On constructivism and modeling

Constructivism, models and transfer learning

Full disclosure alert: regardless of anything else I do or say, my fundamental belief in education comes from a fully constructivist framework. For those that care to get philosophical, this is based on work that dates back long before Dewey, but we could use him as a starting point for why experience and real, hands on, meaningful work are not just a good idea, but truthfully the only real way to get to the understanding of anything in the real world. That isn’t to say that there are times that telling kids something doesn’t have meaning, but when that won’t be grounded in a real experience or useful information or transfer it is not likely to have much usefulness or long-lasting effect.

“We only think when we are confronted with problems” – John Dewey

This week in our class we have been continuing our work utilizing the CASTLE curriculum that was designed by Mel Steinburg at Smith College and has been implemented for many years as an effective means to have students learn and apply a useful model for what electricity is. Brief description of that here:http://www.pasco.com/prodCatalog/EM/EM-8624_castle-kit/.

The power of this curriculum is that it is not teacher directed in the sense of lectures, but instead is unfolded as a series of investigations to try and understand how and why simple circuits with batteries and light bulbs work the way they do. I was first introduced to this curriculum in the mid-1990s at Arizona State University in the most excellent Modeling Workshop series which I still think is the finest professional development activity I’ve ever attended. http://modelinginstruction.org

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conversation and group checking of ideas

conversation and group checking of ideas

Trying to make meaning of what we see happening

Trying to make meaning of what we see happening

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a tea assembles a circuit to investigate

a tea assembles a circuit to investigate

This week’s opening activities had students trying to understand what is going on in wires when we connect batteries and lightbulbs together. I know an outsider might say “we’ll just tell them that electricity moves” – but good research and a constructivists pedagogical approach understand that knowing something and understanding something are two different things. All of my students already know about electricity – but none of them truthfully can apply the ideas to answer discrepant or novel phenomena – critical if we are to transfer the knowledge we have to solve problems. In our case, our students will eventually be using this knowledge to help members in our community (school, home, a larger community) find ways to save both money and environmentally friendly sustainable activities in their energy use at home.We will do this through the process of energy auditing with specific recommendations to improve efficiency and lower energy use and cost.

So what about this business with knowledge and learning? When do we teach something, and when do we let students develop it through real-world experience?
There is a marvelous discussion by Marc Chun, of the Hewlitt foundation about the importance of ways to build transfer that I think are relevant to this conversation here:

You will notice that he refers to this kind of learning as “deeper learning”. One of my goals over the last year has been to more closely tie the work we are doing in our MPX program and at the school in general to this deeper learning movement that is taking root across the country. More info on deeper learning here:
http://www.hewlett.org/deeperlearning

That’s all for today, but in the future I will need to add Why the question

“How do you know that?”

is so important. The value of making thinking visible through tools like whiteboards and thinking routines. The value of discrepant events to help expose naïve and experts thinking and what we understand in mathematics and science. why the work of Robert Gagne’s and his 9 events of instruction do fit in to project-based learning, and the value and challenge of instructional design as a whole.

On the Sins of Omission

On Sins of Omission

Anyone that knows me, knows that I have a few too many fingers into too many pies, but I suppose it’s part of my personality to take on a few too many tasks that I probably should. One of the pieces of evidence of that is the amount of emails, blogs, social media streams and magazines that come across my desk daily from a variety of sources in education, technology, science and design to name a few. As a result, sometimes these go directly to my trash or it into piles articles and magazines that I hope I can get back to but often don’t.

from: http://sonofadud.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/030-finger-in-every-pie.jpg

from: http://sonofadud.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/030-finger-in-every-pie.jpg

Why this confession? On Tuesday, I had a couple of hours free to plan, prep and grade and in my mailbox was the latest issue of Wired magazine. Honestly, I don’t even know how I ended up with a subscription, but most months I look at the cover and think to myself “not gonna have time to look at it this month” and put it in a pile to be thrown out two months later. This time, however, I opened up the cover because the title was “The Future of Design: Invisible. Beautiful. Everywhere.” Okay – I was intrigued. Given how much time we spend with our students talking about creating work of meaning and beauty, and our interest in future design I had to at least take a peek inside. What was obvious almost immediately was how beautifully synchronized the work in this magazine is with the kinds of ways we work with our students in our MPX program. Here’s just a few of the articles in the magazine that aligns so beautifully with the work we talk about, or could use as jumping off points to investigate something meaningful in ourselves and our community:
** the fall and rise of gene therapy – in which amongst other things they talk about using topographic maps and visualization technology to understand better viruses
** Argos satellite – a brief article with visuals about a satellite that maps daily movements of marine animals to better understand their behaviors
** how Internet censorship can actually increase the spread of viruses and malware
** going the extra mile – an article about the design of cars from the shell eco-marathon
** one gamers war on sexism – one woman’s work on gender and sexism in video games
** making the web a louder place – the impact of audio files in increasing democratizing voice on the Internet
** nuclear waste management
** Project collaboration using social media
** the chemistry of pool chlorination
** the technology of communication systems in the sky above us
** invisible design – the ways which technologies are becoming embedded ubiquitous and invisible

and that doesn’t even cover all of the short articles on a variety of topics. Do these topics present jumping off points for short or long-term inquiry? Absolutely. Whose job is it to provide opportunities for my students to find areas of interesting, provocative and meaningful research – mine.
Two challenges, then, for me as the lead thinker in my classroom – how to create time and structure so these incredible conversations about present and future can be embedded as a part of our daily work, our passions and thinking, and ways that we position ourselves to take an active role in shaping the future.

So I’ve gone public with my need to not let these powerful opportunities just slide by my desk in the rush of the day-to-day, in the words of Ian Jukes “the tyranny of the urgent”

Hopefully we’ll see examples of that in our work this year…

Parent Night Aug 22, 2013

MPX Parent night – a summary

Period 6 Algebra II

Period 6 Algebra II


*** caveat – this is a different post as it is a reflection of what I shared At our open parent night at MPI this evening***

So, the goal of parent night is to give parents an opportunity to meet the teacher, better understand how they are working with their student in the courses they are assigned, and the hopefully bridge a conversation that includes the critical triad of teacher, parent, and student.

Here is the information that I laid out that I felt was specific to our program as well as my own personal passions around the work we are going to do this year.

I start showing the brief clip from the classic “minds of their own” which was part of the private universe project in Science from 1994. Maybe you have probably seen some version of this, but in order to better understand the ways that we teach and learn science, this research group went up to Harvard University graduates and asked them relatively simple questions about how plants grow, how electricity works, why the moon go through phases, information that we take for granted that should be part of a good standard education. The specific clip that I showed tonight was from episode three which focuses on hands-on minds-on science, specifically in physical science. In the video clip you see below (from minutes 3 to about 7) they hand a dozen Harvard graduates a battery, a lightbulb, and the wire and ask if they can get the light bulb to light. What I think is most illustrative in this video is how they start to try to explain why they can’t make it happen and this unpacking unveils much of their naïve thinking about electricity and what is happening in a circuit.

When the parents came into the room, I had them grab one wire, one battery, and one lightbulb so that they could try this activity to test they are thinking as well. Much confusion and a little illumination ensued.

Unfortunately, I cannot embed the link, as it is not an embeddable video, but the link to the page is here:

Harvard student trying to explain why she cannot light the bulb.

Harvard student trying to explain why she cannot light the bulb.

I use this clip as a way to bridge why science and mathematics need to be taught not as bodies of knowledge, but as a series of carefully scripted investigations about the natural world. In doing science, the habits of mind of what makes a scientist singularly powerful in viewing the world begin to get built, and begins to displace naive views of the world with more expert views. It is a highly constructivist way to learn science, and is the only way I believe that is effective to build true transferable knowledge of mathematics and science.

Parents from our Period 1 STEM class

Parents from our Period 1 STEM class


As we move into projects this year that center around topics like energy conservation, stewardship of the environment, citizenship and our role in the community, transportation and ways to efficiently move people with the least amount of environmental impact, we need the foundational knowledge on these critical areas in physical science. The way to learn these, is not to have them lectured at us, but to uncover them the same way that scientists did initially: by conducting well defined and controlled experiments that lead to a more complete model of how systems behave.

Our content areas of physics and algebra 2 still need to map to the core content that was developed by the math and science departments at MPI. These are posted as PDF documents in our course page on edline – so that parent, teacher, and student have a common sense of what content we need to make sure is embedded in our work throughout this year.

It was worth noting that the science is based on the upcoming implementation of the next generation science standards, which focus on science as a process more than a body of knowledge anyhow – perfectly aligned with the way we see learning in our program. More info here:

I also mentioned that both Laura my 10th grade colleague and I maintain blogs which contain our work in thinking around MPX 10. Obviously you have found mine if you’re reading this, Laura’s is linked on the right side of my blog page, as well as our MPX page here: http://www.midpac.edu/academics/mpx/

I did review the challenge of the weekly structure that needs to be done due to the MPX 10 STEM class not being able to have students grouped together for both blocks. Essentially, on short work days (like monday) we will do brief investigations on an interesting science topic. Twice a week, we will do project work during our science 90 minute blocks, once a week we will do a discrete math lesson during one of our mathematics blocks, and on Fridays, the students will have an opportunity for “Google time” which will allow them to develop and implement a project that is rich and meaningful of their own design.

We also talked about how we have a high degree of reflective work we do – and that includes students maintaining a personal blog on our Google school platform using Blogger. Parents will be given a letter that will explain and allow them to agree to this electronic means of sharing their work.

Since we only had 10 minutes, that was as far as we could allow time-wise. All in all, it was a great night to connect with our parents and be excited about the work we’re going to towards this year.

Period 4 Algebra II

Period 4 Algebra II

MPX STEM 10 Week 1

Setting the stage

Although it was a short week, it was a busy week for our students. One of the goals with our STEM curriculum is to better understand science is a process and to develop better scientific thinking in the way we approach asking questions and designing ways to investigate them. To that end, our first investigation was a qualitative study trying to understand the behavior of a system of a water fountain (see picture below).

the water fountain system

the water fountain system

When liquid was poured in the final on the bottom, water started running out of the spout on the top and back into the funnel and ran for a substantial amount of time – many minutes before it eventually stopped. The goal for the students was to see if they could create a model that would behave the same way as the system. They first discussed and mapped out ideas on a whiteboard, and then eventually were given equipment that allowed them to build a model and test and see if it behaved the way the system did.
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For many students, it was frustrating when they found out that they could not see what was inside the original system, but this was very purposeful. When we investigate the real world and try and develop models that explain the phenomena we see, ultimately we know we are getting close to understanding what our model behaves as the actual system. In this activity, and in real life, we are never really sure if we’ve got it exactly right, because we are never able to confirm that our model behaves exactly as the system, just that it behaves within the constraints of what we can design. That is science!

Our second activity was a quantitative activity that also wove in the ideas of linear systems from Algebra. As a class, we designed an experiment to investigate the motion of a battery-powered car. The students design the constraints of the independent and dependent variables: Time and position, and conducted the experiment with the intensive analyzing the motion graphically and mathematically to determine what model best explained the motion of the vehicle.

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This activity also give the students the opportunity to become familiar with the proper means to write up an report experimental results – the structure of a standard science lab report.
As we move into week two, we are moving towards our first big project and scene which is on the topic of energy and energy conservation. More of that the common the next blog post!

The Thirsty Games!

The Thirsty Games

***Prelude Starts***
On August 9, we had 20 of our 30 MPX students come in for an experience we called the Thirsty Games. Before I explain what we did, a little about why we did it.

Last year, we started the year with an aggresive look at sustainability in the islands – looking at the world issues around resources (energy, water, education, food, etc) then zeroed in on our islands with its unique problems. We visited both Matson (point of incoming goods) and HPower (point of trash). We had students map their own ins and outs to create a better sense of their own footprint. Full description here:
http://mpx2012proj1.wikispaces.com/home

The problem – it was conceptually too big at the start and some students switched out before they really had given our way of learning a full try (at MPI students can switch a class – not a teacher – only within the first 2 weeks of school). For the students who did stay in, they felt it took longer than 2 weeks to really understand what MPX is and why it is powerful (perhaps those students would have left even after a longer time, but we will never know).

So, how to change this concern tension at the start? We designed a 3 hour experience to give us time to have the students see the whole problem, beginning to end. Our goal was to walk through a mini-project so students could see the parts of what we do. Thirsty Games was born!

**Prelude Ends***

One of our challenges as we move through the 21st Century is the scarcity of resources: Food, Energy, Housing, Medicine, and Clean Water. We wanted to give our new MPX 9 students a chance to both model the way we learn in our project based Mid-Pacific Exploratory program and to do it through a challenge that is real.

The United Nations states that “783 million people do not have access to clean water and almost 2.5 billion do not have access to adequate sanitation. ” 
 – http://www.unwater.org/water-cooperation-2013/water-cooperation/facts-and-figures/
That is 11% of the planet! How do we understand this problem and become advocates? What can we do here?
What have other people tried?

In this challenge, students in teams of four were given a 300 mL sample of dirty water.  The goal is simple: figure out and implement a process to get the water so that it is drinkable by the end of the activity. In order to be eligible for recognition, at least 150 100 mL must still be left.
Our facilitation panel observed, and recognized three teams at the end in three categories:
most creative approach
most effective technique
best team cohesion

Rubrics were developed and shared with students outlining the criteria and descriptions for each category.  The overall schedule the activity played out as follows:

Ice breakers – a brief “getting to know you” time.

What do we do in MPX? We showed 2 finished work examples:

Japanese Internment Project: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mnECZt6zPc&feature=youtu.be
Aquaponics Project: http://mpx9spring.weebly.com/aquaponics-home.html

Hunger games activity introduced – groups formed, activity explained

Students had 10 minutes to consider what techniques might be used to clean the water –  what would the ideal list of tools and processes be to get from dirty water to clean water?

We showed them a brief clip from the start of the mad dash to the cornucopia in the hunger games movie,

then…

Thirsty games cornucopia – 
The table was uncovered so the students could now see what their options are for cleaning the water.

the table is set!

the table is set!


 One person from each team can only walk over – only take one item at a time, can only take a total of 4 items


the cornucopia dash

Students looking over the cornucopia

Students looking over the cornucopia

Students looking over the cornucopia

Students looking over the cornucopia

First round design and construction with 10th MPX grade facilitators – (they also shared what it feels like, what is a group member skills, why do MPX as they coach the teams) 


We then asked each group to briefly describe where they were asked with their work and modeled critiquing and feedback from class and facilitators. one of the clearest ways to get improved work from students is to give them an opportunity to reflect and give each other feedback that is meaningful – helpful, specific, kind. One of our goals in our program is to help students understand how to develop this skill, because if we can truly get there, the quality of their work goes dramatically.

Students were then told they could go back to the cornucopia for two more items, and they were also allowed a two-minute window where they could barter with other groups for equipment that they wish they had.

Teams were given an additional 2nd round construction for 30 minutes. While this was happening, our guest 10th grade MPX students and teachers walked between groups and a feedback as well as observed based on the rubrics which groups were meeting the criteria for our three award categories

Finally, after cleaning up, groups presented to classmates and guest MPXer’s, and Mark Hines conducted the last proof of accomplishment – he drank each teams final water!

group present
hines tastes

At the end of every activity, we know when important part of the cycle of learning is to debrief what we did, and asked the questions what worked for us? And what could have made this a better experience? We asked our students to consider this, and be prepared on Tuesday to answer that question.

As we were working, questions came into our thinking like:
Is this learning, when the teacher is facilitating and not telling students what to do all the time?
Is diversity in a group a good thing – when people have different skills and knowledge does it broaden our thinking?
What is the role of feedback and critiquing to improve our work?
When we learn, are different pathways to the end acceptable? Is it a good thing when students arrive at the same answer through different means?
What are the excitements and challenges in doing project work? Who does this work serve?
What skills and knowledge do you need, and what role do experts play in helping us get there?


We finally did a student survey trying to get a little more information about what kinds of interests in question the students had to help a shape this year, had some pizza and cookies, and called it a day.

All in all, our first attempt at doing our version of “thirsty games” was a big success.
Looking forward to an exciting year with our MPX’ers!

Website with info and images here:
http://thirsty-games.weebly.com

cleaning the water

some links to a few movies of our students in action:
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