Learn About Gravity by Sending an Experiment to Space
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
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.
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:
- 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.
- An innovative teacher – One who successfully introduces new programs, develops or revises curricula, teaching methods or materials.
- 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.
Building Next Generation Units – Harder Than We Thought
Last year, when our district decided to roll out one Next Generation “mini” unit per grade level for K-5, we decided to design the mini units ourselves. We figured, how hard could it be? We were already teaching a lot of the content, we could “next gen” what we were basically already doing by adding models, introducing phenomena, and adding some strong questioning techniques. In some ways, it’s been easier than we thought, but in many ways, a lot harder.
One of the toughest things was adjusting to the idea that we’d no longer be dedicating whole units to the study of particular animals. For example, when we built our grade 4 unit on internal and external structures, we figured we could keep one of our favorite grade 4 activities, dissecting owl pellets, as part of the new unit. After all, the parts of the owl’s external structure (eyes, feathers, talons, etc) and internal structure (digestive system) that we would be studying all support the animal’s survival, growth, and behavior. We’d continue to use zSpace virtual technology to investigate the owl’s internal structure, with literature and non-fiction resources to explore the external structure. The phenomenon was the owl pellet – how cool! Easy. We’d done it before.
As it turned out, using an animal we’d already taught made things both easy and hard. We’d done it before, but in many ways making significant changes to something we’d already done with different goals, was harder than starting from scratch. We used to refer to this section of our curriculum as the “owl pellet” unit. Our old assessments contained specific questions about owls and owl pellets. Keeping these great activities and resources made it difficult for us to let go of the idea of an “owl pellet unit” and embrace the idea of an “Internal Structures and Functions” unit where the owl pellet would simply be the phenomenon that allowed the students access to the core concepts of structure and function. No longer could we expect our students to simply become experts on owls – we needed them to become thinkers and investigators who would be able to generalize from their study of owls to structure and function of all animals. That’s a big leap, and in our first year, we didn’t completely make it.
Later in the unit, while introducing structure and function of plants, we encountered a very different challenge. We’d decided to introduce a plant we never had our 4th graders examine before – moss. It seemed like a good choice – there was lots of it available outside, and we could peel it right up and bring it into the classrooms when we were ready. And, we’d be investigating something new. There was only one glitch – it snowed right before this section of the unit, and the snow lasted! This little miscalculation set us back a week!
Ultimately, did we succeed with our first try at a next-generation science unit? In some ways yes – for example, the students got comfortable with the idea of drawing models, and the thinking expressed in the student models definitely got deeper as the unit progressed. The students loved the unit. How awesome is it to have students so excited and interested in their work each day? As elementary teachers, that is the best part of our job. But – do our students now have a better understanding of generalized structure and function in animals and plants? I’m not sure. In the end, they knew a lot about owls and moss, which was not the goal. But, we’re learning! We may have had mixed results this time, but we’re still evaluating and thinking about changes for next year.
FRC FTW
The first of the year always tends to give my kids anxiety and feeling of abandonment. The next six weeks they will lose their parent. My precious Dorothy (5) and adorable Jame (3) will only see me on FaceTime for bedtime and a quick 5 minutes in the morning when they wake up as I am going out the door. This is due to the oath I took as well as thousands of others globally to be a FIRST robotics mentor. January 6th the Saturday that begins the 6 weeks of build season. For those of you that are unaware, this day Globally at about 10 am EST we learn our fate and the game of the year. In this cas, I am lucky that I live in the same time zone as where the game is released. Broadcasted out from the main kickoff event in New Hampshire Dean Kamen and Woodie Flowers send their message and homework to the world. Then the problem solving, game strategies, and money for supplies starts flowing. Here is the link to this years game.
There has been plenty of preparation gone into the year before the kick-off. Teams have been training new members and fundraising. Plenty of fundraising is required to build these elaborate robots. Our team tries to include local businesses and to help sponsor and mentor our team. What is great about this, is that our students go out and have to talk and convince the sponsors how great this program and why they need to support us. Also, students show up not knowing the difference between a wrench and a hammer. So the leadership of the program is charged with training the new members on the equipment and start building the family. Robotics becomes more than a program to the kids. It becomes family. Our team motto has become “relationships forged with aluminum but built for life” This has become more evident to me as I just went to a wedding of one of our alumni. As I saw her cake with FIRST symbols and binary code, and sitting at the robotics table, I knew I was apart of something bigger than I. Each one of the alumni had a masters in engineering, programming, and heading into Medical School.
Now for this years game. This year we need to stack milk crates “power cubes” onto a balance beam that is either about 2 feet or 5 feet off the ground. As long as the balance is tilted to our team we are building points. Then at the end of the game we can opt to climb a 7 foot high bar for 30 points. The moment we find out our task the students start to problem solve and design. They prototype and do research. They have found out that a previous robot that we built while these students were in elementary school. Was able to stack crates with ease. So they savagely recycled her. So now have a robot in the works. Making better what we used in the past. Also the climbing task was very similar to another robot we built when these students were in Pre-k. They are currently adapting the plans to meet this years needs. Students are actively working each day doing things that they can not do anywhere else.
The way the build works is that student leadership is charged with different teams and the leadership is not supposed to touch tools but to assist the younger members staying on task and the leadership reports to mentors. This is what every team should be doing. Using the adults as a reference but the robots should be built completely by students. Student ideas should be examined experimented and tested. Although some of the robots do not look student built at all. I get some joy in seeing the finished product and the pride of my team each year.
The FIRST program is a program that get the students heads out of their phones and gaming systems and takes textbook knowledge and puts it to real use. Get the students to make something real and tangible. Gives them the ability to fail, fall down, and pick themselves up to succeed. Any student that does not have an idea fail doesn’t learn anything. It is not uncommon to see a student break down when something they worked hard for fail, but you see them get the determination to adapt and change their idea. These are the success stories. They own their creation. Often their creation becomes their child. When the students develop this adaptation and creativity you see it in the pits of the competition. That is a sight to see. The team converge on their bot during competition and fix things that broke or tweek their design to make their bot better mid competition. My job is to support them and the students make it happen. They are learning to depend on themselves and their team. They are learning that life is not about memorizing what someone told them, they are learning life does not have an instruction manual. They are learning that they need to critically think and whatever they put their mind to they can accomplish.
The team is not just about building robots. Team 2161 is also about helping others. In the past 12 years or so They have raised over $200,000 for St. Baldricks to help fund research on childhood cancers. They put the whole event together and team alumni come back to shave the way to a cure. Please consider donating or coming.
As my children Dori and James lose a parent for six weeks. In the end when they come to competition they see their extended family the robotics team. As my kids come up to the school to support my events , the students get to know them and the students will have them control a robot and show them what their parent has been up to. James also has been shaving his head since he was one year old. My students expect my kids to be at competition too. So each year the family grows. The stress and anxiety continues but in the end a better society can be formed with the critically thinking students that realize that they hold the key to greatness. I leave you with these two quotes from Nicola Tesla “Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.” “I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.”
Questioning the Traditional Lesson Structure
With the adoption of New York State Science Learning Standards (NYSSLS), there has been a variety of approaches taken to start blending its three dimensional structure, composed of core ideas, cross cutting concepts and science and engineering practices, into teachers current practice. The disciplinary core ideas are essentially the content that teachers will teach or what information their students are required to know. The cross cutting concepts are the key themes that emerge time and again across science curricula, such as patterns and cause and effect, and are used to explain how students think about science. The science and engineering practices are how teachers will teach the information and what students will actually do in the classroom. The science and engineering practices listed in the NGSS framework include: asking questions, developing and using models, planning and carrying out investigations, analyzing and interpreting data, using mathematics and computational thinking, constructing explanations and designing solutions, engaging in argument from evidence and lastly obtaining, evaluating and communicating information.
If you are feeling overwhelmed with the new standards, one place to start your shift could be to merge one the science and engineering practices into your current teaching flow. A smooth transition could be found by incorporating the first science and engineering practice: asking questions. The most common professional development technique I’ve encountered regarding this practice is Question Formulation Technique, QFT. QFT was developed by the Right Questions Institute, tested and modified to intentionally teach students how to ask questions and provide teachers with the skills necessary to teach the students how to do so. Essentially, QFT is a series of steps that allows for students to ask numerous questions, improve them and prioritize them in order of importance.
QFT begins with a question focus chosen by the teacher, typically something students will look at and be curious about, stimulating them to ask questions. The question focus can be a short video, a visual model that students can look at or even a short statement. The question focus itself is not a question and has a focused intention of jumpstarting student questions in a direction that provokes student thought in a different vein that the traditional approach likely would not. For instance, if teachers were using a short video to introduce nuclear chemistry by showing a slow-motion clip of an atomic bomb detonating instead of a clip discussing the historical impact of the atomic bomb, then the conversation would be better able to focus on solely on the chemistry of the explosion rather than its historical, political or emotional implications. Further, while typical lessons might begin with a “Do Now” from a teacher, the question focus is a different approach that will allow students to develop their own questions to guide the following lessons.
The second step of QFT, is a protocol that must be followed where students produce as many questions as they can without stopping for a discussion, judgement or even answer to their questions. Questions are recorded exactly as they are stated and any statements listed are changed into questions. So often, teachers want to re-phrase student questions: “So what you’re really asking is…” while here the intention is the students’ questions will be validated, no matter how they are articulated. All student input is valued in this method and is a student-centered as opposed to teacher centered approach. Additionally, the teacher needs to stress the importance of following the rules. For instance, groups cannot stop to debate or discuss a question, the rationale for this being that they will lose focus and not be able to continue to generate questions.
The next phase of QFT calls for students to classify their questions as closed versus open by labeling them as “C” for closed ended and “O” for open ended. Closed ended questions are those that can be answered with a “yes” or “no” response such as: “is the balloon inflated?” as opposed to an open-ended question which could be: “what caused the balloon to inflate?”. Students are then asked to change a closed ended question to open ended and vice versa if desired in order to show how manipulation of a question allows for different information to be obtained in order to arrive at an answer. Finally, students prioritize questions in order of importance. Typically, teachers ask for students’ top three questions which, depending on the question set, will shape future assignments. As an example: if the class was going to proceed in developing an experiment from the question focus, this could be how students prioritize information, such as asking students to pick which questions would be appropriate to investigate or three questions to which they would most like to know the answer. This exercise is one where students need to analyze, compare and determine which of the questions posed would best yield the information they want to obtain. This can be concluded by students reporting out priority questions along with a rationale for why they chose those questions. Finally, the technique ends with a reflection where students analyze their thinking in the QFT process and what they learned individually.
Professional development is important for teachers to grow and develop new pedagogical techniques. I was first introduced to this technique last spring at a workshop where the presenter showed a YouTube clip of a tidal wave. Working in groups my colleagues and I were asked to come up with as many questions as possible about the video we observed (without judgement of the questions). The instructions were to begin each question with the statement “I wonder…” or “I notice…” as the video played on the smartboard over and over. This was followed by us indicating if the questions were open (providing multiple answers) or closed ended questions (yes/no type responses) for each one and finally which one we could conduct an investigation about and to determine what the variables would be for that particular investigation. Similarly, at a recent department meeting, my director showed four clips on a loop and we had to choose one of the images to generate questions about. The images for this sort of activity can be obtained from YouTube clips or https://www.ngssphenomena.com/. Together, the group developed questions over a three- minute period, which felt long and grew increasingly difficult. The questions were categorized as open or closed and the closed ended questions were re-phrased to become open ended questions. The group questions were written on chart paper and prioritized into the top three the group would like to investigate.
This past month, I used QFT with my students on a unit discussing gas laws. The question focus was a demonstration in which a balloon animal was placed in liquid nitrogen. Students observed the balloon shrink and then the balloon was taken out and returned to its original configuration, a variation of which is shown here. The students then were led through the QFT technique. Some of the questions derived included: “what is the relationship between temperature and pressure?”, “what affects volume more temperature or pressure?”, “what causes balloons to expand and contract?”,” how would the shape change if it were a different gas?”, “what would happen if there were more molecules in the balloon from the beginning of the experiment?”. All of these were ideas which I typically would have used to drive discussion or generate lessons from. Here, the students generated the questions and took ownership of the lesson flow as I illustrated the ways in which the students’ questions were related to the aim of that particular lesson. The same content was taught, but the order they were presented in was slightly different to address the students’ questions as the lesson aim.
In summary, QFT is a protocol where students generate their own questions, improve upon them and prioritize them. My own personal reflection is that whenever I have tried this technique, the participants are all involved in the process and engaged for the entire duration of time. For my quieter students, I am continually impressed by their confidence in asking questions. I found throughout my unit of instruction, there was greater interest and comprehension of the topics. Moreover, in my after-school department meeting, my colleagues all participated and were curious about each other’s questions. Even after the meeting, we were talking about the clips, which is definitely not the case for all department meetings. Finally, the protocol is well tested in a variety of educational settings and across diverse student groups. It’s a technique that I would recommend to new teachers as it may help with classroom management by providing students with rules and steps to follow at each point of the process.
For more information about QFT, visit the Right Institute for resources. Additionally, there is a great resource written by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana called Make Just One Change that thoroughly describes the technique and provides much insight into how to incorporate into professional practice.
Resources:
Rothstein, D. & Luz, S. (2011). Make Just One Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education
Press.
https://www.nextgenscience.org/three-dimensions
http://rightquestion.org/education/
The Faulkes Project & the Montauk School Science Program
The Faulkes project is a real-time, astronomy based research and imaging project based at Cardiff University in England, and Santa Barbara, California. The later operates as LCOGT (Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network), and is an equal partner in the project. Through this project, students can use large research grade telescopes located in Hawaii and Australia, via the internet, to image objects and conduct student research. In addition, LCGOT has created a network of smaller 1-meter telescopes around the world.
I became involved in the Faulkes project during the summer of 2010, after trying to build an observatory in Montauk for 7 years. It was my initial goal for the local observatory, to operate from a network, providing High Schools internet access to the telescope. When I found out about the already established Faulkes project, I passed the torch and began earnestly using the Faulkes telescopes on the LCGOT network. The telescopes in Hawaii and Siding Springs, Australia, are two-meter diameter telescopes which cost 30 million dollars each. These are capable instruments, to say the least.
Since joining the program, Montauk science students have imaged a planetary nebula (M97), and a pair of galaxies that are colliding (NGC 4567) and many other deep space objects. Montauk students have worked on rebuilding a galaxy catalog called the Hickson Compact Galaxy catalog. In addition, several students began research on determining which stars in a globular cluster are classified as Be Stars.
As an example of a student’s actual research (sponsored by researchers at Cardiff University), the student numbered image below is named NGC 330. The student used photometry to determine any variation in the amount of energy being emitted by stars in this field and compared multiple images taken over several months. The student then examined the images in specific frequencies of light and used various mathematical functions to determine which stars are classified as B[e] stars.
For general classes, teaching students about astrophotography using robotic instruments and photo-processing can be challenging enough, and very rewarding. The following images were taken and processed by Montauk students. Most science students get very excited about participating in this project, and this can be a terrific STEM project as well.
For further information about how to get involved, or if you have any questions, please contact me and see the following web sites: http://lcogt.net & http://www.faulkes-telescope.com . My e-mail is jmalave@montaukschool.org .
Happy observing and I hope to see your school’s images soon!!
We Win Success by Failing.
I’m bored with talking about success. By any metric, I’ve had the good fortune to enjoy a lot of success in my career as an educator. But I also fail a lot. And I know that I’m not alone. Failure is a significant part of educating kids. I don’t mean kids failing (hopefully that’s pretty diminished), I mean teachers failing to do the things they try to do. Things not working as planned. Mistakes being made. This kind of failure is more than just a thing that happens sometimes, it’s a significant part of the job. And it’s totally normal and expected.
So why do we hide it?
If you look at any public collection of educators, you’ll quickly see that discussion of success is much more common than conversations about failure. Any look at the #eduTwitter-scape or any of the Facebook groups for teachers is basically a wall-to-wall display of success. Kids doing amazing work. Teachers trying new things, and being delighted with the results. Everything working out exactly as planned (or even better than that). Which is lovely, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s not particularly reflective of the reality of teaching. Teaching is hard creative work, and like all hard creative work, people fail a lot.
The issue is even more glaring in science education, where teachers teach a field of endeavor that proceeds by failing. The central role of falsification in the scientific process is so essential that only presenting success not only warps perceptions of reality; it can distort our very understanding of it. And yet, we still pretend like things succeed in our classes more than they fail.
It’s easy to understand why this is the case. Generally speaking, people want to be perceived at their best, and for most people, their “best” is not when things they are trying to do aren’t working. It takes a degree of confidence to be willing to show one’s posterior on a regular basis. But in my experience, giving failure a public perch leads to a level of improvement in practice and product that is just not possible if all you talk about is success. Learning is nothing if not all about correction.
Assuming you agree with the above, the question becomes how to build a place for failure in your public life. I won’t pretend to have all of the answers, but I do have a few ideas that have worked well for me:
- Keep everything in Beta. Beta testing refers to the practice in technology development wherein a working, imperfect, version of a product is turned over to a large group of people to use. This everyday usage then provides the developers with a list of imperfections that would otherwise remain undiscovered if the developers were the only ones doing the product-testing. This philosophy is easily applied to education. The work that teachers do and the materials they create should live in a state of constant beta testing. By taking the default stance that work is imperfect, there is less discomfort when the imperfections in that work are discovered. Of course, this type of thinking is only helped by a willingness to make your work available to a vast professional learning network under pretty open terms of usage. Fortunately, in the modern era of easy-to-build webspace and free to distribute licensing, it’s trivial to set up a system wherein you can be a perennial beta tester. All it requires is a willingness to do it.
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Keep a Resume of Failures. I first discovered the concept of the resume of failures when I read this article. The example resumes that it included lead me to put up my own. I think more people should do this, and I hope that doing so on my end leads some of the tens of thousands of people who interact with myself and my digital footprint every year to realize that failing is a large part of why I’ve had the career that I’ve had. Who I am as an educator, and what I do is arguably much more a result of the failures that I’ve had in my career than it is of my successes1.
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Reflect on failures (and successes). I am a huge fan of reflective practice. My reflection tends to happen in public spaces. I find a lot of value in thinking aloud if for no other reason than that it invites correctives from a maximal number of wise minds. But even if a public airing of your reflective practice isn’t something that appeals to you, the act of reflecting itself is invaluable for learning from your experiences. There are a variety of tools that you can use to help you reflect, ranging from a notebook, a simple .txt file, or something a little more formal like 750Words or a blog. However you do it, the trick is to make sure that you actually stick to a routine of regularly engaging in reflection on the work that you are doing with the understanding that the purpose of that reflection is not to whinge about imperfection, but instead to think about how to improve.
These are three relatively easy ways to build a space for considering failure into your professional life. As always, it might be too much to try to do all three of the above at the same time. But the point isn’t to do everything that’s suggested (or even anything that’s suggested). Instead, it’s to work to make a space in your working life for acknowledging that however good we are as educators, however fortunate we have been in our work, we still fail a lot.
The Times They Are A-changing…
“Come gather around people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
And if your breath to you is worth saving
Then you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changing”
While the lyrics above may sound a bit ominous, they are also something to consider! It is an exciting time in New York State for science education…but it can also be an overwhelming time! When I started teaching high school science in 1985, communication was much more limited than now. The internet was not readily available, cell phones and text messaging had not yet been developed. For new teachers, developing lessons could be an overwhelming and isolating task. I was fortunate to start my career with a colleague that was more than willing to collaborate and was able to work with her to plan new lessons and work out the “kinks” as I began my teaching career.
As we begin the transition to NYSSLS and three-dimensional teaching and learning, the shifts in our classroom can be difficult to navigate alone. While some districts are actively working to begin the shifts, others are moving forward more slowly. If you are fortunate enough to work closely with a collegial department, you may have the support needed to begin to convert your lessons. For those of us that are the only discipline-specific teacher or work in a less than perfect department, there is a need to find resources and effective means of networking. The internet is a wealth of resources and information, but there is nothing like collaboration with another teacher to ease the burden of lesson-planning and gain professional expertise!
NOW is the perfect time to consider joining STANYS and encouraging your colleagues to join as well! STANYS has been at the forefront of providing professional development opportunities directly related to incorporating the new standards into classroom practice. The annual conference in November is only one of many opportunities. The Suffolk section has also provided local conferences for the past several years and is actively seeking ideas for providing the best possible support and professional development for its members. Membership has its benefits including:
the opportunity to network with science teachers across the state
reduced cost of attendance at conferences a chance to have your voice heard in science education concerns in NYS publications that will increase your awareness of issues concerning science educators reduced joint cost of membership in NSTA
We are looking for your input and feedback! Involvement at the local level of STANYS is an ideal way to learn more about NYSSLS and to increase your professional network of enthusiastic teachers. In this time of change, STANYS can be the support that you are looking for. If you are already a member, try to commit to attending a meeting or a conference to learn more about what we do. Approach your district for funds to attend the state conference. Encourage your colleagues, especially elementary teachers, to consider joining! If you are not a member, follow the link below to join! (Membership in the state level includes membership in the section level.)