First Day and Getting Feedback

WHAT AM I DOING TO HELP KIDS ACHIEVE?

HOW DO I KNOW WHEN THEY ARE THERE?

WHAT IS THE EVIDENCE?

     I survived the first day.  I did the Flinn "Rainbow" demo from their e-learning series.  I would highly recommend this series to any chemistry teacher.  I had 6 solutions change color, talked about the parts of an experiment and how it can help us learn chemistry.  I wanted "evidence" of learning so each student got a post it note and were told they had to come up with a "question" about the class or write down something they were "clear" about and then post it on either side of the door.  I had a fare number of post its on both sides.  Most questions were about the amount of math or homework in the class....relatively honest first day questions.

    I did the "White Powder" activity with Accelerated Chemistry.  It was interesting.  They had a day to take a white powder that I provided and gather as much data as possible.  The next day I told them that they had one of three powders...A, B, or C (I had them around the room, calcium carbonate, corn starch and flour).  I told them that they could use there data from the previous day to repeat their experiments and observations and identify which powder they had the day before.  Only about 5 percent of the students wrote down the number on the cup that I gave them.  The quote of the day was, "You need to write down everything...you just don't know what is going to be important."  This was more like a formative assessment.  During the next labs I am going to try to focus heavily on data gathering and analysis.

     This week we are doing the Miami survey.  I hope to use this as a valid pre test.  The other idea I might investigate is the book "Mindset".  It talks about how people sometimes get in a certain mindset and what must happen to get out of that mindset if we want them to learn.  There is even a survey people can take (Bob Seiple and others turned me onto this).  I am going to tuck this away for future use.

Student quotes from the white powder experiment.

"Everything that seems unimportant becomes important when drawing a conclusion." L.R.

"Be thorough."  K.K