal content work, if I set personal learning goals for them that is individualised based on what I expect they might be able to achieve. In the end, I will be reporting about where they are in respect to the continuum, and the brighter kids will end up further up on the dots than the kids who are struggling. If both groups work hard and make a quantum leap in understanding, they need to be rewarded for that in terms of marks. However, where they are in the continuum is the over-arching assessment that allows them to see where they are in respect to the standards for their year level. The trick will be to make that explicit, b/c you don't want little Johnny's mum coming in and blasting you for giving him good passes, but showing him only just at or below the VELS level for that year.... This approach sits well with me - I have tutored kids privately in maths, and have wondered how to incorporate the personalised learning that they do in that setting back into the classroom. Last year I had all but been convinced that you can't do that, but I have reverted back to being a believer in individualised learning plans. It will be effective for the students (although rather tiring for me!!). Feeling happy about that :-)

Somehow I thought we had another two weeks until full time placements, but my diary and Deb seem to think otherwise lol! The project is coming along, although it is a challenge. I was hoping that the wiki idea would minimise the amount of face-to-face time we need, but interestingly I don't think it works as well on that front due to dependencies on people working in order on their respective bits. The key advantage that I see is that we can all see the final project in one spot, vs. the usual email mess that has issues with which version is right. The other is that it is easy to track who has been doing the work, which I think is important from an assessment perspective. I realise we're going to have to work a bit like this once we're planning with colleagues in the workplace, but I suspect it will have a different dynamic. It's difficult to make progress - we spent much of Thursday's hour still talking about structure, which I really thought we should have had bedded down by now. The other downer is that Kate is the only one presenting our work next week - I have an all-day meeting on the project I'm working on and Julia flys out on Tuesday. In reality, we need to get this finished by Tuesday & I feel very guilty that Kate is being dumped with the presenting (and also crummy that I'll miss out on hearing the feedback!). Anyway, for those interested in looking at what we're doing (which is a bit sketchy at the moment), the wiki site is.... http://edf4403.scribblewiki.com/Main_Page. If you want to comment, could you leave it here on the blog rather than on the project for the moment though, as we are trying to keep the project to just us 3 temporarily.

Will add more to the journal as I go...

Cheers!