Katie:
In science, we love to experiment. We especially love to test published things that surprise us, or make us skeptical. We also LOVE to learn new things, whether or not they are particularly relevant to anything at that particular moment.
As some of you may know, I was a practicing analytical chemist for about 11.5 years; before I was an analytical chemist, I was a student at UC Berkeley in the Chemistry department. When I switched to teaching, Carondelet was the amazing answer to a fervent but unhopeful prayer. Imagine my surprise when every single credential class told me that the classic method (the only method I remembered) of telling students things and expecting them to learn didn’t work. Between my ESL and special education credential classes, one of the major emphases was CHOICE. Choice in how to access the material and choice in how to convey their mastery of the material. By allowing students choice, they theoretically can engage with the material in a way that excites them and maximizes their potential for creativity and success. I decided to experiment a little bit with the idea of choice for my forensic science class’s final project.
Students were allowed to choose between doing a case study or a discipline survey; within each of these, they were allowed to pick what specifically they wanted to cover. Then came the wild, crazy, freewheeling part that made me twitchy- they got to choose ANY method of getting that information to me, as long as it met certain requirements.
I’ll admit, I was pretty skeptical. So skeptical that I had my students make their proposals back in September, with 3 check-in dates to make sure that they all were making appropriate progress. I also threw in a peer-review day where each student had to review another student’s final draft and fill out a detailed peer review sheet- where the peer reviewer received a grade for how useful they were actually being.
The end products were much better than I had hoped. One student wrote a song about a particular case (it missed a fair number of the required sections, but it’s catchy!), one did a news story, several did Powerpoint presentations, and quite a few did traditional essays. While a couple fell short of what I had hoped for, it gave me ideas like this WebQuest that I had to make for my credential program.
Susan:
The Biotech class became something of an experiment this year too. With transitions to new teachers, we decided to reboot the curriculum and find more opportunities for student choice. We decided to have the students choose between a curated list of books that would give them an opportunity to dive deeper into one of the aspects of the course. After a round of votes, students were able to choose from titles focussing on GMO foods, Superbugs/Antibiotic resistance, Crispr/gene therapy and patients’ rights in medical research. Again fearful that the students wouldn’t make progress on the goal of reading the book for use in the final project, we scaffolded the semester with progress checks, proposals and peer reviews.
Katie:
When Susan started discussing the final project for the book club, I loved the idea of having students decide how to present their mastery. I also wanted them not to simply throw up an infographic that was a summary of the book that could have been made from detailed Wikipedia entries though. In my ESL engagement class, we had just talked about using an INTO-THROUGH-BEYOND series of activities to help students grow, and this concept echoed in my head as we were trying to figure out what to do with this project. Ideally, our classwork had provided the INTO, giving students a foothold into the basic topics. The books and labs should have taken them THROUGH the concepts. Now, they had to come up with the BEYOND.
Susan & Katie:
These projects really highlighted the benefit of allowing choice. The schemes the students came up with were wildly different, and well worth engaging with. One trio successfully lobbied for a group podcast response to The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks; this highlighted the students’ creativity and the skills they learned in their podcasting class. Another made a fantastic set of interviews with students about GMOs and a thoughtful discussion of the topics discussed. Finally,the GMO topic elicited another creative video with a pair of students creating a newscast centering around basic facts with GMO foods. Of course we still got a few of the summary/infographics, but when presentation day came, all members of the class were inspired by each other’s work. There even was an impromptu round of applause for the most impressive projects, and hopefully inspiration for them to take to their next BEYOND project.
After seeing the amazing products that the students created and their depth of understanding, we are both encouraged to apply the creative BEYOND project in our classes moving forward!
On a side note, this blog post and our semester of collaboration in Biotech was a wildly fulfilling opportunity to team teach and learn from each other. Budgets and time don't often allow teachers this luxury, but I sincerely appreciate the gift that Katie and I had this Fall. We share a similar background of a deep immersion in academic research. Working on this class together allowed us to collaborate on teaching: Katie brought ideas from her current teacher-training classes and I could bring my years of experiments of teaching in high school.
Choice makes such a difference. During my first two years in college I was part of an experimental college were choice was emphasized. It was life changing.
Even providing small choices for students dramatically increases engagement. When they get big choices in big projects, engagement can rise to amazing.
Providing choices in science is so important. That's what experimentation is. I am so glad you have chosen this path.
Very cool way to collaborate on a blog! SO much of what I remember from my science classes was just learning material and regurgitating it on a test how lucky our students are and I would imagine many "non science" kids actually being able to get something from this very cool
Holy Cow. So much to unpack with this blog. I love the teaming approach you both took. Into-Through-Beyond is an approach that I emphasized way back when I was a full-time teacher, but it is a great way to look at your curriculum-I'm going over my Psych Realism content from that perspective as I write this. And the projects are remarkable. As much as I try to get into everyone's classrooms, I can't possibly keep up with all the great things that are going on around here. I'm going to send this along to Bryan and Jill-letting out outside constituencies know about what we are doing is an important step that we discussed a great deal last year….thanks for sharing all this…wow!
I know that choice is powerful and that it is better to give the students choice. It is so hard as an educator because I feel that I need to put things in boxes and make expectations super clear. I did an assignment a couple of years ago and there wasn't an expectation for what they had to produce. They had to show understanding of the topic, but they could do it in any way they wanted. I had songs, love notes, art, reflections and a fantastic myriad of assignments. I know I need to do this more. Thanks for the Blog!
I love that you guys collaborated… but I also love that you gave them choice with limitations and objectives to be met.