Making Thinking Visible
One of the gifts of teaching in the digital age is the ease of which a teacher can gather evidence of thinking and learning. Documentation can occur continuously allowing the assessment of student progress as well as the discovery of holes in their understanding. Each step of the thinking process can be recorded digitally using many […]
Statistics for Teaching Science: Part 2 The Problem with Describing Data Using the Mean
Often by middle school and certainly by high school, students default to the mean as the best way to describe data without much consideration for how they might defend that choice. So, you might think, what’s the harm in that? Everyone knows what is meant by this descriptor, it is familiar and understandable, easy to […]
Using Puzzles to Teach Pattern Recognition
In this 1.5-hour workshop, teachers will work individually and then as a team to identify a pattern in puzzle pieces that tell the story of a theorem, function, or process. Once the pattern is defined, participants will use the pattern to predict what comes before or what comes next in the series. Testing their hypothesis […]
Statistics for Teaching Science: Part 3 Getting Comfortable with Variance, Standard Deviation, Standard Error of the Mean, and the 95% Confidence Interval
The variance, standard deviation, and standard error of the mean are excellent methods for describing data because they convey the variability of the observed data around the mean. Anyone teaching AP, IB, Pre-AP, Pre-IB, or college-bound science students will likely want to know how to calculate these values, what they indicate, and how to contextualize […]
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 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 […]
Statistics for Teaching Science: Part 4 Expressing Error on a Graph
Error bars are placed on a graph to give a more detailed account of what was observed. Although there are many descriptors that can be used to draw error bars, in each case the value is used to express the uncertainty or variability of the data. Error bars created from certain calculations are especially informative […]
Writing Easy-to-Use Rubrics
In this 1.5 hr. workshop, participants will practice writing rubrics with the intent of assessing the attainment of specific content and skills standards. We will explore how rubrics can be designed for ease of use and consistent interpretation. I will challenge the participants to make rubrics that are flexible enough to allow accurate assessment of […]
Using Stop-animation Videos to Learn Concepts
Stop-animation videos are short movies made with a series of photos taken from the same position and a handful of items that can be moved about to create a story. In this 1.5 hr. workshop, you will create your own stop-animation video of processes or phenomena, to cover main ideas or convey detailed information. Through […]
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 […]