Week 13

Week in Review

Monday-Tuesday

On Monday and Tuesday we filmed the final runs of students' rube goldberg projects. The final run was part of their test grade for the unit and this was the day when the run needed to be perfect in order to be a candidate for the coveted Golden Mousetrap award. The golden mousetrap (yes, I actually spray painted a mouse trap gold) was given to the group in each class who performed a flawless final run and had the most creative and most numerous energy conversions in order to complete their final task.  You'll see most of the golden mousetrap winners in the YouTube highlight reel above.

Even though 7 instructional days are used for this project I don't plan on letting it go anytime soon for the following reasons:

• Interpersonal skills- I witnessed an impressive amount of growth in students' abilities to persevere with one another. If you watch my "Rube Goldberg In Process" video students will tell you they had to completely scrap original ideas and revise....over...and over....and over again.  This was a frustrating process and it was great watching them work through disagreements with two other people.
• Communication skills- The majority of the students grades come from their ability to (a) diagram out their projects and (b) describe the energy transfers before I videotape them.  Every student completed a diagram and I randomly chose students to describe each step. I like how this project force students to communicate their learning in pictures, in spoken word, and in a created form.
• Creativity- Every year I am shocked by students creativity. About 90% of students create fairly standard, straight-forward Rube goldbergs. But as you'll see in the Highlight Reel their is a 10% minority that makes you laugh with surprise every year.  Who would have thought to use a fan or a windup jack-in-the-box to pull a tissue out of a box?
• Problem-based learning - At the end of every year I have my students evaluate me as a teacher and provide feedback on what we do.  Inevitably around half of my students mention rube goldberg devices as one of the reasons they enjoyed science that year and are looking forward to more science next year. Nothing motivates learning as much as a few well-planned, fun, creative, collaborative projects.

Wednesday

Video Party of the different rube goldberg devices. Students wanted to see what the other classes did and we evaluated how the whole process went this year so I could make modifications for next year.

Thursday

Housecleaning activites for the end-of-semester. Students completed a post-survey for the end of the energy unit, provided feedback on my teaching for the first semester, and then we downloaded pictures of activities we did in science or in other Aces' team activities for the yearbook.

Here are my thoughts when looking at my pre-post data for my energy unit....

• Question 1: 24% is pretty good for question 1 since pre-survey numbers were already at 65%.
• Question 2: I'm a bit disappointed about the 50% growth for question 2 since energy transfers were the main focus of this unit. However, it is only 1 question worth of data points (and it was a tough question). Perhaps if I had asked 2-3 questions about transfers the number would be higher.
• Question 3: I'm all right with the mild growth of 20% on question question 3. Thought I want more than 50% of my students to understand endothermic and exothermic it was a minor focus in this unit and I think if I had spent more time the numbers would be higher.
• Question 4: I've very pleased with the growth in this question. 96% of students indicating they understand the laws of conservation of mass and energy.

Friday

Assembly day.  Happy break!

Lessons Learned

1. Computers Class: Bobbi Aschwanden and Jason Johnston are doing something right in their Computers class. On Tuesday I gave students an opportunity to edit the videos I took of them on their Rube Goldberg projects with Movie Maker. I said they could doctor it up however they wanted but I wouldn't have time to show them how.  Most responded, "No worries. We learned how to do this in Computers."  As I filmed the rest of their peers' final runs the rest of the groups messed around with their own videos.  That's why my highlight reel looks so good.  90% of the highlight reel's editing came from the students themselves.  Interdisciplinary cross connections.  Take that CCSS. Keep up the good work Johnston & Aschwanden!

Week 12

Week in Review

Mon-Fri

For my medium to high ability classes this has been Rube Goldberg week. Students worked in teams of three to devise a ridiculously complicated way to perform a simple task - all while using at least 5 different energy conversions and 3 different types of energy. 

Voting for the Final Task

Last year I allowed every group to perform whatever end task they chose. This year I wanted to up the ante and have every class compete to perform the same final task in a more creative manner than the other groups in their class. To allow them to vote I used a Google Doc (not a Google Form) survey.

The above picture is the Google Doc for my 6th period class. Students entered as many ideas as they liked but they could only vote (by writing their name) in the last column once. Students could change their vote as many times as they wanted before the timer went off and I turned off the editing capabilities of the Google Doc. 

KIDS LOVED IT! They would start voting for one idea, then see that someone posted something else cool and change their vote. Students began adding comments off to the side urging students to vote for their idea and in the final 60 seconds it was a mad house as students switched their names multiple times before I locked it down.

Construction Days
As Monday stretched to Friday students many lessons about working with their peers, recovering from setbacks, and being forced to find creative solutions to problems. Here are some of their thoughts with how the week went.

click HERE to see the video

Here are also a few pics of different devices.

Low-Ability Group

I've used this week to catch up my low ability group and they've now completed the same lessons, labs, and quizzes as the other classes. Unfortunately, we're struggling with reaching mastery of  the same learning goals in this class.  After our initial success the last 2 quizzes have been significantly lower than the other classes, even with differentiated instruction and slower pacing.

I'm a little bit at a loss at the end of the semester. I feel like my low ability class is composed of the "will-not's" and the "can-not's."  I'm starting to see some individual successes with the can-not students as they're slowly acquiring the missing skills and abilities they weren't able to obtain in a faster course. In fact, I'm proud to say two of them are graduating out of the low ability group at the end of 2nd quarter because they no longer need to be in there.

However, over 50% of this low ability class is composed of will-not's, students who will not put forth effort, but will put forth plenty of attitude, apathy, and general grumpiness. My team and I wish we had enough periods in the day where we could further separate the can-nots from the will-nots so the latter won't affect the former. It's a work in progress.

If anyone has any magic potions out there for the will-nots please let me know!

Week 11

Week in Review

Monday

We conducted an inquiry lab over conservation of mass today entitled Bag of Bubbles.  Students first massed a small amount of baking soda and a small beaker of vinegar inside a ziploc bag without mixing. 

 +  +  

Then students mixed the vinegar and baking soda without opening the bag and remassed everything.

Students then compare the initial mass of ingredients with the final mass of the bubbles-filled bag and analyzed the difference.  Most groups had bubbles-filled bag weighing an average of 0.5 grams less than it did before the ingredients were mixed.

The question they had to answer - "Did the bubbles come out of nowhere OR were the bubbles already hidden inside of the materials, waiting to be released?"

They had to use their mass data as evidence in their conclusion and we discussed our results on Tuesday.

Tuesday

Once again I forced my students to think today, and ohhhhhhhh how they groaned!

As a class we discussed our results from yesterday's lab and here were the common responses...

• "Bubbles came out of nowhere because they weren't there before." 
• To which I replied, "So you think you are a magician?"
• "Bubbles came out of the ingredients because if they appeared out of nothing they would have brought mass with them because air is made of atoms and the final mass wasn't heavier."
• To which I replied, "Excellent, evidence-based answer. However, your mass got lighter rather than stay the same, are you a magician too? Did you destroy something in your experiment?"
•  To which they replied. "The final mass was lighter because we made bubbles. Bubbles are lighter than liquids and solids so the overall mass was lighter."
• To which I replied. "You crazy people! Are you telling me carbon and oxygen are losing protons and neutrons left and right every time it changes state from solid to liquid to gas. Sounds like the world is coming apart! Have you forgotten everything you learned about atoms from Unit 2?"

**  I realize this is quickly become quite nerdy for all of you non-science readers. However, I wanted to give you a taste of the back-and-forth conversation we were having because I think you could picture the looks of frustration and consternation on students' faces as I kept poking holes in their ideas and challenged them to revise their answers based upon prior knowledge. **

Eventually we came to the realization that (a) the bubbles were "hidden inside the starting the materials" (or rather the atoms were rearranged to make the bubbles and (b) we lost mass because the ziploc baggies had poor seals and some of the pressurized air escaped out the seams.

What was the point of sharing this long conversation?

D2L can NOT replicate this experience. I think teachers/administrators need to be careful in thinking online learning platforms can seamlessly replicate the type of back-and-forth, didactic instruction that occurs in the classroom.  I detest discussion boards in Blackboard, D2L, Moodle, etc... because (in my experience) they provide a farce of the rich discussion that occurs in a face-to-face environment.  If you would have been in my class on Tuesday you would have felt the emotion, the tension, and the communal effort as a group of 14 year-olds strained together to reach resolution. It was awesome, it was beautiful, and it cannot be replicated online.

Wednesday

Students complete a Practice Quiz to review and make sure they've understood the main ideas before taking a quiz over the last 2 weeks activities and learning goal.  They completed the practice quiz, then showed it to me and checked their answers with a key.  If they didn't finish in class they could check the key on D2L at home.  

Thursday

Students took Quiz 4.2 on D2L then began brainstorming in project groups for their 2 week long Rube Goldberg Project beginning next week. I'll be writing extensively about that project next post so I'll leave it be for now.

Friday

Aces Field Trip.

Week 9

Week in Review

Monday

Acuity tests all day. Boring....

Tuesday

For this unit's final project, my students will work in collaborative teams to make rube goldberg devices.  In order to get them pumped up and to give them some ideas we started class this week watching Audri's rube goldberg device (see below). 

Every day this week I'll start class with a different video, some from YouTube and others from exemplar student projects from last year. These videos help the students stay focused on the long-term project in the midst of the daily grind and prevent "Why do I have to learn this stuff?" questions from popping out. "Why? Because you're going to make an awesome, ridiculously complicated machine in 2.5 weeks. That's why."

After the video we started practicing how to diagram out energy transformations from several objects around the room. Good times.

Wednesday

We started class with another Rube Goldberg video and then filled out another google doc with creative ideas we could use for our end-of-unit project. I like using GoogleDocs instead of worksheets because students are coming up with the examples instead of myself. I also like having them comment on each other's works because I think it keeps them from entering junk work because they know their peers will be reading it as well as me.

see whole document here

Thursday

Today was one of the student's favorite labs of the year - the burning chip lab! We analyzed caloric content of chips by burning cheetos, fritos, and lays chips under cans of water and recording differences in water temperature.

Guess who was busted on lab safety?

"Oh, I see. That's why they call them flaming hot cheetos."

What I liked more than the lab was the ensuing discussion on our zany results the next day.

Friday

Here's a look at our class data for periods 2 and 3.

When looking at Fritos for period 2 you can see there is quite a range in temperature differences - 8 degrees for one group, 21 for another, and 16 for a third.  Same with cheetos in period 3.  

Therefore we spent the first half of Friday discussing the following: "Is there a high enough degree of difference between data points that we should simply throw out the data and label it unreliable, or do we need to just label a few data points as outliers and determine the trend." I projected the google doc shown above on the whiteboard and forced the entire class to discuss.

They were really timid at first, but I kept throwing the question back at them and demanded an answer. Students began offering weak responses and I kept (gently) throwing their responses back to them, pointing out inconsistencies with Socratic questioning.  Eventually some hard-nosed students started taking the bait and began using some logical reasoning and evidence to back up there responses and we eventually decided to throw out the data as generally unreliable.

It wasn't about a right or wrong answer but it was about using evidence to back up your assertion. I told them this was a real-world, authentic experience and that an untold number of occupations - from finance to education to marketing to scientific research - conducted this sort of data analysis every day.

The rest of the period we spent constructing a list of potential sources of errors. I was proud that my students generated the robust list seen below.

Potential Sources of Error:

• Chip size
• Burn technique - are you letting the flame lick up the chip (good idea!) or letting it smolder at the top (bad idea)]
• Curn distance - are you roasting the can by holding it immediately underneath or are you giving lots of space between can and chip)
• Can temperature - between each trial students put in fresh water, but the can has now been preheated. 
• Pyros - did some groups hold the lighter under the can and continue to burn the chip even as it was lit on fire? (Anecdotal evidence suggests yes)
• Thermometer- did students give enough time for the thermometer to accurately read the temperature or did they drop it in, read it quickly, then change the water for the next trial.
• User Error - mismeasurements in regards to amount of water, thermometer reading, etc...

Closing comment one students made - "Ugh, my head hurts Mr. Mabrey. Why did you make us think so much today."  Mission accomplished.

Lessons Learned

1. Lab data on Google Spreadsheets - I can't imagine not doing this for every lab. I love how students instinctively assess their data against other classes to determine validity. Validity is a concept that is becoming implicit with every lab and is getting to the point I dont' have to explicitly harp on it any more thanks to this tool.

Week 8

Week in Review

Monday

Monday we tested the cement Hockey Pucks we created on Friday. Unfortunately it was a cold and windy day but I told them "It's always a good day to go outside and smash stuff." I really enjoyed this lab because it was a direct application of why its important to reinforce bridges, foundations, and walls.

After reflecting on our results students were given the following choice.  Choice A - work on study guide during the rest of class, finish for homework, and then do review games tomorrow or Choice B - work on study guide in class, no homework, and then finish individually tomorrow but probably without time for review games.

To my surprise 2 of my 3 regular classes choice Choice A and the other chose Choice B.  Looks like students aren't as afraid of homework as I thought. Or they just love games.

Tuesday

Today two of my Choice A classes played Trasketball (thank you Mrs. Wyrick). After checking study guides against my key they sat in groups of four with a whiteboard and marker in the middle of the table. Each student in a group was given a number (1, 2, 3, 4).  I read a question from the study guide then yelled out a number.  For example "Give an example of a chemical change.....#3!" Only the student whose number I called could write on the whiteboard and hold it up (other group members could give feedback as the student wrote).  First whiteboard with a correct answer got a chance to shoot either a 1 point, 2 point, 3 point, or 5 point (back against the far wall) shot.  Teams only receive points if they made it. Teams could also lose points if they didn't clap after everyone's shot. Good times.

One of the Choice A classes had half of their class come to class with incomplete study guides. You reap what you sow. That class spent the rest of the class finishing their study guides and checking keys individually.

The Choice B class spent the period in a similar manner but without the penalty for late homework.

Wednesday

The sky fell in.

All of my regular-paced classes took their Unit 3 test on D2L. At least they were supposed too....

When my first class came in, they logged on to D2L and attempted to access the test. Instead they received this message:

You've got to be kidding me.

The next 10 minutes were a blur of making paper copies (since I was trying to avoid killing the rain forests I only had my teacher copy of the test), students constructing answer keys on their own paper, and me convincing students they would have plenty of time to finish their test today (which they did).

To our Tech Department's credit, I was on the phone within 10 minutes talking to Matt and Jennifer, 2 of our ITF (instructional technology facilitators) folk, and they went to work immediately for me. Looks like the error wasn't on our end of things, it was a D2L server error that was corrected within 24 hours. Keep it classy D2L corporate.

Thursday

To kick start our new unit on energy, students brought in small appliances/tools from home. We spread them around the room and students rotated through the stations answering 2 questions: What job does it perform? What energy is needed for it to work?  The questions were completely open-ended and were aimed to access prior knowledge at how we get the devices of our life to function.  

Their answers were pretty great because they weren't influenced by the sophistication of science textbooks/notes.  For instance, a kid brought in a huge socket wrench (I mean HUGE. It was the size of my forearm and upper arm) and kids argued it needed "Force Energy" or "Push-Pull Energy."  What a great starting place.

The above picture is a shot I took of my whiteboard at the end of one of the classes. Notice the definitions for energy in the black pen on the bottom right of the screen.  These are all student-constructed responses they did at their tables as the final part of the stations activity.

Every definition is a pretty great derivation of the textbook answer --> "Energy is the ability to do work" or "Energy is the ability to affect change."  I love that my students were able to construct their own working definition based on their prior knowledge and group experience from the activity, and their definitions are essentially the same as the one I would have given them.

Friday

On Friday students read an article and filled out a graphic organizer. The article was a great piggyback to the stations activity from Thursday because it gave scientific names to the processes they had talked about during the stations. For instance, during the stations activity students had described "push/pull" as an energy needed by objects. The article relabeled that energy as "Kinetic Energy - Mechanical."  This article supplies the vocabulary for the next two weeks.

Lessons Learned

1. Backup Plan - It paid to have a paper copy of the test on test day.  Though it was a pain (and stressful) to run to the copy room to make a quick set of 35 copies, it wasn't near as stressful as not having a paper copy at all! Lesson - things will always fail when you need it most. 

Week 7

Week in Review

Monday-Wednesday

This was a crazy-fun week for 8th science as conducted one of our most rigorous inquiry labs of the year - the CSI Mystery Lab on Who killed Dr. Todd?

Was it the belittled custodian? the crazy shop teacher? the ambitious assistant principal? the pernicious nurse? or the samurai social studies teacher?

A mysterious white powder was found on the lapel of Dr. Todd's suit and coincidentally(?) all suspects had white powders around their person when questioned about the murder.  8th grade science students were employed to help solve the case.

On the first day students made a grid of the physical and chemical properties of  5 powders - salt, sugar, corn starch, baking soda, and talc.  They examined the powders response to heat (sugar carmelizes), to water (talc beads the water off), to iodine (corn starch turns black), and to vinegar (baking soda bubbles). They also looked at the particles' structure under a microscope (salt is really cubed and really cool).

 

On the second day students were given samples of the powders found on all 5 suspects.  Each suspect's powder was a mixture of 2 of the white powders and students had to examine the physical and chemical properties of each suspect to see which powder they matched up with, and ultimately, which powder matched the incriminating powder found on Dr. Todd's lapel.

On the third day students sat trouble and did the difficult work of making sure they correctly matched the characteristics of each suspect's powder to the correct base powder.   I loved this day because it was an opportunity for higher order thinking and rigorous retesting. Students had to deduce why their powder's characteristics weren't matching up, then go back and conduct further tests, deduce again, perhaps retest, over and over and over again.  

Most of the time I don't feel like I'm hitting a home run with rigor and relevance. Most of the time  I feel like I'm preparing students for an end of unit or high-stakes test but this week was different. This lab was all about giving a challenging, fun, collaborative assignment that mimicked real life criminal justice lab work.  I felt like I was preparing students to work in "life after school" and this was a great example of how "real science" involves doing multiple tests and trials again.... and again..... and again.  Thank you Ashley Shaw for introducing me to this lab last year.

P.S. It was the pernicious nurse if you were wondering. 

Thursday-Friday

Crazy lab week. These two days we conducted our final lab on the properties of substances and we made hockey pucks of cement.  We did this because we talked about how engineers have discovered they need to reinforce concrete with different fibers because though concrete has great compressive strength it is lacking shear and tensile strength. If we didn't reinforce concrete then all the walls would come a tumblin' down during earthquakes.

The challenge: create the strongest hockey puck using any combination of 5 fibers (tooth picks, pipe cleaner, yarn, cotton balls, or string).

 

We're letting them harden over the weekend and then we'll be testing them by smashing them on the sidewalk on Monday and seeing which one has the fewest cracks forming.

Lessons Learned

1. Technology - sometimes when you're a pilot FLiP room you dont' use your laptops all week. And that's ok.
2. Wrong Answers- I had many students get the wrong results on the CSI Lab. And I think that's ok.  One of the best quotes I've ever heard about learning is "Learning is a long, slow, continuous conversation that takes time."  We just started the conversation. 

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.