Right now I’m feeling a bit adrift. As a science teacher in my past life (well, 3 years ago before this VP gig went full time) I hold a special place in my heart for science classes and curriculum. And I like to try to think of ways to integrate powerful teaching in Science classes. Things like AFL, Cooperative and Group Learning, Understanding by Design (UBD), and Differentiated Instruction. But I’ve hit a bit of a roadblock. Let me describe:
Using the UBD process, you start with the ends in mind. What are the big ideas? What do I want the kids to really know about by the end of a unit? Okay – first off Science is super concept heavy. It’s shocking, really, the amount of facts and concepts you have to hold in your head to really be able to play with Chem or Biology 11 ideas. Well, okay. Let’s take Evolution as an example. Evolution is a big part of Biology 11. If you simply start to chart the ‘big ideas’ that you want kids to know for Evolution it quickly becomes a very long list of big ideas. Well, to be clear, it’s a few big ideas with a lot of very profound medium ideas underpinning it. Like different kids of mutations. And what effect genetric drift or genetic flow (which are different) might have on an species fitness. And how the biome that organism is in and it’s fitness interacts with predators, prey, vegetation. It’s a lot to hold in your head at once.
In any case, let’s say you can figure out some big ideas for Evolution the next step is tough: Come up with an Authentic Performance Task that shows the level of understanding and knowledge that a student may have. In Evolution. This is where it all breaks down. A colleague suggested the final Performance Task could be designing a new beast and detailing how it ‘came to be’ from an evolutionary point of view. That’s one idea. Then crickets. There is a real dearth of final Performance Tasks for Science. I suspect the same is for Math.
So i’m going to use my google-fu to try to find some Performance Tasks for Science. I feel like I’m beginning a hike to the North Pole.
1 comment so far
6:01 pm - 10-29-2009
I know it’s not exactly what you are looking for, but this rap (from another twitter person) is a good example of a way of integrating web 2.0 tools, performance tasks and learning. It’s actually a pretty good overview of Darwin’s ideas. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hUNBhRiKCI
Welcome to blogging, Joe!