Dawkins Week 5

Teaching practice set:  Supporting on-going changes in student thinking

The gist of this article as the title suggests describes and explains teacher practices that can used to support student thinking.  There are ideal ways to support the above.  However, many teachers are not utilizing these procedures.  

Overview

• Throughout a unit of instruction, students are frequently engaged in different types of activity.
• hands-on work, computer simulations, conduct observations, collect and analyze different types of data
• Students enjoy these activities (ideally).
• Unfortunately, the way activities are structured in many classrooms is far from ideal.
• Students typically follow rote procedures.
• They rarely asked conceptual underpinnings of the activity, and there are no attempts to link the activity with a larger phenomenon or set of science ideas.
• Students typically follow rote procedures.
• They are rarely asked to complete conceptual underpinnings of the activity.
• No attempts to link the activity with larger phenomenon or set of science ideas.

Why is this a problem?

• Research has shown that just exposure to hands-on activity does not lead to student understanding.
• Sense making talk, orchestrated by the teacher, prompts productive puzzlement, reasoning, and learning.  

This handout provide a structure for thinking about the purposeful design of activity and for the critical forms of sense making talk that needs to be integrated with activity.

The 3 practices that make up this set are:

• Introducing ideas to reason with
• Engaging with data or observations
• Using knowledge to revise models or explanations

The purpose of activity is to help students develop new ideas to use in revising their explanatory models for the anchoring phenomena.  

If the activity does not further this goal then it should be reconstructed or discarded.

Critique

• I like the goal and activity examples given by the author.
• I like that the provides detailed examples of modeling.
• The references were useful.  However, the article seemed wordy.
• I like that the author reminds teacher that the activities should be purposeful and just something selected from the curriculum.  

Face-to-Face Tools:  Making Changes in Student Thinking Visible Over Time

Gist:

This article explains the purpose of models.  It provides the “how to” create an effective model.   

Face-toFace Tools:  Making Changes in Student Thinking Visible Over Time

• Models are made to the public representations.
• There are several reasons for this:  models are a way to make thinking visible.  For example, 6th graders modeled the transmission of sound from a musical instrument to the human ear.  I like this example; because it relates to the video that we watch during class.  I know that students will like this example.  
• As ideas became visible, their peers and the teacher used sticky-notes to suggest how they might add to their model, revise other parts, and test some of the relationships built into their model.  Sticky notes are not permanent.  As a result, students are comfortable with writing their ideas on these small pieces of paper. 
• Students engaged in negotiations with peers their initial ideas and benefited from hearing each other’s reasoning about change. This ties into “Science Talk”.  Students learn best from each other.

Models for Public Reasoning

• When students change models in response to the arguments of others, it helps everyone reorganize their thinking about a set of science ideas.
• Drawing and changing models is about re-thinking the relationships among several different science ideas that act together as a system.

Other ways of publicly representing thinking that can be helpful in a classroom

• You may create an initial list of hypotheses that your students have about a science event
• Compare these hypotheses with one another
• Add to the list of hypotheses over the course of a unit
• Organize each lab activity into a table that documents what was done

This paper describes a “toolkit” of face-to-face for use in the classroom

• Called face-to-face because they are used with students.
• All the types we discuss have two things in common
• They represent students’ ideas and are constructed mainly by students.
• They change over time as students learn from observations,experiments, readings, presentations of ideas, and listening to the logic their peers and the teacher.

Some of the face-to-face tools we discuss here can start on the first or second day of the unit.  

They are usually put on poster paper or the board at the front or side of the room.

These remain up throughout the unit.

Small group models

• Most versatile way to represent students’ thinking.
• Students create their own initial models at the beginning of a unit, then change these over the course of a unit.

Provides strategies for focusing students on the phenomenon and eliciting the most from students.

Critique:

• I like how the author’s format.  The Article was easy to read and provided clear examples.  
• I like that the author emphasis the definition of a poor model.