The Edublog that I explored this week was http://101studiostreet.com/wordpress/, a blog created and maintained by Shawn Cornally, a STEM teacher and Headmaster of a high school in Iowa.
This is a teacher who references Alton Brown as a credible source for science knowledge and exploration. I LOVE THIS! Alton Brown wrote one of my favorite how-to books called, I'm Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking (which yes, is a cookbook). This is a book that explores and explains some of the chemical reactions that occur when you make a batter step-by-step and bake it at 400 degrees F. Sure, it's something I've done dozens of times without too much thought about what's happening at the molecular level. But the normalcy of the context in which Brown seeks to educate is what I find so refreshing about his work (and likely Cornally's work, though I'm still exploring that front). To me, Brown's perspective on science education is that it should be relevant, in your daily life, fascinating, and often not costly in resources. Brown does this by bringing the lab into your kitchen, instead of restricting it to a lecture-style "learning" process. He suggests:
... that scientists don’t communicate as well as they could because they fixate on one little corner of the big picture. “They get way too caught up in facts,” he says. “When I’m teaching a science point and a fact doesn’t work for me, I get rid of it. I’m talking about concepts and gross understandings, and then people can sort things out from there. Scientists get caught up way too often in delineations and definitions and what the spectrograph showed” (1).Cornally, author of the ThinkThankThunk edublog, seems to suggest something similar for the brick-and-mortar classroom setting. One example he gave in a blog post entitled, "Banana Batteries & Dan Meyer," was of an 8th grade science lesson that he constructed around a flopped lesson plan.... Not having brought the correct materials for a lab, Cornally opened the floor up to the students and their ideas. His students ended up producing an inquiry-based discussion and experiment design, on which he reflects:
What I realized is that kids love and need to be a part of the authoring of the “word problem.” I had crated patient problem solvers, because the problems weren’t contrived. They were willing to think about what they needed in order to answer their question instead of demanding all of the information so that they could get done as fast as possible. The rest of my career will be devoted to developing this idea into an extensible model that teaches great content and great inquiry skills (2).While neither of these authors nor I are advocating for unstructured or haphazard science teaching, I am very interested in learning how to bring the intensive curriculum of chemistry classrooms relevant and interesting to my students by helping them to make as many connections with the material as possible.
Gaining perspective and hard-earned wisdom from teachers and bloggers such as Shawn Cornally will be invaluable to new teachers like me who are trying to figure out 1. how to run a classroom, 2. how to design lesson plans, 3. how to engage students, 4. how to... I'm sure this list will develop as I gain more experience as a student-teacher. I'm equally sure that this list of tasks will not become too much easier or less interesting as time goes on, since the students in my classroom will bring particular strengths, weaknesses, views and needs with them into a lesson on stoichiometry. I am looking forward to such adventures, but am glad to have others who have gone ahead and are willing to share their skills and practices with beginners in the profession of teaching!
References:
(1) Marasco, C.A. (2008, July 28). An appetite for science. Science and Technology 80(36). Retrieved from: https://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/86/8630sci8.html
(2) Cornally, S. (2010, April 20). Banana Batteries and Dan Meyer. ThinkThankThunk. Retrieved from: http://101studiostreet.com/wordpress/?p=542
Laura,
ReplyDeleteAwesome Post! It was so refreshing for me to read about a chemistry teacher who is focused on disseminating useful knowledge of how chemistry works in everyday life! While I had never heard of Alton Brown, I found myself captivated by the idea of learning the molecular level of a simple activity such as baking a cake. Furthermore, it was refreshing to my soul to hear about a HS chemistry with such a deep commitment to teaching the "big picture" of chemistry knowledge. I particularly enjoyed hearing about his approach to have students generate their own problems to solve. I think this idea holds tremendous weight towards building engagement in our classrooms. Also, I thought the end of your post was very thoughtful and I wish you the best with developing insightful units, lessons, and activities that enable you to connect with your students.
I have definitely heard of Alton Brown, since I love scouring the web for recipes! I love that someone is implementing the idea we came up with in our Book Club: learning chemistry through cooking!
DeleteI'm wondering how we can make all the "problems" we ask students to solve not "contrived." In literature, for example, the problems are often contradictions in the text, or a question about word choice. They're pretty contrived. I wonder how smoothly we can translate academics as they are into real-life scenarios.
Thanks for sharing :)
I too am "glad to have others who have gone ahead and are willing to share their skills and practices with beginners in the profession of teaching!" and I would add the point that you make earlier, which is that he writes about his "failure" in such a candid and evocative way....great modeling for all of us. I'm actually hoping that we can do something in class that borrows a bit from the spirit of Cornally's post. By the way, a couple of your classmates have written about the Math teacher, Dan Meyer, who Cornally references here. You might enjoy Meyer's 2010 TED Talk about teaching math to high schoolers...
ReplyDeleteLove the Alton Brown reference! I love to bake, but did horribly in HS chemistry. Maybe if I'd had a teacher like you to relate atoms and reactions back to the muffins I made yesterday, it would have been easier to grasp! ( :
ReplyDeleteI also appreciate the blog point you referenced about reviving a flopped lesson plan. The reality is that no matter how well we plan, there are always going to be some off days, and opening up the floor to your students is a great way to deal with this! Not only does it give your class a sense of empowerment, but it helps you keep things running smoothly! Love it.
I love the connection you make between baking and science. Have you ever heard of molecular gastronomy? It makes practical use of chemical reactions and implements it into cooking. Some of the foods that result out of it are amazing and I feel like that might be the future of the food industry. Who knew science could be used to make food taste better? I also found that making connections between the content and the interests of the students is really important, although in Willingham's book, it cautioned educators to be careful when tailoring content based on the interests of the students in a way where it doesn't force them to think about the actual content. I second Jeff's suggestion to watch Dan Meyer's TED talk, it also mentions making connections between the content and practical applications. Thanks for the post!
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