I found an article

Dangerous Discussions: Voice and Power in My Classroom

It made me think about how we manage discussions in my classroom. I have difficulty getting students to engage. Part of which I put down to their unfamiliarity with the content but I still have to develop my discussion management skills to enable the shy and quiet to have their say, and to not have the loud/confident students dominate.

My classes have a different mix of ethnicity to the one in the article. Some have minority groups, as defined by society, are  in the majority in their class. That would give a different air to the discussion. Also the difference in subject matter will have an effect. Science is a difficult subject for many, and they do not often feel as informed as they might in a discussion on social issues that that live, as in the article.

I am inspired to try some of the suggestions in this article with my classes.

Te Apārangi The Royal Society, Rutherford Lecture

Last night I attended the touring presentation of the Rutherford Lecture. This is an annual lecture by the winner of the previous years winner of the Rutherford Medal, the top prize given out by Royal Societ Te Apārangi "to recognise eminent research or technological practice by a person in any field of science, mathematics, social science, or technology." The 2017 medal went to volcanologist Professor Colin Wilson FRS FRSNZ of Victoria University of Wellington for the work he has done on Supervolcanoes. 

The lecture covered and introduction to what determines a supervolcano, Comparitive supereruptions of the Quaternary Period, and the history of the supereruptions of the Taūpo volcanic field, the most active supervolcano globally, with 4/10 of the geologically recent eruptions, geologically recent meaning the last 2.6 million years. 

I find attending these sorts of events very useful in the classroom to help broaden and maintain my knowledge on a range of subjects, and this allows me to help students make connections between the content in the my classroom and their own interests. 

Communities of Learning Meeting

Yesterday we had a meeting  with other teachers from the establishing CoL. Aside from the talk on what the community of learning is for, and the positions available it was interesting to talk to the primary teachers.

There is a great disconnect between Primary and Secondary, which I suppose is the purpose of the CoL, to lesson that divided, but some things we encountered were quite surprising. The number of primary teachers that couldn't say hello in 3 languages was an initial clue, but I found the attitudes of some quite insular. There was an emphasis from them on linking all learning to the child's life, a laudible goal to make it relevant, but contrary to the purpose of education which I see as broadening the mind. So many of our students rarely if ever leave Northland. If we as teachers do not expose them to the wider world their worldview will be quite narrow and parochial to the detriment of society.

The other concern is the goal of the CoL. As students arrive in secondary school there is a glaring underperformance in the cohort. A full third of students are coming in with literacy below par, half of those very low at L2. Yet the goals of the CoL do not include literacy. It feels like the elephant in the room is being ignored. In addition the goals are very primary oriented and feel like are not managable in the secondary system. Knowing every student and their Whanau is all well and good in the primary setting with 25 kids who you are with all day. It is quite a different proposition for secondary where we have 130 kids for 4-5 hours a week. The primary teachers were quite taken aback when we reminded them of that. For that reason alone greater communication within the CoL might be useful.

Skills level test on Education Perfect

The Education Perfect Software we have bought the use of for the school included diagnostic tests at Curriculum Level.

The past two weeks we have done testing at Level 4 for Year 9's and Level 5 for Year 10's. the marks are returned as a percentage score, which we will need to translate into Grade Scores for the academic report being sent home.

SCICON

This year the SciCon conference is in Christchurch. I have registered to attend and I have also had an application to present accepted.

The presentation is on the redevelopment of the junior curriculum from a content based model to a thematic and skills based curriculum.

Literacy

We have had a new initiative in the school focusing on Literacy. Initially we have had observations done to assess the standard of literacy teaching in the school, starting with the Science department.

I have started to outline the literacy learning alongside the Success Criteria and the Science skills that we are working each day, colour coded to make it clear that the Success Criteria in Black is the Literacy in Red, and the skills on the posters above the board.

Te Reo Maori

One of my goals for the year is to improve my use of Te Reo and my understanding of Te Ao Maori.

I have already started to increase my use of simple Te Reo in the classroom with some surprise from my students. One student in particular has been impressed with my commitment to learning Maori and it has shortcutted out relationship development as she has opened up to me.

Unit progression within the Junior Curriculum

With the overhaul of the Junior curriculum to be context based and student-led it is necessary to develop a coherent framework for teachers. Especially those who require aid in planning a unit for their students.

After thinking through the logistics of how to run a unit I put together a flowchart on how to make it happen. When a major change like this is undertaken it can be very easy to slip back into old habits of teaching content not skills in context. A major driver in this revamp is to allow more student direction. In this manner it is imperitive to allow students to do a general plan of what they want to get out of a unit BEFORE we fill them with content.  The flowchart allows for teaching content and for teaching skills, both within the flow of student investigation. The hope is that using this format will increase engagement of the student.
The final stage is for students to present their work, then reflect on it. Communication is a vital part of scientific investigation and students need to be prepared for that. Reflection links the inquiry circuit back up to start over again.

The flowchart

Making the Junior curriculum concept driven and student-led

LEM and I have been chatting about how we could make the junior curriculum more relevant to the students and the world they live in. We started thinking about all the ways climate change could be used to hook into the science junior curriculum. How it could be used as a context for multiple content needs in science.

We threw around some ideas at morning tea time, then while my class were doing an assessment I started to pull them into a mindmap using Coggle to link the ideas of climate change, to the Science content, and on to the type of assessments or investigations that could be done.

The goal would be for students to investigate their own interests within a larger framework. When I started to link the content that is essential to Year 9 and 10 it turned out the whole two years could be investigated within the context of Climate Change in Year 9 or Sustainability in Year 10.

The intention is to allow teachers some fluidity in what and how they teach allowing them to follow the students interests. The assessments can be chosen by the teacher to be either a research investigation, using secondary sources; or a practical investigation collating primary data.
Each class would be constrained by having to do at least 6 assessments to report back on, at least 3 research and 3 practical investigations, and for each content strand in the Science curriculum to be assessed at least once. Students who are really into biology can do 3 Living World  themed projects, as long as they still do once each for Physical World, Material World, and Planet Earth and Beyond.

The teacher can follow the students enthusiasms anywhere on the mind map, or beyond if the students are so inclined. As the assessments are Nature of Science based they are comparable.

SNC has developed some good assessment tools, assessing skills not content, so they can be used across different assessment contexts, but still be comparable. The repeated use of these assessment rubrics, coupled with their explicit teaching in class will allow students to both identify what they need to do within an assessment, and identify what their next goals will be to attain the next level in their progression.

Senior revision time

Aftert the school exams it was apparent that the L2 Chemistry students are not yet anywhere near ready for their end of year external exams.

In repsonse to this I decided to drop the final internal that was slated, Oxidation and Reduction, in favour of spending the remaining class time on revision of the content of the external standards.

In class time students are allowed to choose their own specific area of the course to concentrate their revision. To aid and focus them at the start of each lesson I circulate in the class and ask them to give me their personal topic or success criteria for the hour they have in the classroom. Making them choose one specific thing to master in the hour seems to improve their focus for their learning and help break down the seemingly impossible task into smaller bits that are possible.

Team Teaching

It is eye dissection time again. This year I suggested to VWJ that we combine classes as we were both going to do the dissection at the same time. This meant we had two teachers circulating the room. Even with the double the number of students, and hence the same ratio, it made for better supervision of what the students were doing. LEM joined us as well as for both of them it was the first time doing eye dissections with a class.

The class format was to watch a video of a dissection, then to do the dissection themselves and complete a worksheet about what they were observing, as a means of making sure they did take the time to observe and not just squee about the dissection.

As I was the more experienced teacher I took the lead in running the class, and setting out the expectations. Eye dissections are a busy activity with a lot of tooing and froing to get started. Having two teachers meant that one maintained order, and gave the students tasks, while the other set up the equipment, or chased down missing items. During the clean up it allowed one teacher to direct the clean up of the room, and the other to supervise the reloading of the trolley and the disposal of the eye remains.

I haven't taught with another teacher in the room as an equal before. Although I was taking the lead, as I was the only teacher with experience of this activity before, we had equal stakes in the class. I have always had another teacher as an observer whether on practicum or for appraisal purposes.
My son has a team teaching class at his school and it works very well for Primary, now I can see how it could work for us in the senior sciences.

Planning the Year 10 Curriculum

I have been taking responsibility for managing the update to the Junior curriculum. The content and style have been communally decided by the department but I have been checking that things are not forgotten, and the resources are sufficient to support the beginning teachers.

The year 10 curriculum should be a matter for us to extend on the skills based curriculum we implemented in Year 9. That has had a tendency to fall back into being content based which we have had to consciously watch out for.

Chemistry in the real world

I have been on the mailing list for Compound Interest for a while now. It is a website that tracks chemical progress in the academic science world I find it useful as a filter for finding real world applications of chemistry that I can illustrate to my students.

 It also creates useful infographics of scientific and specialist chemical processes. In the past I have colour printed and laminated some of their infographics into posters for my wall, but I don't have enough space for them all, and the Science Department doesn't have the printing budget for me to continue to do so with every poster. I will continue to do so with the really useful ones, but I have been thinking about ways to showcase the varied and interesting things that Chemists do.

I now have a spot on my wall where I black and white print the weekly mailer titled "This Week In Chemistry". The spot is by the door where it is easy to browse at the end of the lesson, and is passed by each student as they leave.

In addition when an infographic about chemical research comes into my mailbox, rather than colour printing I am setting as the new wallpaper for the projector screen. In this way I can change it regularly without reference to cost.

Appraisal - Thinking issues

For this terms observation for my appraisal MTH observed a year 9 lesson where we were looking at thinking skills and applying knowledge they had learnt to real world applications. In this particular instance "real world" was a rather broad concept. The framework for this was from the Issues Presentations that I had seen at the ChemEd Conference and presented to the department.

This particular lesson was within the unit of work dealing with waves and energy and the class had just completed learning about sound and sound waves. The presentation dealt with the movement of waves in a vacuum, particularly in space, using the explosion of the Death Star from Star Wars as the initial image.

The class in question was a lower ability class with many students having literacy at Level 2 or Low Level 3 on the curriculum. Many of them do not display critical thinking skills and show little to no desire to learn them.

The students were engaged by the gif of the Death Star exploding with the Millenium Falcon flying away from the blast zone.  Some could very clearly tell the class what had led up to that point and what came after, and could debate the plot points.  When challenged some problems or falsities in the presentation of the explosion were identified which led us into the text reading.

Five students participated in reading out loud to the class, a selection of text from MovieTropes.com detailing how movie explosions in space defy laws of physics. Due to their previous learning on sound waves and wave behaviour some of this made sense to the students. I was still having to lead the discussion, positing questions for them to respond to, but most students were engaged, especially the low achieving boys.

The final step was to watch a video on the physics of sound explosions which explained with  diagrams, pictures and animation in more detail.

There was very little writing in this lesson which helps get engagement from those students who struggle with literacy. I am trying to develop analytical and critical thinking skills in my students and to get them to see how what they are learning in class can help them to be better at interacting with the world and less likely to be taken advantage of.

Developing thinking skills by focusing on Issues

Attending the ChemEd conference I participated in a workshop entitled "Who Cares" which was about developing awareness in students of applications of Science, linking issues in the world to the content they are learning in the classroom.

It involved hooking students in with a picture and allowing them to form their own ideas on what the picture was representing. The students would then be given an explanatory text, a short text that one student would read to the class, related to the picture and the issue. After listening to the text students would develop ideas on the opinions and points of view of the people involved, whether directly in the issue or on the periphery. The next step was to watch an explanatory video on the topic, after which they could have further discussion on the topic.

The issues could lead directly or indirectly to the topics being taught.

I prepared and presented an Issue presentation to the Science department and it was very well received. I intend to try and bring it into my classroom as a regular feature. Jenna is also considering using it for the shared classes she has once a week.

To facilitate the departmental use I have set up a folder where presentations of this kind can be filed. In addition I put in a "How to" instruction sheet, and a recording sheet for the various issues that have be put in the file.

Class differentiation in Level 2 Chemistry

For Term 3 I have split each Chemistry class into two groups. One group of the academically focussed students, and another of the students who are happy to just get their 14 credits. The academic kids are going to work on both remaining externals, and the others on one external.

Parents have been contacted to ensure that it is clear what their child is doing, and have been asked to respond to me to acknowledge that they are in agreement with the choice that they are making.



<Date>


<Parents>
<Postal Address>


Dear <Salutation>

Re : <First Name> <Last Name> <Class>

From this term in Chemistry, and for the remainder of the year the classes within the course has been split into two working groups. One group comprises the students who are planning to take Level 3 Chemistry in 2018, and may be planning a career or further study in which they may use Chemistry ("The L3/Career" group). The second group are students who have decided that Chemistry does not feature in their future plans, and are aiming to get enough credits at Level 2 to pass the course, but do not plan to take their study of Chemistry any further (dubbed the "I just want my credits" group). So far the students are self-selecting the group they want to be in.

The L3/Career group will be working at a quick pace through two Externally assessed Achievement Standards, 2.6 Chemical Reactivity, and 2.5 Organic Chemistry. It is necessary that this group is diligent about keeping up with the work, and this will require regular homework.

 The "I just want my credits" group will be spending their time learning Organic Chemistry and revising the 2.4 Atomic Structure and Bonding standard we covered last term.

All learning for externals should be completed in time for the school exams in Week 9 of Term 3. After the school exams we will tackle the final internally assessed standard 2.7 Oxidation and Reduction.

<First> has yet to choose a group. Please discuss with <First Name> which group <he> will select to be in to ensure that you and <he> are comfortable with his choice.  I also ask that you confirm that you are aware of <his> choice in a response to this email.

Yours faithfully,


<Teacher>
<TeacherEmail>

Winning Hone Haka

The Science Department won the weekly "Hone Haka" award for being best at incorporating the Te Reo Maori Kupu o te Wiki.

Start to 2017

Beginning 2017 has been a rush in that there has been so much full staff PD and admin and not nearly enough time in departments for us to plan together, and alone, to get ourselves fully ready for the teaching year before the students were sitting in front of us. This is in spite of the fact I came in a few days before the full staff was called back.

Ongoing Inquiry into the Geology assessment for Year 10's

The last couple of days I have been watching and marking presentations from my year 10 class on a Natural Disaster. 

The quality of presentation is much higher than last year. This is a combination effect from having a more literate and engaged class than I had last year, but also having provided greater scaffolding for the students. From the scaffolding they have a better understanding of what is expected of them, and the detail to which they need to go.

Some students are, as expected, only doing enough for the minimum. Others have really been focussed on the higher levels, and been motivated by the clear outlines. The hardest part for many has been presenting to the class, however as scary as it may be, presenting is a valuable skill for them to practise.

In addition I think I will give them a modified re-submission opportunity, modelled on how they will be assessed at Year 11 in NCEA Level 1. Modified, in that I will be showing each student what on the rubric that they missed, and perhaps helping them to research their way to a better grade. In this way they will hopefully develop a better understanding of how they may use rubric's to check their assessments for sufficiency.
The aim would be to have them better craft their assessments to meet the criteria at every level .

Creating Assessment- Year 9 Astronomy

This morning I was putting together the assessment for the Year 9 Astronomy unit. The unit needed to be redone in order to ensure that we were effectively assessing at curriculum levels.

The new test has been compiled from the Assessment Resource Bank's resources of properly aligned assessment tasks. I started with a standard from Level 3,  many from Level 4, some from Level 5, then I adapted a NCEA Level 1 task for the Level 6 component. This will really make it straightforward to assess the level of thinking that our students are doing.

The Test

The Marking Rubric