Robison - Reading Response 6

The final set of practices for ambitious science teachers is to press your students for evidence-based explanations within the last couple of days of the unit. After reading both articles, I realized this is something I do not do very often with my students. Yes, I hold them accountable for understanding the learning targets that we are trying to reach through assessments. However, I do not make them provide their own evidence for the why behind an event. Usually, I am the one telling them the why, but by making them responsible for providing evidence it is taking work off of me and putting it onto the students. It might be too late to do much work with this practice during this school year, but I believe if I get a head start on this at the beginning of next year my students will get used to having to provide me with evidence-based explanations for the modeling that we do in class.

The biggest problem I see with this is students getting in the habit of simply copying what their source tells them. I will need to ensure that my students have plenty of in-class activities and experiences that they can pull from to prevent them from looking up every answer online and rearranging a few words. I loved the idea from the Teaching Practice Set article about having an "explanation checklist" to keep students on track and to ensure that they do not leave anything out of their model. I also loved the idea of having a group "ambassador" to listen to other group's explanations and bring that information back to their group. This helps all of the students hear more examples and explanations, and it forces them to put these things into their own words in order to explain things to their peers.

For my field experience, I am observing another chemistry teacher’s class during my planning periods. Last week he started a new unit and did a really great job with this. It was neat to see him start by using actual scientific data to test a claim and then model with his students, just like the second reading shows. I look forward to implementing this practice more during the next school year!