The Elements Unearthed

 

This past week I participated in two programs that will impact my teaching philosophy greatly over the remainder of my career.

As reported in my previous post, I attended the Teacher Innovator Institute sponsored by the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. This was a two-week workshop that focused on education strategies and technologies. I had to leave that workshop a few days early to travel to my second program, a mandatory orientation seminar in Loveland, Colorado for my Doctorate of Education (EdD) in Innovation and Education Reform at the University of Northern Colorado. Both programs spoke of education theories and reform movements, and I have been trying to wrap my brain around them ever since (and will continue to do so for the next 3-4 years).

Let me attempt to explain the first half of the week, where we learned about Guided Inquiry and how to integrate Makerspaces into our STEM classrooms. Then I will give a brief introduction to our orientation meeting in Colorado, although I’m not nearly ready to summarize it all yet.

Guided Inquiry

On Monday, July 22 we met in the third floor conference room in the Air and Space Museum to learn and practice Guided Inquiry with Leslie Maniotes, who has founded this strategy along with Carol Kuhlthau and Ann Caspari. It was a fairly specific set of steps for shaping and guiding inquiry, designed mostly for doing library research but certainly adaptable to science and technology education. Some of the main points include finding that “third space” where the students’ world and the curriculum align and gradually releasing the responsibility for learning from the teacher to the student through a series of stages (focused instruction, guided instruction, collaborative learning, and independent learning) characterized by the teacher statements: I do it, we do it, you do it together, and your do it alone. This is similar to the guided practice model of Madeline Kahn I’ve often used for teaching skills such as algebra problem solving.

Their main model involves eight phases for the inquiry process, starting with an Opener or hook that provokes interest in the subject, then an Immerse phase to build student background knowledge as a community. This is done by the teacher so that students will have the proper schema or framework from which to understand the subject – without this phase, most research projects go astray or never get off the ground because the students don’t know enough to know where to begin or even the extent of their own ignorance. The next phase is Explore, where the students dig in on their own and follow ideas related to the topic, to dip their toes into the pool and look around. They skim and scan and write down whatever piques their interest in a research journal.

The next phase begins the actual work of research. Students Identify what ideas and sub-topics they are most interested in by reviewing their journals, pausing, and pondering what questions they have and developing a concept map of what they know so far. They analyze their research questions according to their interest level, the resources they have available, the task they are asked to produce, and their available time.

The final phases are fairly standard: to Gather information through research or primary sources, then Create the final product (paper, presentation, etc.), then Share their product in an authentic way (presentation, blog post, etc.), and to Evaluate what they have learned including the content and processes used.

I have blundered along assigning students to do research papers and other types of inquiry without the proper guidance or background knowledge, then have wondered why they flounder. This process, once I adapt it for science inquiry, will be of great benefit for my students.

 

Makerspaces

On my final day at the Teacher Innovator Institute we were at the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia. Josh Ajima, a lead maker teacher evangelist in Loudoun County Schools, presented ideas for incorporating makerspaces into our curricula. A makerspace doesn’t have to be full of high tech CNC routers, laser cutters, and 3D printers. It can be as simple as a Ziploc bag for each student with a few simple items inside, such as a CR2032 button battery, a color LED light, a small buzzer motor, a few business cards, a plastic drinking straw, and a purple crayon. He leads a program called DesignMakeTeach and told us about the stone soup model of makerspaces – start with something, no matter how simple, then add to it as you can.

It is like the story of the man with the soup pot who came to a village and put water and a stone in the pot, then heated it up and claimed he was making soup for the whole village. As he sampled the hot water, he would say, “You know what would make this? A few carrots. Does anyone have carrots?” And someone would bring a few carrots. Then potatoes, celery, salt, and finally a little meat here and there until he had a tasty soup that fed the entire village. All he brought to the table was the pot and imagination, and the village provided the rest for itself.

Our abilities as maker-teachers develop through stages. First, we have to become makers ourselves. Then we educate students as a teacher, then we become a coach to train other teachers. He spoke of the Three Conflicts in martial arts – how to master a martial art, one must not just train the hands, but also the head and the heart. It is the same with making. We focus too much on the hands part, but don’t apply the mind or the heart to engage students in how making fits in with their lives and gives expression to their feelings. I had never thought about the Zen of Making before.

We began by watching part of the video “Harold and The Purple Crayon” on how all it takes to express imagination and make is a purple crayon. We used the contents of our Ziploc bag starter kit to build a light saber and make a Buzz Bot. This could be a great way to introduce electricity and circuits to my physics class for about $2.50 per student. I started thinking of what I will do with the grant money for this institute and how to build my own portable makerspace with a cart, plastic tubs, and a little imagination.

After a presentation by two archivists at the NASM (which brought back memories of my time at the Chemical Heritage Foundation ten years ago), Josh continued by providing us each with a Makey Makey and a Microbit. I had only recently (one month ago) been to presentations at a Utah STEM education conference were I first learned about Microbits, and saw Makey Makeys, Ozobots, and Spheros in action. Now I have the means and some training to take this further.

We divided up into teams to use the Makey Makeys to create physical interfaces for games and other uses. Never having used one before, I wandered around and observed what the groups were doing and took videos and photos to gather ideas for my classes. The Makey Makeys use Scratch for a programming language, then allow contact switches to be made from pieces of aluminum foil attached by alligator clips to the Makey Makey, with another clip on the player’s wrist to provide a galvanic skin contact that would complete the circuit. As players touched different contacts, the Makey Makey would send different inputs to the Scratch program to play the game.

One group did a Tetris robot interface – press the hands to move the Tetris pieces left or right, touch the feet to rotate them clockwise or counterclockwise, touch a fifth contact to drop the piece in place. Another team did a Dance Dance Revolution, another team did a Whack-a-Mole using an aluminum foil hammer and different contacts for the positions where the moles might pop up. One team created a physical Pac Man game. Another team designed a literal musical chair – they took an office chair and put different contacts on the five wheeled legs and the arms so that each would play a different note. One team even made a D.C. Metro Mania game, with the Metro system stops as possible contacts so that students would have to navigate to get from one point to another through Gallery Place, Metro Center, or L’Enfant Plaza. My team created an accessibility board for students unable to speak so that they could touch different contacts to express needs, such as needing to go potty or to eat, drink or say yes or no.

I had heard of Makey Makeys before and had thought them too basic to be useful for a high school class. I was wrong. Although these games are preprogrammed, learning how to make the contacts, hook up the boards, and provide the inputs to the game is a highly sophisticated but very doable project. I can get into this, so my students will, too.

We also tried out Microbits, a small programmable board with USB input/output and programmability, a small LED screen, and thermometer and accelerometer sensors for only about $16. Carl Lyman had shown me these at the STEM conference, and now I have my own to play with. These could come in handy for various physics experiments.

Stuck in Chicago

We took photos of our entire group by the space shuttle Columbia and in our red TII polo shirts on the stairs, since this was my last day with the group. As the rest were boarding the bus back to American University, I stood on the curve and ordered an Uber driver up to take me to Reagan National Airport. I had a great conversation with the driver, Mike, on the way through rush hour traffic. Once there, I discovered that my United flight through Chicago was delayed because of weather and that I would miss my connecting flight to Denver. I was able to transfer to a slightly earlier flight, but arrived in Chicago at 11:00 and still missed my connection. The next United flight from Chicago to Denver wasn’t until 5:30 in the morning, so I had to try to sleep on the benches in O’Hare international. Fortunately I had my hamburger pillow with me, and the lady at the United desk gave me an overnight kit with a water bottle, toothbrush, paste, deoderant, and even TicTacs in it. I managed to get about three hours of interrupted sleep.

Cohort 7

I arrived in Denver at 7:00 and got my bags and a shuttle van to the Payless rental car lot. I drove from there straight across the tollway to I-25 and north to Loveland, passing my motel just off the Longmont exit on the way but without time to stop and freshen up. I had trouble finding the UNCo extension campus – I finally drove past a building with the sign on the side more by accident than anything else – and was 30 minutes late for the initial meeting. I came in just as the last of my cohort was introducing herself, so I went next and apologized for being late. There are eleven people in Cohort 7, and over the next three days I got to know them fairly well. All are very sharp and experienced educators with varying research interests and backgrounds that will make the next few years interesting.

We had a presentation on how to use the university library system to look up articles and do interlibrary loans as an online program. I will now have access to most of the educational research available, a much deeper resource than I could achieve with a simple Google Internet search, which will help me learn more about my seven chosen research topics.

Thinking through my interests as I have prepared for this orientation seminar over the last two months, I have narrowed my personal research interests down to seven major topics. These are the following:

1. Project vs. Problem Based Learning:

I stumbled upon project-based learning as an educational strategy during my third year of teaching and have used it successfully ever since, with most of my classes completing 1-2 major projects per year. I want to see just how effective PBL truly is – does it actually improve retention and motivation? What effect does it have on test scores? How do other teachers effectively use PBL? Most specifically, I wonder about how teachers create a culture of excellence and quality with PBL – in other words, how can students achieve professional level results with their projects?

2. STEAM Education (or STEM-AH):

I have successfully incorporated the arts, history, and humanities into my STEM classes (what I like to call STEM with Arts and History, or STEM-AH, because arts and history put the “Ah!” into STEM). Beyond my own anecdotal evidence I want to know how effective STEAM education truly is and what the theoretical frameworks are for using it. Why should art and history be part of STEM education?

3. Using Authentic Data in the STEM Classroom:

As part of our orientation seminar, we each went through a detailed analysis of possible research topics and how we would approach answering our research questions and disquietudes. I chose this topic since it is the most concrete of the six I have chosen. How can Big Data be utilized and translated for a high school STEM classroom? What datasets exist, how do I find and download them, what software is out there for analyzing the data, and what tutorials exist (or need to be created) to assist in this process? I will be attending the Teacher Research Data Conference again this fall and will focus much of my attention on answering these questions.

4. Media Design Skills in the STEAM Classroom:

As a media design and STEM teacher in small schools and a magnet school, I have incorporated a lot of media design technology into my projects. Hopefully you’ve seen this in the various posts I’ve done on this site. This includes using 3D modeling and animation, video production, graphic design with both Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and other skills. How do learning these skills assist STEM students and teachers? Why are media literacy and design thinking important in STEM classrooms? What models exist out there, including the use of Makerspaces, to effectively teach academic subjects? Josh’s presentation showed how his students use 3D modeling and printing to enhance history (such as the amazing Hidden Figures shadow lanterns he made) and I’ve had some success at this, but what models of excellent practice can I draw from and build a theoretical framework behind?

5. Global Competency in STEM Classes:

How can teachers best incorporate a global awareness perspective into their classes to enhance STEM learning? Here is where problem-based learning may come in. Again, I want to look at excellent models that are already out there and build a general community of practice, with help from all the resources I’ve gained from the State Department and elsewhere.

6. Excellence in Education:

What does it take for a school (or teacher) to be considered excellent? I’m not looking for a list of factors, but more a set of excellent practices. This orientation class has cured me of thinking in terms of “best practice” because it implies that there is one best way of doing something, which isn’t true. Educational excellence is found in many different types of practices and classrooms from a wide variety of teachers and schools. So this would lean towards a more case-study approach, visiting classrooms and teachers and seeing what works for them and their students. I want to set up a mixed-methods survey of excellent teachers, those that have been identified through winning awards or being chosen for professional development opportunities. I’ve developed a preliminary questionnaire for this, but didn’t actually use it during my last two weeks even though I did talk to many teachers informally about the questions on it. But I will have more time next summer to do this more formally.

7. Levels of Engagement Model:

I also want to find evidence for my Levels of Engagement model and why we should train students to become teachers, scientists, engineers, programmers, makers, and artists. Do students move through stages, beginning with ignorance and progressing through passive, to active, to creative types of educational activities? What kinds of research have been done about student engagement and what kinds of research can I do to test my model?

On this first day of our seminar we also saw presentations and posters by the previous cohorts on the history of education and social justice and educational theorists. I am still trying to wrap my head around all of this and the names that were flying through the air like leaves in a storm – Wittgenstein, Vygotsky, Bruner, Bloom, Piaget, Papert, Montessori, Eisner, and many others. I know there will be entire classes on these theories and theorists, but I hope to create some sort of diagram or study aid before we get too deep.

I will speak about these theories, and the other two days of my seminar class, at length in a later post.

My next steps, now that I am home, will be to work through my notes for both programs and try to work out a strategy for proceeding. I need to create lesson plans for this coming year, in addition to reorganizing my classroom. I need to analyze all six of these topics as thoroughly as I did the authentic data topic, then put them into a decision matrix and make a final decision within the next month or so. I will be starting fall classes online in a few weeks, so I have a brief window to think and plan before I have to hit the ground running. By then, it would be nice to have a direction to run and at least a preliminary decision on a research topic.

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