Category: Inquiry science teaching
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New wine, old skins #3: The core of schooling
I’m hoping to get to the point today. As I said, it’s a complicated argument. All that I’ve written so far is the same thing I’ve been saying for 20 years. But my recent experiences as a long-term substitute at an urban middle school, teaching 7th and 8th grade science, lead me to conclude that…
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Old Wine in New Skins Part 2
Yesterday I didn’t get to the point of the post. Perhaps today. NGSS and Common Core are grounded in particular assumptions about learning. These assumptions include: * All people can learn; learning is a characteristic of humans; * People learn by integrating new knowledge into existing knowledge; * Asking and seeking to answer questions results…
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Co-Teaching Physical Science for Teachers
Last night Rosalie facilitated a lecture-discussion on heat, developing students’ ideas about energy transfer and how to do problems. I noticed a couple of times students gave the "right" answer, but when Rosalie probed further, the students didn’t really understand what they were talking about. It would have been easy to accept the correct answer…
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“Seeing” forces
This lesson was developed in a Lesson Study Project over three years. The authors are Karen Vanderheyden, Markeeta Clayton, Nikki Grimes and John Graybill. They called this lesson– “Send in the Reinforcements” You can download it here. The lesson is the first in a series of explorations of the way members and joints distribute load…
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Jet Straw Lesson on Newton’s Third Law
Jet Straw Victoria Deneroff, PhD I stole this idea many years ago from the NASA website, although I have adapted it to be an engineering challenge rather than a science activity. The original appears to no longer be easily available on the web. Design Challenge Build a jet straw air engine which produces the highest…
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STEM Writing Template
The Common Core Standards call for students to engage in literacy practices across the content areas. I am providing the STEM Writing Template as a model so that students can write to learn science. The following is a workshop agenda. STEM Writing Template (Adapted from Keys et. al, (1999:1067-1069) and also Hand, Prain and Wallace…
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Teaching Science through Conversation/What is Inquiry? What are productive ways to use students’ ideas for instruction?
In recent months I’ve thinking about Rosebery & Warren’s (2008) concept of science talks. In addition to modeling science talk for my own students by doing it with kids, I’ve been trying it out in an undergraduate physical science course I co-teach with a chemist. The students had been given the assignment to come up…