Intentionality
Published: 2023-10-05 10:00 PM
Category: Teaching | Tags: science, chemistry, assessment, skills, dispositions
My friend Phil has taught me a lot about intentional teaching. He would frequently remind me that curriculum is much more than the content - it is the skills, knowledge, and dispositions we want students to have as a result of taking our classes. The content is a component - skills and knowledge are part of the curriculum - but we also want students to develop dispositions which will help them be successful after high school.
I'm not naive - I know the vast majority of my students won't be chemists and I'm fine with that truth. What I really want my students to have when they leave is a greater appreciation for science as a process and a little bit of science literacy. This is the hard part of teaching.
Teaching content is easy. I can stand up front and talk or play a video and ask students some basic knowledge questions. Teaching skills is a little more complicated because they need opportunities to develop those skills. I can st up labs and have them take measurements and capture data. Not as easy as straight content but also not too much harder.
Dispositions. That's the kicker.
Dispositions take intentionality. To get students to change the way they think about the world means I'm planning experiences and assessments which actually force them to think differently. Every minute of that experience has to build toward a climax where they're faced with some kind of information that doesn't quite fit their existing models of the world and they're forced to change their schema. That's hard to do.
This year, my chemistry teaching counterpart and I are working hard to make sure students do some real science. That means taking samples, collecting data, and asking them to draw conclusions about that data. Questions like, "Is this right?" don't make sense anymore becuase there's no way to check "rightness" in a scientific setting. Rightness is in reproducability and in quality of data. These are skills that need to be developed.
This all sounds great but it really puts students into a funk. Students who are able to coast through classes doing the business of school struggle to apply ideas. Students who don't engage also struggle because the work is overwhelming and they don't have the mental stamina to engage. The middle crowd - kids who are willing to engage and take the help and guidance I can provide - are the ones who benefit the most.
We just wrapped up a big soil science interlude unit. They took some soil samples from an experimental plot we set up at school and then did some basic chemistry to draw some conclusions. The middle group excelled and saw some great results. The tails of population either wanted answers and felt frustrated the whole time or just shut down entirely.
I'm hoping that repeated exposure to the disciplines of science will help build the stamina they need to push into later investigations. Building these specific experiences will help them, hopefully, develop dispositons which can be applied anywhere down the road.
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