Just kids

I subscribe to the philosophy of Supervision by Walking Around.  You learn a lot about the program in which you work by simply getting out of your classroom, wandering the halls, and listening in on classes.  Since I am not an administrator, I never actually go into the classes, but just eavesdrop.  Since I am in several committees in the school, and eat in the teacher lunchroom, I also hear a lot of teachers talking about their students.

No matter what, I take the attitude of they are just kids.  Kids do dumb stuff sometimes.  Kids don't always make the best choices.  Kids don't always give 100% of their free time to do school work.  Sometimes there are more important things in a kid's life than my class.  But, in the end, they're still kids.  Show them respect, and they will respect you.  Talk to them like they are adults and, most of the time, they will act like adults.  If you are in a meeting about them and they are in the room, talk to them directly; don't talk about them like they are not there.

And, most importantly, talk about them the way you would want others to talk about you.

Just my thoughts.

Definition of School

A student came to me begging not to do the Flipped Classroom in the 4th marking period.  After going back and forth over why, the only real reason we came up with was that procrastination had taken over and now she was thoroughly stressed out.  I explained that the assignment sheets I give outlines exactly how she could manage when to do each assignment over the course of the unit so if she sticks to the approximate schedule she should be fine.  Her response is what really frightened me.  She said

"I want you to tell me what to do each day and what to learn.  Isn't that the definition of school?"

Really?  REALLY?!  Is that what we are teaching students?  A social studies teacher-colleague of mine used to tell his students to check their rights at the door.  When did schools post "Check your brain at the door"?  

I think we need to change the definition of school.

Flipping over assessment

Not to give away part of my presentation for the Flipped Class Conference in June, by I have to talk for a minute about how assessment has changed in my class.  While there are still the typical assignments (HW, quizzes, tests, labs) I have tried to not only make everything objective-based, but also put some sort of inquiry into as many as possible.  This has been the most fun in my recent 5pt quizzes.

I have always used my quizzes as a way to do a quick check for understanding and to keep the students studying the material throughout the unit instead of the night before the test.  When I started the last unit I was looking at the typical problems I put on the quiz and decided that it bored me to even type them up in the first place.  The problem was a Boyle's Law problem (Pressure and Volume are inversely proportional) and I remembered I had this great demo involving shooting a slug of potato across the room.  So, I told the students to take out a half sheet of paper, did the demo (spraying potato everywhere) and told them to explain the demo using what they knew about gas laws.  The entire class got a perfect score.  But the best part was they had fun for that quiz.

So we are now in the Solutions unit and I needed to come up with a good quiz question.  I focus heavily on making solutions and what better way to demonstrate that you can make a solution than by making pink lemonade.  I told my students they were to calculate and write out the procedure for making a solution that was no less than 1.0 in concentration (Molarity or molality was up to them) and then make the solution.  They jumped right into it and immediately did it wrong.  They didn't know they were wrong when they did the calculations because everything looked perfect.  It was when they went to make the solution and overflowed the cup that everything became clear.  What students typically forget is that when you add solute to solvent the volume increases.  Easy to say, but better to experience.

One of my best students gets a 4/5 because of this and begins to negotiate with me on how he can earn back the lost point.  So I looked at him and said that if he can figure out the concentration of a solution made from directions on the back of the container, he could have his point back.  And off he went.  15 minutes later he is back with all of his calculations.  The reason this was challenging is the measurements are in fluid ounces for the total volume and tablespoons for the powder (which we assume is just sucrose), neither of which are units of measurement we use.  I look at his calculations and notice that he had converted everything to grams and milliliters.  As soon as I open my mouth, he interrupts with "I Google'd the measurement conversions that I didn't know."  Well, it turns out that pink lemonade has a concentration of about 0.237M.

The key to this story is that when you move to the Flipped Classroom everything is about the conversations. There is no question that this student understands the material.  Sure I could have given him a traditional written quiz and he probably would have earned the same grade.  But he was far more engaged and will probably remember what he learned from this experience far longer than doing some problem from a textbook.

What I learned this week

This has been an interesting week which really gave me a different perspective on things in my life. Here is what I have learned:

• Standardized testing is good for no one.  Not the students taking it, not the teachers proctoring it, not the administrators organizing it.
• The carrot and stick method doesn't really work.  It works less when the carrot is replaced by another stick.
• Administrators and teachers need to find a way to work together to drive learning in the school on a daily basis.  Nothing happens if only one of the groups is doing the work because the other will get resentful.
• Educators can be really petty.
• Trying to organize a large gathering while running a fever and hacking up a lung is really not a good idea.
• Trust in the creativity of your students.  Also, they love to talk about the cool things they are doing in their classes if you give them the chance.

That's it.  It's been a pretty busy week.  

This is why I do the Flipped Classroom

I have been running the Flipped Classroom on and off for over a year now and while I have seen many successes, what happened yesterday really demonstrated how, when you structure it right, it really works.

My Honors Chemistry class is just the perfect combination of students:  energetic, open-minded, willing to try, outside-the-box thinkers.  I have been including more inquiry labs in their units, something I was definitely lacking in previous attempts at this.  In the one they are currently working (Gas Laws), I asked them to create a lab that measures the amount of CO₂ produced in the reaction of Baking Soda and Vinegar and compare that to the theoretical value that should be produced.  We are getting a lot of great ideas on how to measure the gas (measuring the volume of a balloon, water displacement by immersing the balloon in water, water displacement by bubbling the gas through water), none of which I suggested to them, all of which have had different results.

Since the materials where already out for the lab, I did the following demo for a group of the students trying to get them to explain it with gas laws.

After they came up with a good explanation, another student chimed in with "So can we do the opposite to get the balloon out?  Could we heat the flask and see if it inflates the balloon above the flask?"  Well, who am I to stop them?  So they set everything up and sure enough it pushes the balloon back out.  Unfortunately, because the mouth of the balloon can't hold on tight enough the balloon pops off.

So the same student says, "What if we blow the balloon up a little first, put it on the flask, and then heat it?  Could we get it big enough to pop the balloon?"  I stepped back, took a seat on my stool and got out of their way.  In hindsight, I wish I had my video camera ready.  The balloon got pretty big, but eventually the gas in the balloon hits an equilibrium point and the water condenses.  The balloon never popped because the gas pressure doesn't get high enough.

Now the door has been opened.  Today the students rushed in trying to do it again with a bigger flask and more water.  Then they did it with the same amount of water, but a smaller flask.  Then they tried with heating the baking soda and vinegar lab.  Nothing popped the balloon.  Now, while my lab benches are now white with baking soda and the room has a severe vinegar smell, if I had to do it all over again I would.  It was the greatest 2 days of unadulterated learning I have had in my career.

This is why I do the Flipped Classroom

I am just like you

I am just like you.

• I care deeply about my students.  I get involved in their lives so they know that I care about them as people first.  I attend their athletic competitions, their drama performances, their art shows.  I want to know who they are inside, not what score they are on a test.
• I work hard to develop lessons that engage all learners.  My students need to find a way to connect with the material to make it meaningful and I strive to find ways to make that happen every day.
• I am over-worked and under-paid.  The lights in my room come on at 6am and typically don't turn off until after 3.  After some family time and dinner I start the 2nd half of my job.
• I am constantly under attack from my elected officials because they feel like they know how to do my job better than I do even though they have never set foot in my classroom.
• I love my job!
• I bring passion and energy to everything I do.  I get excited over chemistry so that my students will get excited over chemistry.

So what about me is "intimidating"?

• Are you curious about the technology that I use in my classroom?  Then ask me to show you how to use it in your room.
• Is it my level of energy that I bring every day?  I do it to inspire others to do the same.  You hold yourself to a higher standard so your students have something to work towards, why shouldn't you do the same for your colleagues?
• Are you afraid that I am going to try to change you?  That is not my job.  If you are doing what's best for kids, holding them to a high standard, and challenging them every day then you are perfect just the way you are.  I am just doing it a different way.

Different is not bad.  You are different from me, but really I am just like you.

A great day

I had a really good day and I want to share what my students did today.  I was at #educon this past weekend and was fascinated by the focus on Problem Based Learning throughout the school.  The problem that I have been having is getting over the traditional methods of how I was taught and break out into the PBL world.  If it was Bio or Physics, I think the transition would be easier, but Chemistry is a different animal.  There are certain parts of the curriculum that needs to be taught by direct instruction, and yet SLA is doing it by PBL.  So, while there I picked the brain of a couple of the teachers and they really inspired me.  So, today it happened.  Let me describe the activity.

We just started the Gas Laws unit.  The best part of gases is it has a lot of real-world connections and tons of ways to demo the different properties.  So, I rearranged my room (on the right) to mimic a rigid container.  Then, as the students came into the room they picked a colored index card that had either H₂, CO₂, Scribe or ? on it.  What I wanted was someone to keep notes for me (Scribe), a gas with low mass (H₂), a gas with a high mass (CO₂), and then some added molecules that can be throw in when I needed to increase moles.

There are four properties that we needed to focus on:  Pressure, Volume, Temperature and moles.  I had the Hydrogen students jump up into the center and explained that gases act like billiard balls on a pool table.  Every time they collided with a desk they were to pat the desk to simulate pressure.  The students at the desks were to record every time a gas molecule collided with their desk.

My biggest concern is to keep the students moving at the same pace.  A brilliant friend of mine recommended that I find an online metronome and to have the students moving one step per click.  The metronome then doubled as my temperature because it was easy to increase or decrease the clicks which changed the pace of the students.

So, on to the activity.  The students wanted to compare pressure and temperature first so I started the metronome and they started bouncing around.  Slowly I increased the speed and watched a little bit of mayhem occur as the students continuously crashed into each other.  About a minute later I stopped and had the students sum up what they observed.  Immediately they saw the connection between the speed of the molecules and the rising temperature.  The students at the desks saw immediately the connection with pressure and several threw out that they were directly proportional.  I then started the molecules moving again but began slowing down the metronome to simulate the temp dropping.  It didn't even take the full minute before my pressure students said that they saw a decrease in hits.  One student even commented that not a single molecule struck his desk in the minute.  Of course, my scribe is writing the notes on the board based on her classmates comments.

Next they wanted to talk about moles so in come the ? students.  There were 9 in the middle and now there were 12.  Again, the pressure connection came out immediately.  Besides colliding with the desks more often, they commented that they felt that there was more chaos in the vessel as they collided with each other more often as well.  This demo was a little self-evident, but was important to reinforce visually.

So now came the tough part:  inverse relationship between Pressure and Volume.  When I was first planning this, I couldn't figure out how to make the volume change.  And then it dawned on me: moved the desks!  My desk students slid in the short ends and the gas students kind of panicked.  One asked where they were supposed to move, "we're collide with everything so much."  Did I just hear understanding?  So as volume decreased, sure enough the pressure increased.  My direct relationship student from earlier jumped right in to offer up the inverse relationship between pressure and volume.  

We are more than halfway through the period and the Carbon Dioxide students are tired of sitting and watching their classmates having all of the fun.  So Hydrogens sit and the heavier gas molecules step up.  But, there was a catch.  I needed to demonstrate to them how the heavier gas will exhibit slightly different properties because of the added mass.  Well, I can't make the students weigh 2200 pounds (CO₂ is 22 times heavier than H₂) so I load up every student with every backpack, book, purse, you name they had to carry it.  With Pressure still as our focus I changed the temperature and watched the heavy gases struggle to move around the "container."  Now the questioning here needed to change a little.  We needed to see the effect on pressure from the perspective of the gases versus the container.  The container noted that they saw no real difference in the collisions they were experiencing.  The gases, on the other hand, mentioned that they felt they were colliding a lot harder with both the container and other molecules with greater force as the temperature increased.  Combining the speed and the added mass definitely had an impact on the overall results.

This ran us pretty much to the final bell so I didn't have a chance to talk about how the students felt about the activity.  I tweeted with some students later and they commented that they really enjoyed class today.  I have to say that I had a blast.  It was so much fun watching the students physically demonstrate the concepts for the unit they were studying.  Those students who like the more formal notes still have all of the podcasts posted on my YouTube channel so no information is lost.  

Overall, I definitely want to do this again.  Could I do this every day like this? No way.  But, it definitely makes me question more of my semi-traditional methods for instruction.  Labs will need to be restructured so they start the unit and more information can be drawn from them instead of the labs reinforcing what I have already taught.

Sorry that this was so long, but I wanted to describe as much as I could so you could get a better feel for the lesson.  I would love to hear your thoughts on the lesson and your experience in PBL.