And so it goes...

WHAT AM I DOING TO HELP KIDS ACHIEVE?

HOW DO I KNOW WHEN THEY ARE THERE?

WHAT IS THE EVIDENCE?

     We went over the atomic theory and nuclear and are starting to finish up.  I have a question about Rutherford and gold leaf on the exam and on a homework assignment.  That should be the "What is the evidence?" part.  This week is a bit crazy with early release and trainings...I am going to give students a quiz on Monday that is a bit different.  Each question will be on the interwrite board.  They will respond with clickers and we will immediately check the answers and look for misconceptions.  I then plan assigning problems based on the topics that experienced the most misconceptions.  Hopefully we will be able to clear up any problems before the test on Friday.

     Had and interesting experience with one of my other classes as we were doing percent composition.  It was decided by us as teachers that perhaps a better lab might be needed than the one we had used in the past.  Kim had a lab that involved the decomposition of a compound with oxygen.  Students would mass the compound, heat it and mass it again.  The difference in masses would be due to the missing oxygen.  They could find the percent composition of oxygen of their compound from the experiment and then compare it to the theoretical.  As teachers, we had to "tweek" the lab a bit but we did get it to work and students got reasonable data.

     The good news is that I placed the students in new groups at random and they worked well together.  I also told them we were trying a lab that we thought would be better but we needed their help with it.  It worked well and the conversations that took place as they were helping each other were just what I would want as a teacher.  The bad news is that it was not planned.  It was kind of what I call "accidental teaching". I would love to be able to figure out how to encourage that on every lab.

     I also, after the fact, had an idea to make it more inquiry.  We would do the same lab but they would have to use their experimental results to determine WHICH compound they used.  I would provide three similar formulas that would be the same except each would have varying amounts of oxygen.  Can they solve and figure out which one they decomposed?