Week 6

Week in Review

Ability Grouping

This week has been even more crazy than last week. Thanks to ability grouping my classes I now have three different pacing groups among my five 8th grade science classes.  I have a 3 "high" periods who are clipping through lessons, my "medium" class who is sometimes one period behind the high or is at the same place, and one "low" class who is now two periods behind the others.

What am I doing differently with the low group? Well, now instead of having a class with a smattering of students who are consistently getting D/F's on an assessment I now have them all in one class. For example, here are the results of last week's quiz.

Class Averages

Periods	Quiz 3.1 A
High	80%
High	83%
High	82%
Med	73%
Low	58%

There is a 20%+ point discrepancy between my high and low classes. So I did what any teacher would do when their class average was an F - remediate and reassess.  The day after quizzes were returned and reviewed I utilized whiteboards and D2L item analysis to help students review key terms and concepts missed on the quiz. Students then made a study guide to review at home and re-assessed Quiz 3.1  on the following day using an alternative form of the quiz.  Here are the results:

Class Averages

Periods	Quiz 3.1	Re-assessed Quiz 3.1
High	80%
High	83%
High	82%
Med	73%
Low	58%	76%

I was EXTREMELY pleased with the results.  I'm less excited about their grades increasing and more excited about the possibility that the increased class average may indicate they've learned something!  Last quarter students had the option to come in on their own time to review and re-assess but typically the low-achieving students weren't motivated to do it on their own.  By having them all together in a class its allowed me to differentiate the pacing for their class and slow everything down.

Monday

For my high classes, we watched a YouTube screencast I made last year and set our notebooks up for tomorrow's lab.  I really appreciated having a repository of videos I began making last year with Screencastomatic. 

watch screencast here

Tuesday

Tuesday we performed a States of Matter Lab where students investigated the effect of salt on water's freezing point. Super practical, super fun.

The beaker on the right has salt, the beaker on the left is plain water.  We stirred each ice water slurry with a spoon for 2-3 minutes and then recorded the temps on a class GoogleDoc.

Our team was able to get the salt-water slurry down to -5 Celsius and we were able to get condensation of normal water on the outside of the glass beaker to freeze and form a crust around the beaker. In fact some groups were able to get temps of -10, -12, -15 Celsius.  Pretty cool.

Students entered their data on the projected GoogleDoc during class time. I like having the spreadsheet projected after students hypothesize in order for them to self-check their data. As I observed them during the lab they would keep looking up at the board to see if their numbers were matching everyone else's and I even heard one or two groups saying, "What did we do wrong? I don't want to put our numbers up there. It'll make us outliers."  Score.

Wednesday

Dry Ice Day.  Students love it. Teachers love it.  So much to explore - density of the vapor, sublimation vs evaporation, different freezing temps for different substances, how the dry ice makes a cloud by condensing water, the transfer of heat from a vibrating quarter, etc...  We played for 15 minutes then summarized what we learned in our science notebooks.

Josh? or Santa Claus?

Dry Ice bubbles - so cool!

Thursday & Friday

Thursday and Friday I was out of the classroom at the district office as part of a panel for new website vendors.  I'm thankful my students are already trained in using D2L that they were able to accomplish essentially the same lesson I would have done if I was in the classroom.   They went to the agenda for each day and worked their way down (see pic below).

Students took a Practice Quiz 3.2 on Thursday and checked the Practice Quiz Key with the sub. The point of a practice quiz in my class is to review basic terms and concepts they should have learned throughout the week.  Very lower level Bloom's. Then on Friday they took Quiz 3.2 where I ask application, summarizing, and extension type questions to test their knowledge of those basic terms.  The Quiz was on D2L and I was able to grade their short answers pretty quick.

And I learned how to make D2L technicolor.. See Graphical Unit Headers Tutorial on the right sidebar of the blog

Lessons Learned

1. Ability Grouping. Seeing positive results so far from my low period. New leaders are emerging in the class and several were extremely happy we were going to take a whole class period to review and reassess rather than making them come in on their own time. This furthers my belief that it is NOT stigmatizing to group students by ability. They already know if they need more time with things, and they appreciate receiving extra time.  Especially when there are opportunities to switch between periods at determined points throughout the years if students begin demonstrating a pattern of success/growth.