The practicum experience & 18/9 tute

Chemistry Teaching Rounds

Well, firstly I thought it would be useful to put down my accumulated reflections of the chemistry teaching round experience.

I had a wonderful time! I was teaching a group of 9 girls, and they were just brilliant to work with. 7 of them were from NESB, and several of those really did struggle with English. This part of the teaching, which was less chem-specific and more communication oriented was very interesting & a bit daunting. I did a survey after the first lesson, to find a bit more about the girls themselves & also what they liked/didn't like about chem. One of the comments was that they liked the power point that I did, so I thought to myself 'yes, even though it's transmissive, for the significant number of students in the class who may need to go away and translate things, it might be useful'. So, I merrily made a short (10 - 15 min max) power points & related handouts for each 'teaching' lesson (note the quotes - all lessons are learning ones, some seem to need the teacher to talk a bit) for reference. At the end, I did another survey & guess what they said - 'less power points!!'. This is almost humerous, as I generally wouldn't do much transmissive type of teaching, & wouldn't even think about doing power points in my teaching, but I tried to use my knowledge of the students potential difficulties and fell short! I feel compelled to also say that these slideshows were pretty short - we did lots of examples, discussions, q & a, activities, working lessons, pracs etc etc so I really didn't just stand up there and drone on for hours (which would be boring for anyone and NOT a good way to teach!!).

So that was one mistake. I clearly need to research more about NESB and how to handle it in the classroom. Furthermore, I think these students have much greater difficulty with scientific language than students who've been brought up with English as a first language. Try explaining the difference between oxidant and oxidised....you'll see what I mean. The difference in the word is subtle, but the meaning is significantly different.

I also found a great context to try and bring into the Redox theme.....but it didn't even get off the starting block! I know the girls at this school go to GTAC in Y12 and look at the chemistry of alcohol processing in the body. So, I thought it would be fun to link Redox into this, and do a prac on alcolmeters and maintain a theme throughout on this (the textbook already covers mining, so why repeat this?). However, I couldn't use the chemicals involved as they were not in the school for safety reasons. I tried to get a breathalyzer kit through various places & failed & eventually I just ran out of time before I started the practicum to be able to get it together. So, the thematic approach was far more difficult than I had hoped. Instead, I ended up with a 'battery' theme, and the girls had a project to design & make a battery. I deliberately made this an open ended activity, and some students had difficulty with the concept of going off and researching how to build it themselves, where others did really, really well. Two girls in particular had the idea of daisy-chaining several galvanic cells together to get a better result. Others needed more support, which I know is a fairly common problem with open ended tasks. Still, they all got there & I believe learned quite a bit from the activity. It is quite difficult to teach a theme throughout - perhaps I should've been broader, but I managed somehow!

The girls also found optional lunchtime tutes really useful - it allowed those that were still coming to grips with parts of the topic to come and get a bit of extra help, whilst not holding back the others. I really struggle to find ways to differentiate the curriculm for kids in Chem. It's far easier in maths, although still not straightforward, but I need to work on this in Chemistry some more. I did it a bit, but I don't think well enough. There were two girls who seriously could've coped with much more than they got & I think next time I would make up 'extension' type sheets for students to optionally take, which would go into more detail than the Y11 curriculum required. The open ended assignment was certainly a good way to allow those students some lattitude, but it wasn't enough.

In Year 8 science I also did the 'sound off' trick on a video & it worked a treat! They found it challenging, but were clearly engaged and I ran the video again after we'd discussed everyone's thoughts & it was interesting to see the students' reactions to the original dialogue. Lots of "oh is that what they meant" moments - good thinking invovled! I also did a 'make a heart' modelling session (due to students frequently mislabelling parts of the heart in tests prior to my arrival) with red and blue playdough, which was very successful. The girls had to draw down the stages of their construction on an A3 sheet, and it was most interesting to see how much they discussed & learned from this activity. It was really valuable. They did much better on the next test too, which was great as it was the only thing they'd done on the heart inbetween tests, which proves this stuff actually works!

18/09 Tutorial

OK - now to last Thursday's tute.

We spent a looong time talking about our experiences, which was an interesting thing to be a part of. Some people sounded like they had a difficult time, and others had a ball. I Loved David's chemistry assignment - the CSI comic/poster/etc. I'll be taking that idea into classes in future, as it clearly contained all the necessary info whilst allowed for a great deal of individuality in the approach taken. I hadn't thought of a comic before!

The curriculum assignment is going to be very useful I think & I'm feeling impatient to get into it. I need to do them in order though, or else I'll get caught out.

Re: the portfolio discussion - I have to say I'm disappointed that Deb is disappointed that I think the way I teach chem is a subset of my overall teaching philosophy. There are certainly differences between them, but the overall aim is the same. Maybe I'm missing the point & the process of doing the portfolio will reveal that....

So, until next time, lovely reader!

M