MSTA 2024

Published: 2024-03-04 10:00 AM

Category: Science | Tags: teaching, conference, chemistry, collaboration

I attended the Michigan Science Teachers Association Conference on March 1st. It was the first all-science teaching conference I'd attended, which is very different than the kind of conference I generally go to.

Some of my big takeaways are:

1. Lots of new resources on where to find relevant and rich data. My Environmental Science course uses a ton of data because we're constantly circling that question of how humans are interacting with and impacting the environment. I like to have my students analyze and make sense of data. One site in particular that stands out is Our World in Data, a free, searchable site of data on just about anything you could possibly want. We will be using it this week.
2. At some point, the fun got taken out of science. Maybe it was the testing changes in the early-mid 2000's or it was me just deciding that I was going to be "rigorous" and "serious about learning." I'm not really sure. Either way, there is a ton of fun to be had in school and it is okay to do the fun stuff. I got a couple new, goofy songs to help students remember the intermolecular force properties of water (to the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club) that we will use in our next chapter on solutions.
3. I'm a chump when it comes to labs. So many teachers have such better labs than I've been doing. We're going to turn pennies to gold next week for St. Patrick's Day (see #2).

What good science teachers do

The session that made me think the most was a research report out of Michigan State University which looked at classroom practices which led to higher student retention and application of science skills and content. Teachers and students from across the country participated (125,000 students over four years) so this is, like, a legit thing.

The most effective science teachers took time to help students go through a divergent/convergent thinking protocol over the course of an investigation. Students are guided through forming ideas, comparing, coming to consensus, investigating a phenomena, and then using evidence to draw conclusions. The best teachers get students to diverge in their thinking by calling up background knowldge to engage with the scientific thinking process and then working as a community (like real scientists) to develop plans to test their thinking.

That's all well and good but the real payoff comes in the convergence that happens later. Because students are engaged in the process, all of their work is consequential, meaning it can be used to draw conclusions (whether or not it is graded - that doesn't actually matter). The research found that when students are encouraged to use what they've done, they converge on ideas which descibe the phenomena. They learn what to look for as they are learning what it represents in parallel.

I would really like to think that this is what I do in my classroom, but in all honesty, I think four days out of five I tend to focus on process and getting from Point A to Point B. We do a lot of consequential writing in our notebooks and students are able to use those materials on assessments, but it isn't around longer-running, wholistic units.

This is not to say that every unit must follow that process. It's more a point of reference for me moving foward - am I allowing time and space for divergent thinking to become convergent? What methods and tools do I use to help students find that consensus on phenomena? In what ways can I support students through that process? It's a very different way of thinking about science as a discipline in high school but it seems to do a better job of helping students build dual understandings (plural - that's important) of content as well as practice.

I'm re-working my next unit a little bit in respose. We're staring solution chemistry this week and I'm going to try to do some pre-thinking activities to tease out what they know (or think they know) about solutions before we go through our investigations later this month.