Beatriz Cristina
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Viewing 13 posts - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)
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When you need to assess a project that students have been working on over time, it can be tricky. I do not think that you should only assess the finished product, but also pay attention to the whole process as well. Teachers should take notes throughout the process, notes of their observations. When planning the inquiry-based projects, teachers should have a clear idea of what they want their students to learn, what the goals are, and what they are going to assess. A teacher can make rubrics before-hand of what exactly they want to assess. This might change along the way, but it is good to have something solid to start with.
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As a teacher, I have struggled with knowing exactly what to assess. How do I know that my students are doing what they are supposed to? That stems from ME not knowing exactly what I am supposed to do or should ask of my students during inquiry-based activities. As I learn more about them. I am better able to tell my students what is expected fo them.
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I selected eBird because we live in an area with so many birds. eBird is an online database where you can upload your bird findings anywhere in the world. This gives scientists information about types of birds, where they are found, and possibly migration patterns. For this website, you do have to create an account. It would be a little tricky for younger students to create their own account and log in, so I could either make an account for each of them or just make a class account and give them all the login information. Since we are studying birds and their habitats, this could be really useful to track the birds that students have observed in nature.
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In my classroom, I try to give my students time to observe and wonder and give their questions importance. Instead of just saying "That's a great question", but I write it on the board and we talk about what we think about it. Also, giving students a space to express what they are curious about and letting them explore that topic. Even though as teachers we tend to want to plan everything out, with science we need to be a little bit more flexible and realize that sometimes thing swill pop up that we had not thought about. When those opportunities come up, we need to flow with them and have the students explore them. Usually, the kids tend to be very excited and motivated.
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My class participated in Project Squirrel. This project was easier for us to put together and I thought it would be interesting and fun for my students to participate in. This was a good project to start us off in really observing animals and have students begin to wonder about them. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of questions my students had about squirrels, their bodies, their habitat and their actions.
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We can give our students the OPPORTUNITY to observe and wonder. As teachers, we often times just want to get through the standards (because that is what is expected of us), but we need to move away from merely teaching the standards to really teaching students scientific practices, which include observing and wondering. These are regular parts of life and they help build critical thinking skills. If a students does not know the content, they can easily look up the information on the internet, but the skills of observing and wondering, those are harder to Google.
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I really liked this activity of going outside with just my notebook and pencil and sitting still and observing. This is something I do not do often, nor do we give our students much time to do this. I was very surprised to hear so many nature sounds, whilst living in the city. I heard all kinds of bird calls and it was interesting trying to decipher where they were coming from. It also made me realize just how many noises our brains seem to ignore, until we really listen for them.
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Right now, I am focusing on planning and carrying out investigations. I think this really makes science class fun and engaging to students. It also helps them understand the topics more when they are the ones actually conducting the investigation. They are more likely to learn and remember when they do a hands-on activity.
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I wish to model all three teaching practices, but the one I will focus on first is positioning my students as people who do science. In the classroom, whenever we are doing science experiments, observations, or activities, we tend to call our students scientists, but now I want to do MORE than simply call them scientists. We have to make them feel like scientists. Make them feel like the work that they are doing is important, valuable, and can really make a difference.
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I have not used any citizen-science projects, but I have worked on a unit about helping protect birds in the area and their habitat. We have not been able to carry it out, due to covid and virtual school. I have brainstormed ways of how to carry out this unit even from home,. Students can still observe birds in their natural habitats by just going outside their house and observing birds near their homes, however we really wanted to take the kids to a coffee farm that is known to have lots of birds. I like the citizen-science does not necessarily follow the scientific method because the method scientists use tends to change. It is not linear. I can do a better job of showing this to my students, not to necessarily follow some steps, but that it is OK to alter the steps or to go back to previous steps.
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I teach 2nd grade and for the Science unit about habitats and animals and plant characteristics, we wanted to give students a big problem that they had to find a solution to. The big question was : How can you, as second grade students, help protect the bird species in our area? This is in a school in Colombia, where there are many bird species and they are an integral part of life and tourism. I would say this is a structured Inquiry because I presented the question and all the other information/activites: we presented the information about habitats, animals, amnd plants (students did do their own research though), we gave students opportunities to observe birds in their natural habitat, we had experts come in to talk to students, BUT at the end, students came up with their own solutions. Each students had to have an actionable plan for what they could do to help protect a specific bird species from the area.
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Great definition! I was thinking along the same lines. Inquiry is basically the scientific process.
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To me inquiry is sparking a student's natural interest in the world. Students are already curious, inquiry is where we guide them into channeling that curiosity in a more systematic way to get results, or findings. Inquiry is having an idea or a hypothesis and doing observations, experiments, and analysis to figure out how or why.
Viewing 13 posts - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)