Good News...Sometimes Stuff works...

WHAT AM I DOING TO HELP KIDS ACHIEVE?

HOW DO I KNOW WHEN THEY ARE THERE?

WHAT IS THE EVIDENCE?

     Good news...sometimes stuff works.  I feel like I can chalk one up for inquiry science.

     First, I had parent teacher conferences....30 to be exact.  It was kind of like speed dating without the dating part.  One of the best parts is that at the last minute I brought the "scientific method" I am trying to use which we examined this summer at Miami.

  I showed this to parents and discussed that my experience in the lab tends to support this method.  I also wanted to let them know that although many students are struggling with labs, I was just trying to introduce at least one portion of each lab in which they would have to "think".  In other words, what happens if they cannot find the answer on Google?  To me...that is science.  The overwhelming majority of the parents were very supportive and faced this type of problem solving in their own jobs.

     Second, I tried a new lab with Academic.  They had to take as many measurements as possible with a graduated cylinder and a "mystery" liquid.  Then they had to predict the mass of their empty cylinder, a mass of a volume assigned at random and a volume of a mass assigned at random.  Each time they would bring up their prediction and graduated cylinder and we would immediately check their answers (this is a Flinn Activity).  They did well.  I asked them to write in words what was going on inside their head.  I was hoping for graphs but for many I could see that they were solving proportional reasoning problems without me having to tell them how.

     Finally, in Accelerated they had to find the density of a material without using a centigram balance (it is called on Archimedes Balance).  We frontloaded the problem (as we did in Academic with the "mystery" liquid problem) and it went rather well.  At one point only one or two groups had an idea.  I explained it was O.K. to share ideas and if their method worked so well, then they should easily be able to get someone elses answer for their object.  Each group had different objects.  The level of discussion and debate was well worth the time it took to pull this lab off.  Check out below.

     My goal next week is to introduce a "flipped" assignment.  It is not exactly inquiry but it might save me some time to do more labs and inquiry.  I will keep you posted......