And there I go again, providing back story…

Most of us in the teaching profession have commented, lamented, bragged, or at least observed that teaching and learning ain’t what it used to be, due to some combination of changes in students, their teachers, society, culture, and values. In particular, I am finding that over the last few years I am losing the narrative.

Have you noticed that when you study a complex subject in depth, that it seems to get easier the more you learn? At first glance this seems counter-intuitive - you might think that the more you learn the more you have to remember, making it harder. What is happening, however, is that we are completing a giant puzzle. At first, the pieces are separate, and make little sense. But the more pieces we have, the easier it is to see the picture, and everything starts to reinforce everything else. We begin to understand the system, rather than having to remember the pieces.

It has always been my stated goal to help students move toward understanding the system, rather than trying to remember the pieces, and so I try to provide as much context as possible, to weave a narrative around the whole on which the parts can be pinned. But I am finding it more and more difficult to transfer that narrative. Maybe it’s me, maybe the students, maybe the curriculum, but I think it is some combination of all three.

A few years ago a colleague from a different school took a sabbatical year, and as part of his research, he read the Campbell Biology textbook from cover to cover. He said the truly remarkable thing was that it read like a novel. It is a good text, but when read from start to finish the entire text is a narrative, with each new concept carefully pinned to the storyline. Meanwhile, I am finding the Science curriculum I am required to teach to be more and more characters, and not enough plot.

One contribution to the problem is the shift towards brevity. I am more of an old-school orator, and trying to weave a complex contextual framework in a soundbite world is a challenge. I struggle somewhat with trying to balance context and facts – there is really only time in a course to do one of them well. Experience tells me that context is harder for the students to learn, while facts are easy to dig up in the information age. But it is also less concrete, and harder for the students to see the relevance of. They see the facts and details as the things that should be “taught”, because that is what they are used to. And what their parents are used to, and what we are used to.

I find that while students today are capable of finding out information quickly, they develop the sense that any question has an answer than can be found quickly, and they are less likely to spend time digging and working through problems. As a result, they need more guided work time during class when I can help get them unstuck as they work through the more complex material. They are less likely to complete those tasks on their own at home. So while context an narrative is becoming more important to teach than ever, I have to chop my lessons down to “just the facts Ma’am” in order to maximize hands-on time.

Flipping the classroom (which I am experimenting with in my grade 9 astronomy unit) is one way to help deal with this issue, though so far my results have been mixed. Modelling is another approach that helps students build their own context as well as facts, but it requires considerable training to accomplish. Blended learning can provide a self-guided course with teacher supervision and support, but requires a certain maturity and self-motivation from the students to be effective.

I’m not sure what the answer is, or even if there is an answer. Certainly not a quick answer. But it is a problem worth spending time exploring. My students are worth it.

So When a student is stuck during an in-class activity because they have no idea what was in the online component they were supposed to have read and/or watched, I treat it as if they had watched, but did not understand. I let them know that there is more detail in the notes and video, and then summarize. It seems to work – often the summary is enough to get them over the hump, and sometimes they go searching for specifics in the notes or click through the videos. And sometimes they even start to recognize that maybe they would get more out of the class if they came prepared…

I’m not sure why it took me so long to discover Project Noah. It is a citizen science community that, in their words, is intended to be “a fun, location-based mobile application to encourage people to reconnect with nature and document local wildlife”. Essentially, you take pictures of animals and plants, and upload to the Project Noah website. But it is based around smartphones. With the app installed on your iPhone or Android, users can snap anything interesting (or mundane, too) and upload. You have the option of identifying what you have uploaded, or requesting identification. The location information can optionally be attached to help learn more about geographic distribution. There is also a social network for chats and discussion, and even patches for accomplishments.

The images and locations are searchable online, so it can be used by amateurs and researchers alike, and as they say their “ultimate goal is to build the go-to platform for documenting all the world’s organisms and through doing this we hope to develop an effective way to measure Mother Nature’s pulse.”

I uploaded my first image today of a snail (me: “Oh! Gotta take a pic of this snail!” My wife: “Geek”),  and I took the time to double check the identification and enter that information. I think there is potential for this to be used in the classroom in many ways – an image resource, a class project or hands-on biodiversity lesson. Having to take a few minutes to identify and classify what has been found is an extra layer of analysis and engagement which requires a bit of patience, but pays off.

Of course, now that I have my first upload, I’m hooked. And, as with my snail picture, I expect to be called a geek a lot more often…

What is an Astronomical Unit? What is it in km?

They correctly put that it is the distance from the Earth to the sun, approximately 150,000,000 km. The third question was:

Space probes can travel at about 30,000 km/h. About how long would it take to fly directly from the Earth to the sun?

The response? “How are we supposed to know how far away the sun is?”

One advantage I am finding with flipping the classroom is that these things arise when I am around to help…

Over the last few years, but this year more than ever, I have noticed a growing disconnect between students and school. I get the sense that students feel lessons are something to be tolerated, and work simply an obstacle that has to be surpassed before they can get on with their lives. Not all, but enough that it sets a tone. I have also noticed that when they have things to do in class they are much more engaged, as long as the doing starts at the beginning of class. If I begin with even a 15 minute mini-lesson before giving them things to do the assigned work/activity/questions automatically becomes “homework”, and therefore not immediately important. I realized that by flipping the class I could assign lessons for at-home consumption, and the start class right off with doing. I also realized I needed to get students doing more questions more frequently – written, verbal, or whatever – so that they could get a better handle on what they do or do not understand.

So the plan was to start with the final unit in grade 9 Science, which is Astronomy. My colleague and I would record lesson videos and post them in BlackBoard for the students, along with copies of the notes, additional links and resources, and the expectations/objectives/standards of the lesson. In class we would start off with a few questions on the content of the video lessons, and move into an activity applying the concepts.

The lessons themselves consist mostly of my Colleague, Ross, and I narrating and explaining a the points of a lesson on Powerpoint. The screen is recorded using Camtasia 5 (which we bought a license to years ago and no one else in the school uses it) , while Ross and I appear onscreen thanks to the keep in front feature of AMCap. We can switch to other simulations, images, videos, or web pages as necessary. I did a few on my own, but I find it MUCH easier when I can talk with someone. It just flows more naturally.

So far, my impressions are that it improves the efficiency of delivery, allows the students who miss class for sports or other reasons to catch up more easily. Despite my hopes that each lesson could be kept to under 15 minutes, that is not always the case – my longest single vid is 20 minutes, and some of the lessons are three vids of 7-10 minutes each. With feedback from the students, I now post two separate modules for each lesson, one called “at-home part” and the other “in-class part”.  They are numbered (eg 4A and 4B), and colour coded the same to help identify they are together.

It is hard work. Though I have the Powerpoint lessons from previous years that can be modified fairly easily, filming them in advance, editing and posting them along with notes and resources, and putting together activities and questions for class is hugely time consuming – the first time.

It is enlightening – while editing the videos I realize just how often I say “Okay, so, um…” in 10 minutes. This will make me be more conscious of how I present, and will help me improve my skills for any type of presentation in future.

Not all the students have fully bought in – some show up to class without having viewed the lessons, and need to waste time playing catch-up. But then, these are also students who typically tune out during an in-class lesson, so they are no further behind, and can in fact catch up more easily.

My next steps are to tighten up the sequence, to get better flow between the videos, the question sets and the activities, and to get the students involved with the videos.

I have been assimilated. I have become a cyborg.

Denser slower, Denser slower
That’s how light, That’s how light
Undergoes refraction, Undergoes refraction
That’s Snel’s law, That’s Snel’s law

(Note that while it is usually referred to as Snell’s Law, the person for whom it is named was Willebrord Snel, with one “l”. He later went by the latinized “Snellius”, but it is not called Snellius’ Law, so I will be pedantic and stick with Snel’s Law.)

For each question, I first put the question up on the screen, then activated the short answer response. Students submitted answers (anonymously), and as a group we went through them on the screen, removing duplicate answers and those that clearly did not address the question. I gave them a few minutes to discuss the remaining answers, and then I hit the vote button, and students voted for which they thought was the best answer. We then further discussed and clarified, so that everyone was on the same page.

For my second period class, this worked really well. They had fun, they were engaged, and they left feeling smarter. We had, after all, spent eighty minutes addressing their questions, and they asked if we could do the activity again. I was pleased as punch that it had worked out so well, and even more pleased that the kids left feeling pumped about learning.

Until my fourth period class.

In Fourth period, the kids behaved entirely different. They were distracted, they wrote silly answers to the questions, they voted for the silly answers, and basically blew off the entire activity. It was immensely frustrating, particularly for the few who actually wanted to learn.

It was a useful reminder that not only are individual students unique, individual classes have their own unique dynamic as well. And that just because an activity works brilliantly with one class, doesn’t mean it will with another.