joe’s inspiration – photos from yesterday

Following Joe’s lead, here are my pictures from yesterday’s amazing event…

Enjoy!!

Again, great job EVERYONE!

Let’s see, pluses and arrows (vectors) as promised:

+  You truly engaged with Freedom School scholars as PEOPLE first!  (evidence? eye contact, names, joking, connection, accessibility of language and physical presence, and it was CLEAR you loved to be with them!

+ Your stations were designed with EXPERIENCE FIRST (formal science language to follow)

+ Consistently heard language that prioritized process and rationale over outcome (final, one-right-answer)

+Teaching through questioning – heard it in ALL groups, consistently!  NICE!  (Tough to do well – keep practicing!)

-> Consider how you can “recognize” competent participation in the discourse of science (e.g. posters with contributors names next to ideas; verbally credit and re-use a new named construct such as “Michael’s theory about diffusion”)

-> Consider depth of probing – How many follow-up questions did you ask before changing topic.  As Alicia pointed out, everything can’t be depth work, but the depth work is what is often most difficult and therefore important for you to practice.

-> Consider ways to position students as resources for one another – e.g. develop cultural practices and norms in which it is expected that students respectfully respond to one another and push each other’s thinking forward.

->  Consider what your specific content-related objectives were for your station (e.g. Students will be able to identify 3 “controls” and define “fair test.”)  Did ALL students reach these objectives?  How do you know?  If not, how could you fix that?  For camp, because of incredible access to resources (small teacher to student ratios, more time, etc.), we have the chance to help EVERY student achieve rigorous (but few) objectives. What will those be?  How can you set up the best possible scenario to help EVERY student reach these objectives?

A few group-specific pieces of feedback:

+ The questioning strategies going on with the questions station with eggs were great.  Alicia: “What makes you think this is salt water?” (probing for evidence)  Kristin: “What’s a hard boiled egg sound like?” (scaffolding questions that invites physical investigation); and Michael: “That’s a good question, but let’s think of some more general questions.”  (working with the good in students’ contributions even when they weren’t exactly what you wanted.  Again, tough skill and important!)
(more to come… ran out of time right now…)