Effecting Change

My courses at Walden have opened my eyes to the importance of STEM education. Each class I’ve taken has provided me with more insight as to how to change my lessons to include more inquiry and teach my students how to rely more on their own knowledge and less on me as they attempt to discover answers for themselves.

Most of the teachers I work with are unfamiliar with the term STEM education. As a leader in my school I take it as my responsibility to take what I have learned here and pass it along to my colleagues. I hope that I can effect change, not just in my own department, but school-wide. I think all teachers would be shocked to learn that U.S. students are falling behind students in places like China and India and this will motivate them to change their curriculum in order to better prepare our students to be globally competitive.

One of the obstacles I have found, as I’ve tried to change my lessons over the past 18 months, is some resistance to old ways of thinking. I work with other teachers who have been teaching for many years and are comfortable keeping their lessons the same year after year. When I’ve approached some of the teachers in my own department about updating our lessons to include more STEM based activities, they have not seemed interested in taking the time to make the often time consuming revisions that are necessary. The best way I’ve found to overcome this resistance is to make significant revisions to at least one lesson per unit of study and implement it myself, reflect on how it went and make any necessary changes to the lesson. I can then approach other teachers and explain the changes I made and ask for input as to how we can improve it even further. This seems to have worked on most occasions and they are becoming more open to making revisions. Next year I will continue to do the same until I feel that most, if not all, of my lessons meet the criteria of true scientific inquiry. When teaching a new lesson, or a revised lesson, I will often tell my students that it is new and ask for their feedback too. I find that many students like to be challenged and appreciate being asked for feedback.

Where's Our Sputnik?

Thomas Friedman’s article brings to light many of the challenges our nation is facing today in terms of the direction we are heading and the roadmap we are laying out for our children. What will the U.S. look like in another 20 years? Will we be even farther behind nations like China or will we find a way to get excited and motivate our citizens to continue to be the nation that produced such ingenious idea as the Internet?

When the space race began and we saw the launch of Sputnik, we responded by investing in science and math education and produced more students studying math and science than anywhere else. What has happened to this push? Where is our Sputnik? What needs to be done to get our nation excited again about these fields? Do we need to be surpassed by other nations before we really get motivated? Will it be too late by then?

Friedman brought up many valid points about where a lot of wasted money is going. I’m not naïve enough to think we can just pull all of our troops out of the Middle East and the war on terror will end. But when I think about all the money that is going overseas and I look, from the inside, where we are falling short in education, I feel very frustrated and helpless. In my personal opinion, I would love to see our troops come home and focus more money on defending our boarders here and finding ways to become less dependent on foreign oil. If we spent that money on better educating our citizens, especially in STEM education, I feel strongly that we have people right here in this country that can solve these problems if they are given the opportunity to study and thrive in these fields.

Instructional Lesson Plan Implementation

This lesson was a bit of a struggle for me. Not because I found the topic difficult, but rather because I teach life science so I had to find a group of my 7th graders who were willing to come in to my room on their lunch and work on this activity. Also, the topic has nothing to do with anything we've been working on this year so it just felt out of place. Luckily I have great students who volunteered to come in and help me out. Overall the lesson itself was good, but it's just not the ideal way to teach a lesson.

I do try to use models on a regular basis in my own lessons & I find that they are especially helpful to my classified students because a hands-on approach is much more engaging to them. They worked on locating the location of an earthquake's epicenter using three seismograph readings. My students struggled a bit at first when trying to use drawing compasses and determine the scale they were supposed to use, but once I helped them with the first step, they were able to progress together and locate the epicenter.

I know we have used this lesson plan template throughout our Walden courses and there have been many complaints from people about the template itself. I feel it is very redundant and would never use something like it my daily teaching & lesson plans.

Scietifically Literate students

Students who are scientifically literate are able to understand and explain natural phenomena. They can take what they've learned in school and apply their knowledge to concepts that see in the real world.

As educators, we don't have to look far these days for topics of natural disasters. Just turn on the news an you can choose between earthquakes, tsunami's, tornadoes, drought, etc.

Although it was considered a "natural" disaster, I have spent quite a bit of time talking about the BP oil spill in the gulf last year. True, the oil spill was caused by human error, but the effect of what has happened to life in the gulf since then, to me is a natural disaster. Although it's only been a year so we can't even see the true impact, we can look to Prince William Sound and how that area is still trying to recover after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989.

I use this topic as a way to discuss food chains and the impact the oil spills have on microscopic organisms that are the base of the food chain. Students tend to only see the effect on sea birds, fish & mammals, but it's these microorganisms that keep the food chain going.

Ask a Scientist

I was really excited to find out there was a website available to post questions on and get answers from real scientists! I was a little disappointed that I posted my question over a week and a half ago and never got a reply. My question was as follows: If cells are constantly performing mitosis to repair dead or damaged tissue, what causes scar tissue to build up & why do some cuts repair themselves leaving no scar behind, while other cuts leave scars?
Since I didn't get an answer form the website, I went to my own real scientist for an answer; my supervisor! I told him the situation and presented him with my question. He explained to me that when a cut is fairly superficial, the cells are still in close enough contact with one another to communicate proper healing and are able to repair the tissue so that it looks as if a cut ever happened. However, if a cut is very deep and/or wide, the cells in the surrounding area are not close enough to be able to communicate and you are left with scar tissue. Makes sense to me!
I'm not sure I would be willing to use this website since I never got a response. I'll be curious to see if others heard anything back. I love the idea of this site and would like to use something similar because I get questions regularly from my students that I can't fully explain and I could post their question immediately and hope for a response.

Web 2.0 presentation tools

The two presentation tools I'm reviewing are Prezi & PowerPoint. After watching the Prezi tutorial, I was excited by some of the presentation tools that come with Prezi and feel it would be a good tool to use for my Course Project. It seems easy enough to use & I like the idea of being able to have my students add to it from their own computers. My biggest concern with Prezi is based on the email we got from Dr. Lyman about the stability of Prezi. I worry that because I am not yet familiar with all the components associated with Prezi, if I run into any issues, I'll loose all my work. I also read a few on-line reviews from other Prezi users who had some similar complaints, although most liked the Prezi interface well enough.

For this reason I'm going to use PowerPoint for my Course Project. I use PowerPoint almost daily in my classroom and am very comfortable with it. I already know how to insert text, pictures and videos. Since I already have it installed on my computer, there is no additional cost to me. (unlike the fee that Prezi requires to register.) I post alot of my PPT presentations on my school website so that mys students can access it from home for additional review help. I worry that I used Prezi, most of my students are not familiar with its uses.

21st-century learning tools

In this week's application, we were asked to explore an online tool that could boost student’s interest in science. The topic I chose to explore was new ways of looking into the electromagnetic spectrum. I found a great website by The Smithsonian http://americanart.si.edu/education/pdf/Conservation_Electromagnetism_Lesson.pdf

What I liked most about this lesson is that it allows students to explore practical uses of the electromagnetic spectrum in a less traditional way. I have only taught the electromagnetic spectrum and its uses in the scientific realm in the past, but this lesson looks at how it is used in the process of art conservation; something I had never considered before. Students will look at how X-rays are used by art conservationist to look at possible cracks in sculptures that can't be seen by the naked eye. They explore how UV radiation can be used to identify the material in the artwork, and Infrared radiation is used to determine if there are any underdrawings under the painting we can see with visible light.

Students are presented with 3 different pieces of artwork, and their potential flaws, and must determine which type of electromagnetic spectrum wave should be applied. They will then see before & after pictures to really see the significance these tools have.

Because we are so lucky to live outside of NYC, we take our middle school students on a trip to The Metropolitan Museum each year. Our principal has asked us to find a lesson that would relate to the field trip, and is the past I've struggled to find a connection between science & The Met. Now I can teach this lesson prior to our field trip and tie the two together. The only challenge I might face with this lesson is some extra prep work on my part. I would need to find out, before our trip, if there are any paintings or sculptures that the Met might have used such applications on so that I could inform my students of this before we go.

Exploring heat transfer

For this week’s experiment, we looked at what type of materials are the best insulators. I set up the experiment by taking 4 identical ceramic coffee mugs and filled each with 8oz. of hot water. I covered each mug with four different materials; Aluminum foil, paper, an over mitt & a down comforter. My initial readings indicated that each mug contained water that was over 120 degrees, but since my thermometer only went up to 120 degrees, I can’t be sure what the exact starting temperatures were. After thirty minutes I took another reading, but the thermometer still went up to 120 degrees so I decided to let the mugs set for an additional fifteen minutes. So after a total of forty-fiver minutes, I found that the Aluminum foil worked best, keeping the water temperature at to 118, while the paper allowed the water to cool down to 110 degrees. Both the oven mitt & down comforter kept the water at about 115 degrees. From these observations, I would say that all worked well at keeping the water hot.

If I were to teach this lesson in class, I might use the above set-up, but then do a follow-up lesson where students could look at the container instead of the material is was covered with. Since most places like Starbucks use Styrofoam or paper cups, I feel like it would be better to test those materials against a ceramic mug to determine which are better insulators, as it is more likely that those containers would be used more often in real life. I also feel like I would need more accurate thermometers, perhaps digital ones that would give more valid readings.

Momentum lesson

For this week's application, I chose to investigate how the steepness of a slope and mass affect a collision outcome. I took 3 steel balls of different masses and rolled them down a ramp, colliding with dry erase board erasers on the floor. Based on what I know about the properties of momentum (mass times velocity), my hypothesis was that the ball with the largest mass would push the eraser the farthest. My hypothesis was correct, but I wanted to explore the lesson further so decided to change a few more variables. I chose to perform the same experiment, but changed the height of my ramp several times. I then conducted the experiment again, but this time instead of the collisions occurring on hardwood floors, I moved to carpet to observe the role friction might have. On the carpet, the collisions sent the balls flying off in every direction and not really moving the eraser at all.
I feel like by testing so many variables, I could anticipate what variables my students would want to look at.
This lesson could be modified to be any one of the four levels of inquiry depending on the age or skill level of students. To engage students further, we could change the type of objects that are colliding to make it more relevant to their lives and discuss how collisions in sports result in injuries.

Inquiry lesson reflection

For my inquiry-based lesson this week, I worked with a small group of students in doing an owl pellet dissection. The students appeared very engaged as they attempted to find out what the owl pellet was (I didn't tell them prior to starting, only that they knew a little something about the animal that created it). We had a lot of discussions about what the object was based on what they found inside the owl pellet. Once I told them what it was, we spent time looking at what type of prey the owls ate based on the type of skulls found inside the pellet and the role of Barn Owls in an ecosystem.

Melting Icebergs- Question 9

In class this week, we were asked to set up an experiment to demonstrate what will happen if the polar ice caps melt. I have a lot of concern when it comes to global warming and have had many discussions about it with my students. My biggest concern is not that there will be world wide flooding, but more about the effects on wildlife in these regions and long term effects on humans. We already hear about larger mammals in these areas having to search longer and farther for food supplies; penguins being found dead miles from their normal hunting grounds, polar bears starving, etc. This is so heartbreaking to me. I'm a huge animal lover and feel it is unfair to them if this truly is a result of human actions.

I was actually really excited about this week's experiment because I'm always looking for new activities for the environmental component of our curriculum. I have to say I was very disappointed with the actual experiment. I ended up doing it twice, because I thought I did it wrong the first time because I was expecting different results. Both times I did it, it took over an hour for the ice to fully melt, which would not work in my 45 minute classes. I filled the glass all the way to the top, but barely any water flooded when the ice all melted; it was more condensation on the outside of the glass and bowl. I'd like to hear about how it went for everyone else. Maybe it was too cold in my house for the ice to melt fast enough. Should I have used hot water? I was expecting more actual "flooding

STEM lesson reflection week 2

Week 2 blog on writing STEM lessons

I have done numerous lessons before, but creating one that was geared towards a STEM lesson was more challenenging that I though it would be. When I usually write lesson plans, I obviously make sure they are alligned with our current state standards, and then write objectives, anticipatory sets, assessments, etc. What I found to be the most challenging in this particular lesson was finding ways to extend it to include all STEM ideologies. The science component of this STEM lesson was easy enough, as was the technology part since we used microscopes to observe bacteria and spent time in the computer lab, although I wish my school had more varied types of technology such as probe ware. The engineering and math parts were more difficult. There is not much math in 7th grade lfe science so this is something I'd need to work on with our math teachers to find more ways to incorporate science and math in both classes. When I taught 8th grade physical science in previous years, there was much more math involved. I have to be honest about not really knowing how to incorporate an engineering component of a STEM lesson and feel I would need more traing in creating STEM lessons overall.
The 5 E's did help me narrow my focus for this particulr plan. I haven't used the 5 E's format in previous lesson writing, but can see the benefit of using it to creat high quality lessons, especailly is working with ESL students or students who need more modifications.

introduction

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