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A November Tradition – Annual Conference Highlights from Rochester

The STANYS 124th Annual Conference, held in Rochester in early November, 2019, paved the way for a memorable weekend. While you never know what you’ll get in terms of dicey weather in Rochester in the middle of Fall, you know you’ll walk away from the Conference with bundles of materials to sort through, and lots of information to process when you arrive home. This year’s highlights, in no particular order, include:

  • Meeting with local Suffolk members on the same flight
  • Dinosaur BBQ!
  • Excellent sessions, run by knowledgeable and energetic NYS science teachers
  • Meeting with NASA educational specialists from Goddard Space Flight Center and Langley Research Center
  • Getting tips on how to assess students in a way that incorporates traditional grading practices with the iterative, rubric-style grading that comes with NYSSLS 3D assessments
  • We saw an amazing group of pre-service teachers from Oneonta State (my alma mater!) present a variety of innovative models to explain more complex topics related to Earth and Space Sciences. Thank you Jim Ebert and Paul Bischoff for bringing a little bit of O-State to Western NY! 
  • Having students use technology on a more regular (and regulated) basis, to conduct guided research projects
  • Gathering resources, listening, absorbing and reflecting on items presented during a marathon weekend… Three days packed with information that we can use or alter for use immediately
  • T-shirt competitions – and inspiration for a new Suffolk (Suff-i-k) shirt for next year!
  • The energy exuded by the Texas Instruments team
  • And… who could forget to mention the consistency of support from Ward’s Science culminating in the memorable raffle to cap off our Sunday

There were Institutes for many major subject areas and levels of science instruction. These and the luncheons for similar groupings of educators were very well-attended. As the days progressed, I heard many complimentary comments regarding the ease-of-use of this year’s new conference Guidebook app. Kudos to Suffolk’s own Matt Christiansen, the Vice President-Elect of STANYS, and “Keeper of the STANYS Conference Apps”. 

This year, for a slightly different experience, I attended several sessions that were not directly related to my subject area of expertise. I attended a workshop led by the Director at Large of Physics, Seth Gunials-Kupperman that was excellent. It led teachers through his assessment process, and the intricacies and successes of allowing students to be regularly re-assessed to check for deeper understanding. The workshop about Soil Science, led by Deb Mabey, from Hoosick Falls, NY, was also excellent. I was excited to see a simple and powerful link between biological and geosciences on display with her building of MudWatt systems, and encouraging students to bring in soils from their own backyards to use as an alternative fuel source for energy production.

I immediately got to work on incorporating paper circuits into a unit on aerospace engineering in my astronomy elective this month. Inspired by education specialists, Dr. Barbie Buckner from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (our NY liaison from NASA Goddard) and Dr. Anne Weiss from NASA’s Langley Research Center, I was able to have my students explore the concept of X-planes, and we made several styles of paper circuits from the templates provided via Dropbox linked in the Guidebook app.

I’ll add a brief note of thanks for all who voted in the STANYS Election this Fall. I’m excited to shift roles from Subject Area Representative for our Suffolk Section to that of Director at Large for Earth Science in the near future! What an exciting time, one that I have to remind myself is more like training for the endurance required as a marathoner, rather than the rapid acceleration and rewards reaped by a sprinter.
 It was nice to connect with like-minded individuals and see all of the excellent science happening statewide in classrooms with STANYS educators at the helm. I am excited to see where STANYS takes us as we work through the organization’s 125th year at the forefront of science education in New York!–Stephanie Burns – Suffok SAR Earth Science, DAL Elect – Earth Science

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Strategies For More Effective Labs Chemistry

Too often we have students who float through lab exercises without making connections to the science content they are learning in class. Some students struggle to find meaning of the lab and just run through the motions, copying other student’s data and ideas, and then handing in the lab report without a second thought about the science they just witnessed. Many students feel lab time is just for fun and not for learning at all. As teachers, we know the lab was intended to challenge students, make students discover answers to phenomenon, and reinforce the subjects we teach in class. So why is there such a large disconnect between labs and classroom content? The execution of the labs is an essential skill which teachers need to refine over time in order to make their labs more valuable to their students. These are a few tips that teachers can use to help drive labs towards that ultimate goal.

  1. Flip Your Pre-Lab: Regardless if you are a novice or an expert in flipping, flipping your pre-lab isn’t a difficult process and can prove to be very beneficial. You can create a video just by videotaping yourself in the lab with your cellphone! I prefer to screencast my computer using screencast-o-matic and voice over a PowerPoint that contains ideas and images from my lab. I upload my videos to an online website known as EDpuzzle, which is a free website you can use to track students watching your videos (and embed questions during the video to assess the students’ understanding). Both of these sites are free and very easy to use. Other teachers upload to their personal websites or YouTube. A flipped pre-lab could include reviewing safety rules pertaining to the lab, showing how to use equipment, and practicing necessary calculations. If the students complete this pre-lab at home, they come into class ready to work, increasing the time spent on the actual wet lab. The flipped pre-lab can decrease lab misconceptions and give the students a better understanding of their goal before they start the lab. In addition, flipping the pre-lab is helpful for inquiry style labs because the students will already know how to use the equipment and account for safety issue that may arise.
  2. Class Lab Discussion for Inquiry Labs: Inquiry labs can be daunting and cumbersome. One strategy to make these labs more manageable is to have a class discussion before the lab starts. Give the students a larger, overarching problem that needs to be solved. In pairs or small groups the students should come up with variables that they can test to solve the problem. A simple example could be “What factors affect the rate of a reaction?” Students can come up with factors such as temperature, surface area, and more. Next, have a class discussion and record all of the student’s variables down on the board. In some labs, it may be overwhelming for one lab group to test all of the variables that were brainstormed. Therefore, assign each lab group one variable to test from the list. At the end of the lab, students can exchange data to solve the overall problem. For example, group one can study temperature effects and group two can measure surface area affects. If there are not a lot of variables, double up the lab groups and they can compare their answers at the end of the lab. The individual lab groups will have to brainstorm constants for their lab and come up with a plan of action. Once the teacher checks the plan and constants, the group can get started on a series of trials to test their assigned variable. In most cases, the students should have a pre-planned data table and a graph to show the relationship that they tested. At the end of the lab, each group should report about the variable they tested, constants they used, and their results to the class in a short, two minute presentation. The class should record that data to create a class master set of data that shows all variables and their effects. This method will reinforce the need for multiple trials of the same variable in an experiment, while not putting too much pressure on any one group to solve the overarching problem in a lab because the lab groups are focused on one part of the overall problem. Together as a class, they can understand the problem as a whole and witness how a group of people can work together to solve the larger problem.
  3. Lab Quizzes: In my classroom, like many others, most labs are done as a small group or pair of students. Some teachers assign roles to each student to hold them accountable for participating in the lab. Despite the effort it takes to arrange the lab and possibly assign roles, some students can still do the bare minimum and copy other students’ work. To really tie the lab in with the classroom content and ensure that every student has motivation to understand the lab, lab quizzes can be given periodically to test student understanding. The quizzes can be short, using sample data from the lab or questions that may show up on future tests. Some quizzes may have the same questions that were in the lab, but with new numbers. Other quizzes might have questions about error analysis from a lab. You can also create a mini lab practical to ensure the students have proficient lab skills. In AP classes, I often give one AP question from an old exam that relates to the lab we completed. Lab quizzes should be given soon after the lab is complete or at least by the end of the unit. The bottom line is if the students know they will be individually assessed on their lab, they will most likely put more effort into understanding the lab as it is being done. Unfortunately, many students don’t find value in work that is not graded. These individual quizzes that can take as little as five minutes can be the item that students find the most motivating factor to understanding the lab.
  4. Challenge Labs: I have changed some of my standard labs into challenge labs. Instead of having students confirm the formula of a hydrate (I am a chemistry teacher) or confirm the value of a constant, my teams compete to get the closest value to the correct answer. It doesn’t always change the makeup of the lab itself, but it adds a healthy competitive element to the lab that engages more students. Some labs did change, like my density lab. Instead of identifying if sample size affects the density of an object or confirming the makeup of a sample based on density, I gave teams a sample of aluminum metal that was pre-massed by me, and another sample of aluminum without a mass that had a different shape and size. Students could use any equipment other than a balance to find the mass of the second sample. The closer they got, they better they scored on the lab!

It is important to conduct meaningful labs in class. If the students cannot connect the content in the labs to the content in their homework, classwork, and exams the labs become a waste of time and energy. The labs need to be a driving force in the classroom and something to refer to when describing questions in class. I hope you consider trying one or more of these strategies for your labs to help connect your labs to your chemistry content.

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Suffolk Spring Conference 2019

Spring has sprung and that means it’s time for the STANYS Spring Conference.  The Conference this year was held on Thursday March 28th at Brookhaven National Lab. Participants were greeted with a light breakfast and time to circulate around at vendors before the Keynote Speaker began.  The Keynote was presented by Dr. Cary Sneider a Professor at Portland State who is a member of the NGSS Engineering Writing Team. His keynote focused on the concept of inquiry and how it has changed within the guise of NGSS.  His talk was engaging and interactive and a great way to start the day. The first session continued with a variety of workshops to choose from, ranging from argument driven inquiry presented by Dr. Victor Sampson himself, author of many Argument Driven resources to escaping the classroom.  Lunch was a nice break to interact and connect with fellow participants and after lunch we continued on with two additional workshop sessions. I was fortunate to sit in a workshop where we explore the chemistry of hot sauce as a phenomena and how well it can clean a penny. The presenters were so well organized prepared it made the transition to NYSSLS seem like something we can all introduce in our own classes.  Participants were engaged throughout the day and were involved with hands on workshops that ranged all content and grade levels. The conference was a success with teachers walking away with lessons that they could use in their own classrooms. I want to thank the STANYS members that put this great conference together and look forward to the next one. The behind the scene effort it takes to pull off a conference of this caliber is nothing short of amazing, and the members of STANYS really work together to provide high quality professional development to the teachers of Suffolk County.  

 

For additional photos of the day click here: STANYS photos

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Moving to NYSSLS Implementation?

Where are you, your department, and your district in transitioning to New York State Science Learning Standards (NYSSLS)?  These are our current science standards, but I totally get the reluctance of some to modify since the state assessments haven’t changed.  Get ready anyway. Teachers, administrators, Boards of Education, professional organizations, NYSED, and NYS Legislators all have priorities but they are often determined by necessity, often the turn in the road ahead.  Each group needs to outline where they hope to be in a few years and then lay out a step by step plan to reach those goals for NYSSLS implementation. District administrators and teachers should plan for changes without waiting to see the new state assessments.  These “Framework based standards” are now adopted by 40 states representing 80% of all student in the US. The standards are about improved science education and preparing our students for this century and not about the summative exams.

District administrators, teachers and community stakeholders need to understand the changes and work towards an implementation plan.  PK-5 are grade banded and development of phenomena-based 3D curriculum resources is challenging so most elementary teachers need support, curriculum materials, and professional learning opportunities.  Middle schools must decide on a course map that includes all the standards (MS PEs) and somehow figure out how to handle acceleration in their HS courses. Once the middle school course map draft is outlined, PEs could be bundled, and curriculum developed.  High school science departments could look at Appendix K, the PEs for their courses, and do a cross walk with the Curriculum Cores and the NYSSLS. As an important note, you must closely look at NYSSLS and not NGSS as you dig into designing curriculum. A concerned teacher recently pointed out that HS-PS2-1 is about Newton’s Second Law of Motion but has a significant difference in the NYSSLS clarification statement … projectile motion, or an object moving in a circular motion), for objects in equilibrium (Newton’s First Law), or for forces describing the interaction between two objects (Newton’s Third Law)…   

I’d like to share some of my positive experiences and observations as we move closer to implementation.  I know student centered instruction, project-based learning, learning through case studies, and problem solving has been part of best practices in science classrooms; now NYSSLS aligns with those practices.  Elementary (K-5) is making progress in local classrooms and teachers are talking about how happy the students are to be doing science. Kids love being up and about figuring out, working in groups and engaged in learning science.  The K-2 and 3-5 progressions represented in the content (DCIs) for each grade removes some of the previously taught recall-based stuff that isn’t inclusive of all students. Some districts are choosing between various elementary BOCES and publisher-based curriculum resources to pilot or adopt.  It won’t be many years before students entering middle school will expect science to be about explaining phenomena, figuring things out, and solving problems. Some middle schools have their draft course maps and shifted entire grade levels to NYSSLS. High school programs seem to be the slowest to shift but there are some that embraced student centered instruction before NYSSLS.  Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGILs), Argument Driven Inquiry (ADI), IB, and the current AP science courses are aligned with the NYSSLS approach. I know cohorts of MS and HS teachers in the NYS Master Teachers program have been working together in transitioning their courses. Teachers collaborating, setting goals, trying new lessons, developing phenomenon based inquiry tasks, working on performance assessments and among the things that will help move us forward.

STANYS is continuing to do what we can to help the science community make a smooth transition to NYSSLS.  Through the NYS Science Education Consortium, we participated in the widely distributed White Paper on Assessment and have lobbied for funding for professional development.  Suffolk STANYS in partnership with BNL will be offering a Spring Conference March 28th.  We have Dr. Cary Sneider (lead writer of NGSS) and Dr. Victor Sampson (ADI) scheduled for workshops along with several your colleagues and folks from BNL.  STANYS is planning more PD opportunities again this summer with Paul Andersen and plans are already underway for our Annual Conference in Rochester.

Best wishes to you and your families for a wonderful year.

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Preparing Students for the Next Generation

How can we best prepare students for the next generation? (The following is based on a TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson.) As science teachers, we are trained to be keen observers of student behaviors. Most of us are naturally good at this. This is a direct development of our science minds. We see natural changes and can make predictions, but predicting the timing and the degree of future changes decades away, is extremely challenging. That being said, the students we are teaching today will live and work in that world. Graduates and students today are facing globalization, a robotic workforce, academic inflation, high-speed travel, rapid population movement, rapid advancements in computer technology, climate change, and a raft of environmental issues. The world is changing at an accelerated pace. Students today need to more creative than ever to compete and be the problem solvers that can take on these challenges successfully.

We as teachers, administrators, and legislators have a large stake in creating curriculum and practices that allow students that are creative to flourish. The problem is that we reward students that excel in less creative courses, and diminish the types of courses that produce creativity. Some teachers that I work with are masters at using teaching crutches that allow a student to get the right answer by reducing the solution and limiting creativity. In the world of hyper testing environments, are students being taught that being wrong is unacceptable? Think about it, we reward students for getting near perfect or perfect scores. In fact we praise them with lavish awards and scholarships. Colleges use SAT scores based on a few dimensions of learning, mathematical aptitude, reading and language skills. In general, students learn that in order to be accepted into a college, they must emphasize the courses that the SAT measures, and de-emphasize other courses that are very creative, including arts. This by nature reduces the creative courses that SAT focused students enroll in. Please, I’m not being disrespectful and I’m certain brilliance can shine in any area, but there are specialized minds and very creative thinkers that are not being developed to their fullest potential.

In New York State, many new educational programs are being implemented. In science we are transitioning into the NYSSLS based on the Next Generation Science Standards. How we teach NYSSLS is an important as the performance expectations themselves. Administrators need to realize that every teaching discipline is different. If a science teacher that tries to set up interesting teaching phenomena for 3D learning is not given adequate time or supplies to accomplish this, then creativity and problem solving will be lost from the start.

In order to teach students to be more creative, as often as possible, we should allow students to fail with less penalty, allow them to realize that real problems and solutions do not always lead to an absolute answer. Many times, solutions lead to unsolved problems and more questions. Reward the journey as well as the end result.  I’ve seen many students reach an impasse in science investigations and simply assume they have failed and stop working. Why? Because the reward system in most schools and higher academia fail to allow creative solutions that don’t fit standard grading. Students are taught that failure is unacceptable, so students stop investigating when things go bad and they probably experience a dose of damaged humility as well. However, it’s at this point that student creativity and grit for reworking the new questions generated needs to be taught and rewarded. We should allow time for these type of open-ended activities and not jump to assigning a grade or a score when a student reaches a predesignated result. Encourage and guide the student with the new problem. Allow them to struggle, and reward them for creating new hypotheses to solve using the information gathered from the previous attempt.

If we all know that an experiment that can’t fail is flawed from the start. Then why do we teach students that failure is not an option? It’s not just above average ability that should be rewarded without failure. If we seek to produce the type of problem solvers for the next generation and well into the future, then we must reward creativity, perseverance in finishing, and the raw ability of tackling unexpected results as the cornerstones of the next generation of problem solvers.

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The Sixth Anniversary of Hurricane Sandy: Looking Back, Looking Forward

Today, as I write this latest website submission, is the sixth anniversary of Hurricane/Tropical Storm/Post-Tropical Cyclone/Superstorm Sandy. She was a conundrum, a tropical system and a blizzard, and also an example of what wicked weather was in store for us that winter weather season. More recently, reflections and comparisons to Sandy have been made in the wake of the devastating events this year including Hurricane Florence’s landfall in the Carolinas, which lead to major flooding inland along the Mid-Atlantic, and the catastrophe left in the wake of Hurricane Michael along the Gulf Coast.

What do you remember from Sandy? What do you think you would never forget from the experiences of that time? Did the hurricane affect your life, your family, your friends, your co-workers, your students? Was the impact major or minor?

I remember having turkey dinners for days, because my husband’s family lost power, and they had turkeys frozen and waiting for Thanksgiving dinner than then had to be cooked. Ours was the only family house with power, so they made trips here for light, hot meals, and connections to the outside world via television and the Internet.

I remember taking a field trip to the Long Island Solar Farm, at Brookhaven National Lab, the day before Sandy struck. We went about our day as if everything was normal, with the high cirrus field streaming in overhead. We headed to Smith Point after the field trip, to check out the high surf from the hurricane, and to get an idea of what the beach looked like before the storm struck.

As the storm approached, I went up the road about a mile to our town beach, along the North Shore. There, the surge was apparent, as the wind fetch was out of the northeast. I decided maybe we should get more batteries, and headed to Toys R Us for the only D-cell batteries in town. Then we hunkered down for what was a long, long night, with a three-month-old, a two-year-old, and furniture holding our front door (facing east) shut. We watched as our swing-set blew end-over-end across the farm field. We listened as the roof shingles ripped off of our newly built home, and we waited for the Sun to come up so we could survey the damage.

On November 16, 2012, I went back to Smith Point beach. At this point the Army Corps of Engineers had already filled in the breaches on the east side of the beach, but the Old/New Inlet was then untouched, and has remained so to present day. It is, however, showing signs of closing naturally, as I witnessed early this October, 2018, during another trip back to the Breach, and much to the displeasure of those who live along Bellport Bay. Many have appreciated cleaner water conditions consistently occurring there since Sandy recut the inlet on Fire Island in 2012.

I have had the displeasure of riding out two nasty hurricanes at this point in my life. I was in Florida for the worst vacation of my life, when Hurricane Charley struck in 2004. Happily, I was with my grandmother, and was able to follow the news for a while, until we lost power, through her antenna television signal. The sound of the wind howling around my own home during Sandy was no less scary than during the time when tornadoes were all around us in Florida nearly a decade before.

As we look back, and as we watch the 2018 Atlantic Hurricane Season come to and end in another month or so, I wonder what is instore for us in the future. With oceans warming, water expanding, and storm systems becoming less “normal” like those I studied in college; with the polar and subtropical jet streams looping in exaggerated ridges and troughs, I wonder how to best share these thoughts and scientific principles with my students. Do I delve into the often-politicized topic of climate change, propose a new course on the topic at the high school? My students are currently old enough to remember Sandy, but there will come a time when they were too young to remember. How do I stress the importance of being well-prepared and well-informed?

For starters, some resources for you:

National Hurricane Center: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/

Weather Summary and Discussion of the Development and Dissipation of Hurricane Sandy: https://www.weather.gov/okx/HurricaneSandy

Dr. Charles Flagg and Stony Brook SoMAS site – Great South Bay Project: http://po.msrc.sunysb.edu/GSB/

Long Island Solar Farm: https://www.bnl.gov/SET/LISF.php

Hurricane Charley Service Assessment – August, 2004: https://www.weather.gov/media/publications/assessments/Charley06.pdf

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including its most-recent report Global Warming of 1.5 deg C: http://www.ipcc.ch/

Download a free copy (PDF) of the book Teacher-Friendly Guide to Climate Change at http://www.priweb.org/index.php/pubs-special/pubs-spec-5813-detail