Using Team Challenges to Foster Collaboration
Whether for STEM, foreign language, arts, or humanities, applying information is one of the most effective ways for a student to increase their level of understanding and for a teacher to assess mastery of knowledge and skills. Team challenges include any activity that asks a cooperative group to use what they have learned to accomplish […]
Using Competitions to Engage Online or In-person Learners
Competitions are assignments that guide students through a preliminary exploration, data collection, analysis, reflection, and revision in a repeating cycle. This process leans on the scientific method and helps students practice character skills such as persistence, curiosity, critical thinking, and self-direction. For my own purposes, I will differentiate team challenges from competitions in that competitions […]
Part 3 Choosing the Most Appropriate Graph for Your Data
So, should I use a bar graph? Students are often unsure of how to depict data in a manner that elucidates the trends and exposes any disruptions that need to be revealed. However, they often define the choices they make based on the graph type (pie, bar, line, scatterplot, histogram, etc.) rather than choosing how […]
Using Debates to Teach Evidence-based Reasoning
An exciting way to engage your students in their online or in-person class is to use a topic that sparks discussion, research, and the desire to sleuth out additional information. In this 1.5 hr. workshop, teachers will participate in an asynchronous debate (such as a posted homework assignment) and synchronous debate for use during an […]
Math-infused Science: Part 4 Choosing the Most Appropriate Graph for Your Data
The final workshop in this series guides teachers through the technical steps of helping students create a graph that looks the way the student intends it to look. We will navigate the formulas, buttons, options, and functions of two common graphing programs to make visual displays of data that are both beautiful and informative. A […]
Using Games to Teach Complex Concepts
Excitement is easy to stir up when you frame something as a game and add a bit of competition to the process of thinking and learning. In this session, teachers will practice creating two different types of games that can be used to cover the content and apply skills. We will identify when a game […]
Student-designed Experiments: Part 1 Building Curiosity
In this workshop, we will practice a repeatable structure for introducing a topic that will be studied through scientific exploration using a remote teaching and learning platform. We will help our students conduct a preliminary investigation at home developing interest in a particular phenomenon by generating data and making observations and hypotheses. We will then […]
Student-designed Experiments: Part 2 Helping Students Write an Experimental Procedure
In this workshop, we will pick up where Part 1 of this series left off. We begin with a list of variables our students have identified as potentially impacting a particular phenomenon they have explored. Using a think-pair-share process, we will give students the structure needed to write steps for a scientific investigation using the […]
Student-designed Experiments: Part 3 Guiding Students Through Data Analysis
Teachers will play the role of the students, collecting data in their own homes and pooling their observations and measurements in a spreadsheet shared by their lab partners. We will conduct data analysis within lab groups during the workshop to experience how this process can be performed using remote teaching and learning platforms. Peer critiques […]
Student-designed Experiments: Part 4 Drawing Evidence-based Conclusions
This workshop will focus on the content and demands of the conclusion section of a lab report, with applications to data-based questions and internal assessments for IB students, and free response questions for AP students. The conclusions drawn from experimental data must be limited to the scope of the experiment, but it is also important […]