New Chronicles: The Biology, The Forensics, and the Jarmon


Over the past few weeks, I have gotten great feedback from my first observation with my principal and administration. Overall, they were proud of how the lesson went but had a few suggestions for improvement. One of these things was to be mindful for how I question probe my students to allow for them to be prepared to defend the answer that they gave for a response to the bell ringer (drill) exercise. In addition, I have gotten feedback to find ways to quickly get my students into their seats and ready to begin the lesson activities. Since receiving this feedback, there was a professional development day in Harford County on November 4th. Due to the notes of improvement for question probing, note taking, etc., I attended three workshops where I got to learn about the new STEM cases that allow for students to be able to step into the role of a scientist to determine how the content learned in class relates to phenomena in the real world.

The second workshop I attended allowed for me to learn about how to teach new concepts to my students in an engaging way. This workshop started off by allowing for me to observe the drinking bird . As the bird was moving, I was to ask a series of questions that if answered could explain how the bird works. After all questions were written, there was time to debrief where we took a look at the questions that were made and then determined which cross cutting concept was being addressed through those questions. For instance, one of my questions was what causes the bird to move back and forth like a pendulum? Through this question, we were able to determine that the cross-cutting concept that related the most to that was cause and effect. As we continued to go through each question and identify the best cross-cutting concept that is being addressed in each question, we also looked to determine if the question asked would be testable through experimentation. Overall, I think this workshop helped me so much that it inspired me to try it with my kids as soon as we got back to school. The activity that I did with my students was a diffusion demo where hot and cold water were inside of beakers with red and food coloring so that students would easily determine the movement of particles in each beaker (one was hot water with red food coloring and one was cold water with blue food coloring).

Based on my student’s observations, they were to write three questions that related to the demonstration they had just watched. My students followed the same procedure that I did in identifying the cross-cutting concepts and determining if the asked questions are vague or specific enough to be tested through an experiment. While I completed this lesson, I had a colleague that was in the room at that time to watch and give me feedback. After completing this demonstration, she gave me question shells to aide my students in framing their questions so that this will improve the quality of questions that are being asked. When I tried this with my other biology class, I took out four of each type of question shell and brought the stack of four cards for the students to select randomly. From my experiences, this allowed for my students to produce higher quality questions to guide not only their learning but for future lessons.

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