Robison - Reading Response 5

In Teaching Practice Set: Supporting on-going changes in student thinking, they give a great step-by-step guide about how the flow of every lesson should go. I agree with the author, that students want to, and need to, know the reason behind what they are learning. My students ask me all the time, "When will I ever use this or see this in real life?" If you start every lesson with an anchoring event, or something that every student can relate to, this helps grab their attention, gets them interested, and keeps you from answering the same "WHY" questions every five minutes. One thing that I really liked from this article was the fact that it talked about have multiple activities for each topic. They state, "Multiple activities and multiple rounds of sense making are required to build towards a deep understanding of an explanatory model. A single activity is not enough to accomplish this." I feel like finding affordable and short labs for chemistry is sometimes a difficult task, so when I find one that relates directly back to my topic I feel super accomplished. However, that lab should not be the only "activity" my students do for that topic. They need to see multiple examples of something, and physically be able to do it and see it, to fully understand a concept. Just because the lab activity might make perfect sense to me, my students might not be able to fully understand the concept right off like I do. I also like the idea to make two "laps" around the classroom. Usually the first time I go around to check on everyone I usually spend my time redirecting and getting groups started on their project/activity. However, that second lap is when you can really hear their "science talk" because they have accomplished more work on that project.
In Face-to-Face Tools: Making Changes in Student Thinking Visible Over Time, the article talks about modeling and making students' thinking visible. My class did an activity similar to the activity pictured on the first page of the article, and similar to what we have done in our Methods class, last week. We drew initial models, we did a gallery walk and asked our questions via sticky-notes so that they were anonymous, and we made changes to those models. An idea that I liked from the reading, which is something that I did not do in my classroom last week, is to conduct more of a before-during-after model. Rather than making an initial model and editing it all in the same day, it would be really cool to see how the students gradually learn more and more information over time which causes them to slowly add more and more descriptions to their models. Next time, I plan to do different versions of models throughout the entire unit, rather than just at the beginning in one or two days.