Vote No to SB 403!

The video here gives a quick overview of the benefits of the common core standard. See my previous blog post for the lies the opponents of common core are using to try to make their case. Please take five minutes to find out who your senator is, and to call him or her and ask for a No vote on SB 403. (The bill is to repeal the common core; so, a No vote is asking to stop the repeal and keep the Common Core.)

They lied!

I don't normally make a habit of posting political comments, but something is going on in the Alabama legislature that I think many of you would want to know about. A bill has been introduced in both houses that would ban Alabama from participating in the Common Core movement. That is a nationwide coalition of states who have come together to decide and implement a set of common standards. As a life-long educator, I think the common core is a great thing for Alabama kids. It puts them on a level playing field with students in 45 other states, and it will open the doors for them to get better jobs in today's global economy.

The bill is being pushed by the Tea Party side of the political spectrum. I have no beef with the Tea Party. I believe in conservative fiscal policies and limited government. I do have a beef, though, with a bill that is based on lies. Please take a look at the document here, which clearly rebuts every point of the current Alabama bill.

Online learning: Knowing their work, but not them.

Online learning is all the rage right now, but I don't think it's a panacea or silver bullet. I'm learning from teaching online that it has strengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages, and definitely trade-off's when compared to face-to-face instruction. In this 3-minute video, I describe what I've learned this semester in teaching online. My key reflection is that I get to know my students' work, but I don't get to know them as people. 

Coming soon

... the behind the scenes on Coevolution on Prezi.

6000 Skulls

I just spent the day trying to really get my head around human evolution at the Hall of Human Origins in the National Museum of Natural History. I think I'm getting it. Australopithecus died out. Homo heidelbergensis is probably the common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals. Homo erectus lived a long time and was pretty dang tall.

The biggest thing I'm pondering as I walk away is how all that we know about early humans is based on 6,000 skulls. That seems like a low number. On the one hand, the number doesn't bother me. 6,000 is a pretty hefty count for any collection of specimens. Even just 1 piece of evidence is something that science must deal with, as long as it is authentic. And 6,000 is a lot more than 60 or even 600.

On the other hand, that seems like such a small number to answer the question, "Where did we come from?" In my day-to-day world, people don't believe in human evolution. I don't see them being convinced by this amount of evidence. Sure, I could try to argue with the reliability of the skulls we do have or the promise of future finds or the difficulty of fossilization. Those science-y arguments don't work well for the non-science-y people I'm thinking of. Human evolution asks them to overturn much of their worldview, and I don't think 6,000 data points are enough for them to do that.

(And I just realized that the number of currently known skulls is equal to what most of my people believe to be the age of the Earth. How crazy is that?)

My Talk at Tedx Birmingham

Speaking at Tedx Birmingham was an amazing experience! How do you cram 25 years of teaching into 18 minutes? How do you communicate the dire challenges in American education and the hope all around us in excellent innovations? How do you help people outside of education understand how our education system is failing children while at the same time honoring teachers and the impact they have?

The resources I used in the talk should be tagged in my Delicious account with "MyTed". Let me know, please, if anything you need is missing. Also, here's the link to the presentation I used during the talk, which was developed in Prezi.

Tweaking Inquiry

When I was in the classroom, the break around Christmas was always a time when I retooled what was going on in my classroom. It was my half-time for the year, a time to step back and make important changes so that my students would learn better. Half of my time with them was gone, and I wanted the rest of the time with them to be as good as it could be.

If you're new to teaching science by inquiry, you've got a chance to make some key tweaks to teaching and learning in your classroom now. You probably don't need to make huge changes, even if you're frustrated with inquiry. Inquiry is a great approach for teaching! Don't doubt that. Instead, step back and think about small changes that you can make that can give big benefits.

I constantly use the five essential features of inquiry from Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards as my diagnostic for how well I'm doing with guiding learning. Here, I've flipped those around into questions you can use for diagnosing how well inquiry is going in your classroom:

1. How engaged are your students in scientific questions?
2. How do your students give a priority to evidence when they are learning science?
3. How adept are your students at developing explanations based on the evidence they're seeing?
4. How adept are you at guiding your students to consider alternative explanations for the evidence they're seeing?
5. How are your students constantly communicating and justifying their explanations?

I've found that if I think through the five essential features, I can usually figure out what's not working well in the inquiries I'm leading and how I can improve my students learning. 

I'll be tweeting out tips based on each of these questions in the next few days. I hope these help you as you teach with inquiry. Please let me know with a comment here or a reply on twitter if you have any questions. I'm happy to help.