This week in my teaching science class, we learned about assessments, specifically assessing the student's prior knowledge. I was already aware that it was important to assess student's prior knowledge, but I never really thought about implementing it in science. With reading and math being the big pushes in education, I had only thought assessing prior knowledge in these subjects. I now realize that it is important to assess for prior knowledge in ALL subject areas, including science. It is crucial that we understand our students strengths, weaknesses, and misconceptions. Our teacher showed us some awesome ways to assess students prior knowledge in science, because we had no idea how to do this. She even modeled half of a lesson, which included assessing for prior knowledge and getting the students engaged in the lesson, allowing the students to explore with the concept and then explaining the content. The lesson model that she uses, and taught us was the 5E's: Engage, Explore, Explain, Extend, and Evaluate, proposed by Anthony W. Lorsbach.
For the modeled lesson, my teacher engaged us with a video and a question: are we smarter than MIT graduates? The video asked MIT graduates if they could light a light bulb with a wire and a battery. Most of them proclaimed yes, I can, quite confident in themselves, until they were given the opportunity to do it. Most of them failed in getting the light bulb to light. The video left me intrigued, was that possible? Why couldn't they get the light bulb to produce light? Now I wanted to try. I would say the video definitely fulfilled its purpose, I was intrigued and wanted to know more, and prove that I was smarter than an MIT graduate.
After the video, my teacher went on to assess our misconceptions about lighting a light bulb with a wire and a battery. She gave us a worksheet with different options on how to set up the wire and the battery to make the light bulb produce light (see below).
circuit_card_sort.pdf |
After making a prediction about the arrangements, she moved us onto the explore phase, where we got the materials and tested out the arrangements. We worked in pairs, and we got a battery, a wire, and a mini light bulb. We tested out each arrangement, seeing which ones worked, which ones didn't and why it didn't work. We compared our hypotheses to our results and corrected some of our misconceptions.
After we experimented, she would have went onto the explain phase, to describe and teach the content to us. It is in the explain phase that you introduce the vocabulary for the lesson, so students have an experience to connect the word to. This enables the student to make meaning of the word, and they are more likely to remember the word and use it correctly.
The Extend phase comes next, where the teacher allows the students to apply their knowledge into a new situation. The last phase is the Evaluate phase, but this should be happening all throughout the lesson. The teacher should constantly be evaluating students knowledge, seeing if they are understanding the concepts and making decisions that better the education of the students. In other words, formative assessment should constantly be taking place throughout the entire lesson.
Seeing my teacher this lesson was really helpful. It gave me an idea as to what I should be seeing and implementing in my classroom. I also got the opportunity to see her teach this lesson! My teacher invited us to watch her implement this lesson in an elementary classroom. This was an exceptional students class with all nine students having autism. The first thing we did was debrief before we went into the classroom. She told us about the class, the students, and the lesson. She told us about some of the vocabulary she was going to use and why she was using it. As we went into the classroom, we were greeted by the students. They were ready to experiment! They all had their goggles on! We mentioned that we had science notebooks just like them and they were so excited. We waved hi and learned their names. My classmates and I, there were three of us total, took a seat in the back to observe our teacher implement the lesson.
The first thing she did was to ask them what they knew about electricity (assessing prior knowledge). Many of them mentioned a light switch, One of the students even brought over their class-made light switch. They also mentioned an Xbox as a reference to their knowledge about electricity. After assessing their prior knowledge, my teacher introduced the battery, wire, and light bulb as tools scientists made to help electricity flow. The allowed them to have one of each material. She also gave them the circuit sort card (as attached above) as a guide for the students to use when making the arrangements. The rest of the lesson was spent in the explore phase. The students had a blast testing out which arrangements made the light bulb produce light. We went down on the carpet and helped the students with their arrangements. I worked with two students who were an absolute delight. They were so willing to share and experiment. I experienced a passion to learn in them that I have never experienced before. We tried each of the arrangements. They were never discouraged when one would not work, they just said to try another way and never give up. We experimented with multiple batteries, which had the effect of making the light bulb brighter. Through our experiments, I was also able to hear some of the students misconceptions, like electricity stops at the light bulb. I would use this information as a teacher to plan for my instruction, making sure to address this. Eventually, it was time to leave, and we left the class still exploring with the materials.
When we debriefed about the lesson with our teacher, she mentioned a few important things. She addressed why she did not go into the Explain phase. She told us that the students were not ready yet, that they were not all ready to hear that language. They have not had enough experience with the materials and they were not all using the same language to describe the materials. She didn't even introduce some of the vocabulary because the students were not ready to associate the material with the vocabulary. This shows the importance in knowing your students when making instructional decisions. She went onto explain that she would have let them explore for a few more days, until they were all coming to the same conclusions. Only then would she introduce the essential vocabulary. We also learned that it is important to know the content of the lesson, and if you are not sure of an answer, say it. It's okay to not know all of the answers.
Overall, I has am amazing experience getting to work with these students and I learned A LOT!!