ImagineIT Phase 5: Conferring with Colleagues and Student Focus Group
After meeting with a few members of the science department and discussing my ideas for my ImagineIT and PBL project, I received some feedback that will help guide my implementation of the project. The dilemma I wanted to focus on deals with culturally relevant teaching; specifically knowing and utilizing students’ prior knowledge as well as their interest in the topic to ensure the project encourages student choice and engagement. I was also encouraged to have students try to set their own goals for their achievement, which I think will be helpful to see where they think they stand on current knowledge and what kind of growth they are aiming for.
In the meeting, the feedback was mostly positive about the activity I created for my students to learn about molecular structure and how it affects the properties of matter. My peers liked the idea of a crime investigation to engage students and they supported the level of challenge associated with the activity. When I mentioned the homogeneous groupings that I was considering, they suggested heterogeneous groups may work better. The prior knowledge that students bring in on the content covered is very minimal, scattered, and possibly based in misconceptions. Because of this, the homogeneous groupings may not be much different, and may lack the variety of thinkers needed for these comprehensive, inter-disciplinary activities. Another teacher also shared a documentary series from PBS on poisonous chemicals that used to be common household medicines and/or used in crimes to poison victims. This could be a great entry event for the crime-based PBL.
The student focus group was also very helpful for getting feedback from the students about the activity but also for determining what prior knowledge my students will likely come in with. I asked nine students that I had in chemistry last year who are currently in AP chemistry to go through the activity together with minimal support from me. Before beginning the activity, I asked the students about the prior knowledge that they brought from middle school on this particular topic. Depending on the middle school they came from, their prior knowledge ranged from essentially nothing to knowing how to put atoms together to make molecular structures. However, the more advanced students mentioned that these concepts were still very confusing for them and they needed to fully go through everything again before they had a better understanding of the content. This supported the suggestion from my teacher meeting about using heterogeneous groupings versus homogeneous.
I also asked them if they could see the real-world use for this concept based on how we learned it last year. They said they really couldn’t but as they re-learned it in AP chemistry, they could really see how it was useful. I asked this same question after they went through the crime-based PBL activity I created and they noted that this was a really exciting and applicable way to learn the subject matter. There were a few things that they were able to look up online that gave them a shortcut to the answer of who was responsible for the crime, so the focus group ended up also being a good way to anticipate this and make adjustments before giving it to my current students.
Overall, the trends I saw from the conference with my colleagues and the focus group with students were that prior knowledge on this topic is very low and therefore, being able to connect this to students’ interests and making it engaging for them is extremely important to their success on this abstract topic. By starting at a point that they may be familiar with and excited about (a crime scene investigation), I have a better chance of the students seeing the reasons why the shape of a molecule is so important to its properties. Learning bonding and shapes of molecules without any context feels like memorization without a purpose and does not connect to anything the students already know making it easily forgotten!
After meeting with a few members of the science department and discussing my ideas for my ImagineIT and PBL project, I received some feedback that will help guide my implementation of the project. The dilemma I wanted to focus on deals with culturally relevant teaching; specifically knowing and utilizing students’ prior knowledge as well as their interest in the topic to ensure the project encourages student choice and engagement. I was also encouraged to have students try to set their own goals for their achievement, which I think will be helpful to see where they think they stand on current knowledge and what kind of growth they are aiming for.
In the meeting, the feedback was mostly positive about the activity I created for my students to learn about molecular structure and how it affects the properties of matter. My peers liked the idea of a crime investigation to engage students and they supported the level of challenge associated with the activity. When I mentioned the homogeneous groupings that I was considering, they suggested heterogeneous groups may work better. The prior knowledge that students bring in on the content covered is very minimal, scattered, and possibly based in misconceptions. Because of this, the homogeneous groupings may not be much different, and may lack the variety of thinkers needed for these comprehensive, inter-disciplinary activities. Another teacher also shared a documentary series from PBS on poisonous chemicals that used to be common household medicines and/or used in crimes to poison victims. This could be a great entry event for the crime-based PBL.
The student focus group was also very helpful for getting feedback from the students about the activity but also for determining what prior knowledge my students will likely come in with. I asked nine students that I had in chemistry last year who are currently in AP chemistry to go through the activity together with minimal support from me. Before beginning the activity, I asked the students about the prior knowledge that they brought from middle school on this particular topic. Depending on the middle school they came from, their prior knowledge ranged from essentially nothing to knowing how to put atoms together to make molecular structures. However, the more advanced students mentioned that these concepts were still very confusing for them and they needed to fully go through everything again before they had a better understanding of the content. This supported the suggestion from my teacher meeting about using heterogeneous groupings versus homogeneous.
I also asked them if they could see the real-world use for this concept based on how we learned it last year. They said they really couldn’t but as they re-learned it in AP chemistry, they could really see how it was useful. I asked this same question after they went through the crime-based PBL activity I created and they noted that this was a really exciting and applicable way to learn the subject matter. There were a few things that they were able to look up online that gave them a shortcut to the answer of who was responsible for the crime, so the focus group ended up also being a good way to anticipate this and make adjustments before giving it to my current students.
Overall, the trends I saw from the conference with my colleagues and the focus group with students were that prior knowledge on this topic is very low and therefore, being able to connect this to students’ interests and making it engaging for them is extremely important to their success on this abstract topic. By starting at a point that they may be familiar with and excited about (a crime scene investigation), I have a better chance of the students seeing the reasons why the shape of a molecule is so important to its properties. Learning bonding and shapes of molecules without any context feels like memorization without a purpose and does not connect to anything the students already know making it easily forgotten!