Academic Risk Taking

Over the past year I have been thinking a lot about academic risk taking and after interviewing teachers and students, and tested a few things out, I'm still thinking!

I still think it's important, as do the teachers and students I've interviewed.  But not many people can decide on a definition, which is problematic if teachers are trying to develop in their students.  There is a definition given by the IB, but it doesn't necessarily match with peoples personal meanings.

I think for me academic risk taking is tied up with personal challenge, having a go at something even though you might fail.  And from looking at my results a lot of my students find that difficult.

Most are stopped by fear, both of looking foolish and of getting low marks.  To stop the fear of marks I've decided not to give any for the first half term and see if that encourages my new classes to take more risks.  With me second year classes I'm trying to be clear over work which contributes to term grades and work which is formative.

It's so important to stop students from being scared, Carol Dweck's book on mindset has been really useful to come up with strategies and I would recommend it to any teacher.

Anyway I'll see how the new strategies go and if it makes any difference.

September's goals

So September is nearly here, and the summer holiday seems much shorter than it did in June.  I'm already getting emails on the start of term meetings and it's time to start making plans.

I really like the beginning of the school year, it's lovely to see the old staff and students returning and I always get excited about meeting new classes.  I feel hopeful about making a fresh start.  

Even more exciting this year my department has been chosen to trial the use of ipads in the classroom.  I went to school last week and we have a new 60" flatscreen where our whiteboard used to be.  Going to be a bit of a change, but a good one I hope.

I'm normally pretty good at coming up with ideas but less good at maintaining them throughout the rest of the year, hopefully this year my blog will help me to keep up my energy.

So plans for September - get to know my students!

I've already added new questions to my start of term questionnaire, it still has the normal - "how much science have you studied before?" bog standard questions, but I've also added others like "what was the most exciting thing that happened to you last year?" and "if you could make me read any book what would it be?"  I'm hoping that it will make the exercise a little more interesting and give me new insights about my new classes.  With my old classes I plan on spending part of the first lesson feeding back about their summer.

I'm also going to try and learn all of my students names in the first class, by the end of the first 50 minutes I would like to say goodbye to them all by name, and then welcome by name at the beginning of the first class.

A fellow teacher gave me a nice exercise which I might try.  She asks students to discuss in pairs an object that is important to them.  Then either the student whose object it is, or the other student in the pair reports back to the class.  She says it helps her to gauge some of the personalities in her class, and it's a little more interesting than asking them the usual questions of "what did you get in your GCSE's?"

So here goes, September is nearly here, my dissertation on academic risk taking is nearly finished (blog report to follow) and I still have marking to do.  Bring on the new term!

Mini summer project - Developing enquiry through practical work

Through my masters myself and others have found that while students enjoy practical work, they may not understand why they are doing it or what their results show,

While teaching on the summer school I have been experimenting with an introduction to the IB group.  The students are unknown to me before the week starts, and most of them I will never see again, my class is mixed ability and mixed nationality.  Students haven't normally done much if any practical work. 


I experimented with changing the way I normally teach by first doing the practical work and then asking students to derive the variables and the reasons behind it.  Normally I would teach the content

I chose two simple experiments, one looking at mass loss in different leaves, and the second looking at the affect acid has on seed germination. 

In the first hour students set up the experiment

Transpiration - students weighed 5 different leaves from different species and pegged them on a clothes line, 

Germination - students made serial dilutions of acid, and added it to 5 petri dishes containing filter paper.  Each petri dish contained 10 rocket seeds.

In the second hour students were introduced to variables and then asked to identify the dependent, independent and controlled variables.  I used think-pair-share and then wrote their answers onto the board.

Enquiry

I found enquiry difficult to observe, however through group work I noticed that by giving students time to think through things on their own and to jot down their ideas they were much better at participating and more importantly questioning each others’ answers.  Although an obvious point, I must remember to give students enough thinking time before I ask them to contribute their ideas.  In the interview one student made the comment that she preferred the way we had done the experiments because it had forced her to think about her ideas, whereas normally she read the sheet and didn’t remember anything afterwards.

To develop enquiry further I think I would need a much more specific idea of what I wanted from my students.  During the tasks I identified enquiry as talking through their scientific ideas and questioning each others ideas.  However this is quite limited because it doesn’t take into account the work they did individually.

Understanding

Students completed their work on germination and transpiration easily.  When I asked them about it many had studied these topics before and helped other students with the subject specific questions.  From the interview students said it was useful to be given questions to make them reflect on the experiment as often they completed practical work without knowing why and what they were doing.  So although they were unsure while they were completing the experiment the reflection time and questions afterwards meant that they all made progress in why they were doing the experiment.

Other points

The interview also identified a common complaint which was that students were always made to complete full write ups, which took them so long that they started to dread doing practicals because of their resulting homework.  By making their homework questions shorter after having processed the data in class they felt they had gained a better understanding of the science.

Despite the long homeworks another student said that in order to develop enquiry skills they needed to do more of them.  One student also got frustrated when she did practicals that didn’t have a clear change, she enjoyed the germination experiment because she could see a definite change at the end of the week.  

I still have a way to go to make sure that all of my students are understanding the point of practicals and developing enquiry skills through practical work, but I was pleased with the progress the students made over the week.   I am now much more aware of developing inquiry skills and in the future I will be more careful about choosing post-practical questions to develop enquiry.  

There also needs to be a balance between developing practical write ups skills to get good marks in internal assessment and using practicals to develop scientific understanding.  In the future I will stress the difference to my students, so they don’t see practical work as a cause of lengthy and pointless homework.

Lesson objectives

I've just completed my 9th year teaching and the second year of my three year masters.

I feel in control of my classroom, I have enough resources that if I've forgotten to plan a lesson I can teach of the top of my head and it's a decent lesson.  I could quite happily sit back and relax and still do a good enough job.

But I'm not sure that's enough, I ask my students to reflect on their feedback and to use this to improve.  We spend a lot of time setting them goals and then looking at whether they have met them, and I think it's time for me to do the same.

Too often I find that I get to the end of the school year and have to fill in my professional reflection without having made much of a note of what I've done over the year.  Once I have my new targets I'm ready to start and then set myself so many goals it only lasts a few weeks into the new school year.

I want next year to be different, I am going to concentrate on a single aspect of my teaching each month.  Here's my first terms goals:

September - Getting to know my students

October - Improving participation

November - Study skills

December - Giving better feedback

I am going to try different techniques and see what works, and hopefully improve my teaching at the same time.