We’re now into the third week of school, and the kids are beginning to impress me.
The biggest changes I’ve made since last year are to the way I’m doing lab experiments. During my first two years of teaching, I did what most other teachers do–give the kids a detailed procedure for a lab, have them copy the procedure into their lab notebooks, have them do the experiment from their lab notebooks as much as possible, and scratch my head and wonder why they don’t understand the first thing about what the lab is all about, even after they’ve written the whole thing out in painstaking detail.
With a little help from the chemistrycoach.com website, it dawned on me. I was doing all of their thinking for them. Copying a word-for-word procedure is one of those repetitive tasks like knitting or crocheting–it’s a task that you can put on autopilot to free your mind to wander. The kids were copying the entire procedure without paying attention to any of it. Once they were in the lab, they were following a detailed word-for-word procedure that was guaranteed to work. This didn’t encourage them to think about anything. It allowed them to get lost in the sensory experience of using chemicals and lab equipment, and they never had to even notice the bigger picture, let alone understand it.
I’ve made two changes this year. First of all, I’m not giving them detailed procedures. I’m giving them the objective, and enough info about the techniques involved to enable them to piece together the experiment for themselves. They need to figure out the specifics of what to do and how to do it.
Second, no more writing out detailed procedures beforehand. I’ve chosen a lab notebook format (and there are many to choose from) in which they write a “scheme”, but not a detailed procedure before they start doing the experiment. The scheme is basically an outline or flow chart that sketches out the big picture, with just enough detail to remind them of what they’re supposed to accomplish and more or less how to go about it. They take detailed notes on the procedure and results in the lab as they perform the experiment. Leaving the details until they’re actually performing the lab ensures that the procedural details in their notebooks end up matching what they actually did, just like they would do in a research lab or industry.
Based on the first experiments with each class, it’s working even better than I hoped it would. The kids are actually *thinking* about what they’re doing, before and during the experiment. When they hit an obstacle, I ask probing questions that make them think about the problem, but I don’t actually suggest a solution. As a result, they’ve come up with some creative ideas that have impressed me. Even the solutions they’ve come up with that didn’t work have shown that they understand the concepts involved, understand the problem, and are applying good problem-solving strategies.
What’s even better is that because the kids know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, they’re enjoying the labs on a level that they haven’t in their previous science classes. And better yet, they’re enjoying it for the very reasons I want them to enjoy it. This is why I became a science teacher.
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