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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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Field Trips: Making the Most of Your Experience

As a teacher, what comes to mind when you hear the words, “field trip?” Perhaps scheduling challenge, expense, permission slips, coverage, transportation, not enough time? Each of these are valid concerns, but if planned properly, field trips can be impactful experiences for students and valuable for teachers. A little effort on your part can yield great rewards.

A field trip is where classroom (formal) and out-of-school (informal) learning environments intersect. The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) notes their potential in the position statement: Learning Science in Informal Environments. These experiences, “can spark student interest in science and provide opportunities to broaden and deepen students’ engagement; reinforce scientific concepts and practices introduced during the school day; and promote an appreciation for and interest in the pursuit of science in school.”

How can teachers make the most of the field trip experience? Here are a few tips:

  1. Consider the timing.  Will the field trip be used to introduce a topic or reinforce what has already been learned?  
  2. How will the trip be funded? Are there funds in the department budget? Or can you utilized BOCES or ask the PTO/PTA, do some fundraising, or will students pay?
  3. A trip looks interesting but you’re not sure if it will suit your needs. Ask to observe a program in action. Which skills, tools, methods or vocabulary would you like your students to practice? Share this information with your field trip provider.  
  4. Before the trip, set your expectations with your class and tell them your specific learning focus. During the trip, remain engaged to ensure the experience is meeting your expectations. Finally, plan for post-visit discussions and activities back in the classroom.

Consider field trip providers as partners in educating and inspiring your students. And these experiences aren’t just for students. Meeting teachers’ professional development needs is a priority for many field trip providers. If you see a student offering that piques your interest, ask to participate as a learner. Classroom teachers can gain content knowledge as well as pedagogical skills modeled by the informal science educator.

Investigate what’s out there. Reach out to a STANYS SAR for recommendations, review options at BOCES Exploratory Enrichment, and talk with your peers at conferences. Give field trips a try. The experiences support and enrich what you do in the classroom. They are an additional tool in your already fantastic toolkit! Check out the list of field trip providers and other resources below.

RESOURCES

Here’s a list to get you started:

Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Office of Educational Programs Long Island Science Center
Caumsett Outdoor and Environmental Education Center Mount Sinai Marine Environmental Stewardship Center (MESC)
Center for Environmental Education & Discovery Oceans Wide
Center for Science Teaching and Learning Quogue Wildlife Refuge
Central Pine Barrens Commission Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research & Preservation
Children’s Museum of the East End Science Museum of Long Island
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s DNA Learning Center Seatuck Association
Connetquot River State Park Preserve   Stony Brook University’s Institute for STEM Education
Cradle of Aviation Suffolk County Marine Education Center
DEC Region One Environmental Education Office Tackapausha Nature Preserve 
Fire Island National Seashore (U.S. National Park Service) Tesla Science Center
Garvies Point Museum The South Fork Natural History Museum and Nature Center 
Girl Scouts of Suffolk County Discovery World STEM Center Vanderbilt Museum, Mansion & Planetarium
Long Island Aquarium Wertheim National Wildlife Refuge – US Fish and Wildlife Service 
Long Island Explorium Western Suffolk BOCES Outdoor Environmental Education Program
Long Island Maritime Museum

 

 

NSTA Position Statement: Learning Science in Informal Environments

Connected Science Learning: Linking In-School and Out-of-School Learning

Field Trips are Valuable Learning Experiences

School Teacher Learning Agenda Influences Student Learning In Museums

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Phinding Phenomena: 4 Tips for Locating that Elusive but Essential Component of your NYSSLS Lessons and Units

Many who have started to actively engage with the New York State Science Learning Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards have recognized the importance (and challenge) of teaching with phenomena.  Finding good phenomena with which to anchor lessons and units is hard!! This post will offer some tips on finding phenomena based on work that I’ve done with teachers over the past few years.

Some background (from Using Phenomena in NGSS-Designed Lessons and Units) Natural phenomena are observable events that occur in the universe and that we can use our science knowledge to explain or predict. By centering science education on phenomena that students are motivated to explain, the focus of learning shifts from learning about a topic to figuring out why or how something happens. Explaining phenomena and designing solutions to problems allow students to build general science ideas in the context of their application to understanding phenomena in the real world, leading to deeper and more transferable knowledge.

The process of developing an explanation for a phenomenon should advance students’ understandings. If students already need to know the target knowledge before they can inquire about the phenomenon, then the phenomenon is not appropriate for initial instruction (although it might be useful for assessment). Students should be able to make sense of anchoring (unit-level) or investigative (lesson-level) phenomenon, but not immediately, and not without investigating it using sequences of the science and engineering practices. With instruction and guidance, students should be able to figure out, step by step, how and why the phenomenon works.  

Not all phenomena need to be used for the same amount of instructional time. Teachers could use an anchoring phenomenon or two as the overall focus for a unit, along with other investigative phenomena along the way as the focus of an instructional sequence or lesson. A single phenomenon doesn’t have to cover an entire unit, and different phenomena will take different amounts of time to figure out.

Tips for Finding Phenomena

  1. Use readily available online resources. I like to start here just to get some general ideas. Some of the more well-known resources are Paul Andersen’s The Wonder of Science website, NGSS Phenomena, #Project Phenomena. Sunrise Science is a blog that lists these sites as well as a host of others. I’ve found that while these provide a great starting point for generating ideas, they are not always EXACTLY what I need for a lesson or unit.
  2. BBC videos – but turn off the sound. I also recommend becoming an avid watcher of BBC Nature programs like Planet Earth I and II, Blue Planet, Frozen Planet, etc., as well as other documentaries and websites (which I often find on Facebook). These provide a wealth of high quality nature-based phenomena.  Once I locate a video, I like to show it to students with the sound muted, a strategy I learned from a HS science teacher who works with English language learners in Los Angeles. The main reason for turning off the sound for the first viewing is two-fold: 1) It allows students to take an active role in sense-making (figuring things out) without being told the answer by the narrator (who often explains what is happening while you are watching); 2) It allows students to focus on only one sense at a time (sight) rather than being bombarded with both language (sound) and sight which may be difficult for them to process simultaneously. Not until students are ready to research more deeply into the phenomenon do I consider replaying the video with sound.
  3. Find the phenomenon that’s already hiding in your lesson.  Oftentimes, flipping the sequence in which a lesson is taught is the easiest way to create a phenomenon-based lesson. For example, a 4th grade teacher with whom I work wanted to have students explore a roll-back can in which a can is rolled on a table and then unexpectedly rolls back to you, similar to the one here.  She searched far and wide for a phenomenon to introduce the task, but then realized that the can itself could serve as the phenomenon.  Students generated observations and questions about the can and then proceeded to investigate the cans themselves. Much of Chemistry and Physics labs can be previewed to students as a demo at the start of class to help them generate questions. Students can then explore in lab groups and test variables/variations to address their questions. Thus, you oftentimes don’t have to look very far for a phenomenon – it can be lurking in your lesson somewhere waiting for you to pull it out.
  4. Go outside and keep it local! The most powerful phenomena are culturally or personally relevant or consequential to students, grounded in real world contexts or designing solutions to science-related problems that matter to students, their communities, and society.  Long Island is renowned for its natural beauty (not just strip malls). We have lakes, hills, rivers, forests – all of which need protecting. What better way to have students solve problems and make sense of phenomena than to take them outside into the schoolyard and plant native plants to support dwindling pollinator populations (e.g., native bees, Monarch butterflies) or understand the relationship between sewage and nitrification of our bays (fish kills makes a great anchor phenomenon).  Your current students will likely be voting members of society in less than a decade from now…what kind of citizen do we want to send out to society?

Designing phenomenon-based lessons can be challenging; however, it also provides opportunities to engage students more deeply in explaining relevant phenomena and solving problems that urgently need their attention.  We as science teachers have the privilege of shaping the direction society takes towards addressing these problems.

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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  

 

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Beyond Siri

Summer vacation brings us such a fresh time to renew our career and plan new ways to teach. I view it as almost a rebirth a new start. This year was no different except I also get a new point of view from my 5 and 3 year old children. This year we have done a few adventures that included beaches, road trips, Disney, Sesame Place, house projects, and my Fire Department Carnival. These things have not been uncommon in the past but what makes this year different is that I am in the golden age my kids. They ask why for everything. I learned very quickly when they ask why there is so much I need to explain and the attention span doesn’t last for the full scientific explanation. I don’t believe in the thought process that when you have a question you turn to Siri. Today’s youth whenever they have a problem turn directly to the internet for the answers, which I believe is dumbing society down. Not everything on the internet is true!

To overcome all the whys and have my kids actually learn something, I ended up doing open ended experiments when them. Having them figure things out was not the most time efficient but was so much fun to watch them struggle and develop more questions and discover the phenomena. One example was during a beach trip my little princess wanted to wear her heels to the beach instead of her flat crocks. I was watching the fight and potential melt down of the little one. I said let’s do it. My little princess wore her heels and had a really hard time walking in the sand. So of course I tried to have a race between kids. She got so frustrated that she lost. So we looked at her footwear and compared footprint to her brothers. Then had her wear one foot with crocks and one foot with heel. Without getting into the math she figured out that on the sand you need a wider footprint. Then I asked her to figure out a way to make her heels work on the beach. I grew up in the old school days of the original MacGyver where Angus MacGyver was played by Richard Dean Anderson. So I carry a multi-tool knife and duct tape in my truck. We also can’t forget the engineer flow chart, if it moves use WD-40 if it doesn’t move use Duct Tape and if that doesn’t work use more. So giving her duct tape she was able to take a cardboard box that her mother had for the trip turned it into a platform and taped it to the bottom of her heel. She was so proud of herself and my little prince and princess learned to identify a problem and engineer a solution. They did this without asking Siri for help.

Although this summer we have been doing so many of these little inquires with my kids. I got to thinking about how I could get juniors and seniors to use their mind more than just Siri. So how can we get the student to have the same wonder as my kids. That wonder that exists before internet and fortnite™. Also we need to show them their phones are there for more than just gaming. Again, my little gifts had questions about in the pool. They asked why did they need to always wear their floaties. You have to understand my princess yells at you if you go on a amusement park ride without your hands up. She likes to live life more on the edge. Instead of thinking of buoyant force I thought of an activity I could use in AP Physics 2. I gave my kids playdoh and said make 5 different boats with the same amount of play dough and we tested how many marble that they could hold. It was a fun filled competition which trash talk included loser is a “poopy head.” The five year old made one boat that thinner walls and a wider base that displaced more water and in turn held the most marbles. She then made a connection to her high heel sand shoes that she made earlier in the week. This simple activity could be used so our students can take a simple task develop questions and then develop an experiment to answer their questions. After the marble challenge, give the students a marble and have them develop a way to now lift it. You will know the students learned the topic when they develop a way to displace the air to cause the lift on the marble. As a SCUBA instructor we do this experiment and calculations to lift things safely and controlled of the sea floor. As an ex-captain of a volunteer fire department I purposely trained people to find ways to accomplish tasks. I would always show them ways to do tasks according to textbook but sometimes the textbook approach doesn’t work in the changing environments. How you react to the changes makes the difference to saving a life or becoming a victim.

When training or teaching our students we can’t just spoon feed the information to them. They need to think about possible questions and how to figure out the answers to them. Spoon feeding is great when it is the same scenario every time which might be good for some tests, but teaching them how to think ask questions and come up with solutions will be good in everyday life. These students will be better prepared to face the world and challenges in colleges and the workplace.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.” Einstein

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Technology Considerations for the Science Classroom

As we plan for the upcoming school year, it’s a good time to reflect and think about goals and the means to implement them in the next few months. Many colleagues have mentioned the desire to incorporate more technology and even go so far as to suggest a “paperless classroom.” It sometimes seems like a race to keep up with the latest advances in technology as they impact learning via animations, simulations, apps, probeware and flipped learning to name a few.  While I too am guilty of falling victim to the allure of any tool that appears to potentially enhance my students’ love of learning science, the replacement of a traditional aspect of a lesson’s design should be performed only if it offers a real and tangible improvement to the lesson. The excessive use of technology simply based on trends should be approached with caution.

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) can be the vehicle by which teachers decide if and how a technological application can be incorporated into their classrooms. TPCK more recently coined as TPACK technology, pedagogy and content knowledge incorporates technology into Lee Shulman’s pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) construct (Mishra, P., & Koehler, M.J., 2006). PCK is the means by which a teacher takes his/her content knowledge and transforms it into content knowledge for his/her students. Teachers’ PCK includes an understanding of the misconceptions and preconceptions students bring to each specific topic as well as the strategies to assist them in overcoming these barriers to student understanding  such as demonstrations, animations, simulations, analogies, etc. (Shulman, L., 1987). With technology constantly evolving it is important to utilize applications with students if and when they enhance student learning. When deciding if it is appropriate to utilize a particular technology tool, a TPACK lens requires a teacher to think about how the technology could be used as a pedagogical tool or content representation as well as how student learning of the content is impacted by such a tool when considering the context of how it would be used. In other words: it eliminates the thought process of using technology for the sake of technology but rather requires purposeful lesson design where technology is integrated if and only if it aides in students learning of content considering the population of student needs.

It is challenging to integrate technology while at the same time, consider the pedagogy and the content simultaneously through a TPACK framework. Today, most teachers are trained to incorporate technology via one size fits all professional development sessions which typically provide only an introduction to a tool and focus only on the technology itself and not the best practices for integration the tool into student learning.

There is no debating the fact that students need to be technologically savvy and as educators we are responsible for making our students college and career ready for the 21st century. With a wide range of applications available at our fingertips, educators need to determine which tools are the best aligned with content that will enhance the pedagogy for their students. Students have also culturally adapted to the world of smart phones where they can download an app to practice a particular science skill, sketch and rotate molecules, makes mechanisms, etc. (Williams, A., & Pence, H., 2011). While there are many advantages of using such tools, the traditional paper and pencil method should not necessarily be dismissed. For instance, when polled my students preferred assessments on paper over the computer. Even when providing students with the rationale behind computer assessments such as Graduate Record Exam (GRE) and vocational tests now being administered online, they still did not prefer this method and stated they needed to annotate the questions and wanted to interact directly with the text on paper. Additionally, students in my class preferred Lewis dot diagrams and drawing structural formulas in organic chemistry by hand over their technology counterparts. For programs that had the application or functionality to create molecules, often it was more cumbersome than drawing by hand and more time was spent learning how to use the program than the chemistry content itself. When considering this from a TPACK lens, the technology did not enhance student learning and thus the lesson needs revision.

In summary, when trying to incorporate technology into lessons, teachers should consider the content at hand, the pedagogical method that best suits teaching the content and the technology that would aide or be the mechanism of instruction for a particular group learners. As educators, we continue to strive to improve our instruction. It’s beneficial to reflect and think about why a teacher is using a particular piece of technology and ask if it is serving the function the teacher believes it to be. There are many pedagogical techniques available that do not necessarily require technology such as Modeling instruction™, POGIL®, and improvisation to name a few that for which I have been unable to find a technological counterpart that I feel is equally effective for my teaching environment. While the demands for technological applications for certain pedagogical techniques have been met by means such as  zoom meetings with breakout rooms to teach concepts via a POGIL® activity, I would argue that certain populations of students learn better from the face to face interaction. Thus, there is not one singular approach that works but rather a variety of approaches that can be appropriate depending on what the content goal is for a particular group of students and the context.

 

References:

Glaser. R. (1984). Education and thinking: The role of knowledge.  American Psychology, 39(2), 93-104.

Graham, R. C., Burgoyne, N., Cantrell, P., Smith, L., St Clair, L., &  Harris, R. (2009).

Measuring the TPACK confidence of inservice science teachers.    TechTrends, 53(5), 70-79.

Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. (2007). Technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK): Confronting the wicked problems of teaching with technology. In C. Crawford et   al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education International Conference 2007 (pp.  2214-2226). Chesapeake, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education.

Mishra, P., & Koehler, M.J. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for integrating technology in teacher knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017-1054.                         

National Research Council. (2000) How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.      

Shulman, L. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4-14.

Shulman, L. S. (1987). Knowledge and teaching: Foundations of the new reform. Harvard Educational Review, 57(1), 1-22.

Williams, A. J., & Pence, H. E. (2011). Smart phones, a powerful tool in the chemistry classroom. Journal of Chemical Education, 88(6),  683-686.        

 

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Outstanding Students and Teachers to be Recognized at the 44th Annual Awards Dinner in May

Each year the STANYS Suffolk Section presents an Awards Dinner at which outstanding science students and science educators are honored.  The dinner this year will be held on May 23, 2018 at Villa Lombardi’s in Holbrook.  Each high school science department from districts that are patrons of our District Membership Services Program submit an outstanding graduating senior from their school who is recognized at the Awards Dinner.  At the dinner three teachers (elementary, middle level, and high school) receive our Science Teacher Recognition Awards for meritorious service as a science educators.                                                                                                      

A letter has been sent to all building principals and to high school science supervisors inviting them to nominate a member of their faculty for recognition as a Science Teacher of the Year.  We invite you to assist us with our Science Teacher Recognition Awards Program by submitting a nomination form for an outstanding science educator.   You may nominate a colleague or yourself to be a candidate for recognition as a Science Teacher of the Year:  2017 – 2018.  The award recipient may be either a teacher of science or a science specialist who has made extraordinary contributions to the science teaching profession.  Examples of such contributions are:

  1. An outstanding teacher- One who helps students and other teachers both inside and outside the classroom with the delivery of science programs, organizes special student programs and has achieved success with special groups.
  2. An innovative teacher – One who successfully introduces new programs, develops or revises curricula, teaching methods or materials. 
  3. A teacher serving other teachers – One who works through professional organizations such as  STANYS, NSTA, NESTA, NABT, AAPT, AACT, BOCES, SCOPE, intra-school or inter-school programs, to provide ongoing help for student teachers, new teachers and veteran teachers.                                                                          

To nominate a teacher for an award, click here to complete the Google form. Once the information on the nominee has been entered in the form a cover letter and an application will be sent to the candidate.  This will include providing more detailed information about the candidate, and instructions for including a professional resume, a personal response, and letters of recommendation.  It will be the candidate’s responsibility to complete all forms and obtain all of required documentation. 

At the Awards dinner in May Outstanding High School Science Seniors are recognized from each participating high school in our District Membership Services Program. Student honorees and a teacher of their choice are guests of the Suffolk STANYS section.  The invited teacher speaks about the student as the receive a plaque.                        

Letters have also been sent to all to all Suffolk County high school principals and science supervisors requesting student nominations, which should be submitted by completing this Google form.  Please see if your district is a patron of the District Membership Services Program and can submit a student nomination.  If not, it’s not to late for a district to enroll.  The cost is $200 per high school.  If you need information about enrolling your high school in the District Member Services Program please contact Brian Vorwald. If this isn’t possible for this year, please consider supporting the program next year.