Recent Course Updates and Future Plans

It’s been awhile since I wrote an article to my blog. I’m unsure if it was due to lack of inspiration, distraction, complacency or some combination of different reasons. My class has continued to evolve and I made important changes to the course. I hope to continue to improve my course and reflect about it online.

Since the last blog post, these are the changes I’ve made to the course:

• SBG improvements: science process standards that span between units as part of my SBG focus
• Flirtation with gamification: leader-board and other graphics showing the number of level 4s and mastery projects completed by individuals and classes.
• More voice & choice: robust offerings of optional units and mastery projects.
• Differentiation in content delivery: iBook that accompanies most of the videos.
• Lab report improvements: Less focus on formal lab report writing and greater emphasis on flexible formatted lab write ups.
• More flexible hot seats: students decided how to show they understood the standards rather than answering questions from me.  

Upcoming this year:

• Personalized learning continuum: as I continue to work on voice & choice and differentiation, there will be entire learning cycles that all students will be able to choose. Rather than only offering this choice to students who finish the course earlier than others, there will be two stopping points where all students will have to select a learning cycle from a menu of topics.
• Claim Evidence Reasoning: as I moved away from the traditional format of lab reports, I was proud to see improvements in overall quality, yet many students needed more direction. I will use the technique of Argument Driven Inquiry, also known as Claim-Evidence-Reasoning for lab assignments. As a department, we agreed to adopt Claim-Evidence-Reasoning for lab reports because it helps to focus the students on the important elements of experiment analysis.

I am happy to report that the journey started as part of my shift to flipped learning has opened avenues for the course that I would not have predicted. These changes have led to a more engaging, rigorous and authentic experience for students.

Flipping the Chips are Down Lab

The following article was featured in Carolina Tips in the fall of 2014, the online newsletter by Carolina Biological - a vendor that sells lab supplies and equipment to science teachers. 

For science teachers considering flipping their class, a great way to test the waters is by flipping the lab. Instead of using class time to lecture about and demonstrate steps in a lab procedure, consider creating short videos known as labcasts. Students can view these labcasts prior to the experiment. Watching the steps and seeing the equipment can help minimize confusion and provide clarification. Additionally, the use of labcasts can save precious class time for the actual experimentation and post-experimental analysis.

Teaching natural selection with the Chips Are Down lab

In the evolution unit, the Chips Are Down lab (which is a student favorite) does a wonderful job simulating natural selection. In this lab, students experience how populations change and generate a wealth of data to analyze (Fig. 1.).

Students play the role of predators and exert a selection pressure on a population of butterflies made of differently colored construction paper. The prey are placed on a multi-colored cloth background (Fig. 2); some of these butterflies naturally camouflage on the background, while others are easily spotted. The student predators take turns eating the prey by picking up the first butterfly they see. The predators eat a certain number of prey, then the game is paused to allow the prey to reproduce. Rounds of predation are followed by recovery of prey. After a few rounds, you see certain colored prey going extinct, while others increase in frequency (Fig. 1). The students witness natural selection in action and frequently cite this lab as the activity that helped them to understand this abstract concept.

The problem is the written instructions are somewhat confusing, no matter how many times they have been revised. Merely reading the steps does not clarify the procedure; students actually need to see it in action to fully understand it. In the past, I've typically done a round of predation and recovery with the entire class in order to help students visualize the steps. While this demonstration has been helpful, it is time consuming and limits the amount of class time available for repeating trials, troubleshooting, and data analysis. In addition, the post-lab discussion typically must wait until the next lesson.

 
Figure 1   Frequency of different colored prey after generations of predation. 




Figure 2   Image of a multi-colored background. 

I've solved these problems by creating a labcast demonstrating the Chips Are Down lab. In this short video, I explain and demonstrate the procedure and address the commonly asked questions. Students are required to watch the labcast prior to the lesson. I set aside only a few minutes at the beginning of the lesson to answer questions; this time is much shorter than the demonstration and Q&A sessions of previous years. After the change, students were able to execute several rounds of predation, perform calculations, and discuss the conclusions, all within the same lesson. With the saved class time, students were even able to test and compare data generated from different backgrounds. All of these changes, made available through the labcast, only helped to improve student understanding of natural selection.

The relative ease and low cost of making videos, coupled with the potential gains of leveraging this technology, make a compelling case for flipped learning. Labcasts allow you to smoothly transition to flipped learning in your science classes. These videos can clarify lab procedures, save precious class time, and improve student learning.

Quarter One Reflections

After a quarter into the school year, I have a solid grasp of the effects of the changes I've made. Here are the chief thoughts I have about quarter one.

Standards Based Grading

The transition to standards based grading has been mostly smooth. This year, I have a much better handle of what my students know and do not know. The SBG Grade book on Haiku is easy to use. The color codes make it easy to see which standards each student or class section is still working on. This has helped me identify which students need targeted intervention.

Standards Based Gradebook on Haiku

At first, it took students some time to understand the concept of "I can" statements and my particular system for showing learning. They seem to have figured out the system. 

The most noticeable difference is the quality of my reports. I've always struggled with writing first quarter reports because I barely feel like I know my students well enough by that time in the school year. This time around, I had plenty to say. Rather than including the general fluff, my reports focused on what my students knew and were able to do and the ideas and skills they still found troubling. Adding this component to my comments about performance on major assignments, my general impressions and suggestions moving forward, the reports are much more informative. 

Haiku LMS

The new learning management system is quite effective. The layout is beautiful and the interface is intuitive. I have consolidated many of my online tasks within Haiku - recording and sharing grades, assigning and collecting student work, repository of resources and interactive components like polls, practice quizzes and discussions. In the past, many of these roles would have been offloaded to separate resources. I'd like to move my actual quizzes to Haiku but it does not support randomized questions from a test bank, so I still need Moodle for that purpose. 

Haiku can be a bit buggy though. There is a limit to how many objects can be embedded on one page. Some students complained of notoriously long loading times. A student suggested that I make more usage of subpages. Now each step of the learning cycle is housed on its own page. This has significantly increased loading speeds.

Subpages on Haiku

Asynchronous learning

As mentioned in a previous blog post,  asynchronous learning continues to allow students to submit their best work and internalize a growth mindset. Most students are keeping to a reasonable rate, even though there are students who I believe can work faster. I've made some changes this year, which hopefully will help students adjust to the responsibility of setting their own pace. The most important change, at the request of a student, was allowing students to create their own weekly plans.

A student's week plan

Creating the plans take a lot of time so I've been trying to encourage students to send their plans to me during the weekend - with varying degrees of success. At the very least, students are using less class time to create their plans and becoming better at working while waiting for my indication that their plans are satisfactory. For students who show difficulty with this task, I've started to collaborate with them to create pacing calendars for a few weeks, rather than letting them work alone on their weekly plans. 

Mastery projects

A handful of students have elected to complete the mastery projects. In most cases, these projects have been good enough to help other students learn the content. My library of student made teaching materials is growing and some students have already taken advantage of this library to prep for a quiz. I recently added a leader-board to acknowledge students who have completed mastery projects- in hopes of motivating a few more projects.

Mastery Project Leader-board

Quiz retakes 

This year, I have a better handle on whether students are ready to take quizzes or retake quizzes. The hot seats have been a nice addition. The only problem I've seen with the hot seats is when students opt to take the quiz a few days after completing the hot seat discussion. 

After the first batch of quizzes, I've added a few layers of permissions for quiz retakes. In addition to submitting quiz corrections and explainations of the mistakes, students have to do one more thing for permission for a retake. Making the students go through a few obstacles seems to help students take each attempt more seriously. 

Labs 

The switch to inquiry based labs has proved to be most effective with asynchronous learning. Last year, I tried a combination of inquiry and full class labs. I struggled with students who got to the labs first and figuring out whether they should use last year's data. It became confusing for students to know whether they were using this year's or last year's data sets. This also prevented me from adjusting procedures. 

For the full class synchronous labs, students working at a slower pace had to rush through content or temporarily skip steps in order to be "ready" for labs. Now that students design most of their own labs, there is no confusion about what data to use and no need to worry about skipping or rushing through steps - students do labs when they are ready.

So far, I've managed to keep up with the demand for lab materials. I place small lab kits around the edge of the counter space on labeled lunch trays. Since different students perform different labs, I only need to make a small amount of materials available for one particular lab. The trick is to have several labs prepared simultaneously and to anticipate when students will be ready for future labs. Below you can see how I organize lab materials.

DNA extraction lab materials

UV bacteria lab materials

Protein Synthesis model exploration materials

Upcoming changes

In the upcoming quarters, I'd like to incorporate some synchronous projects to help me experiment and think through PBL and 20Time in future years. I also want to offer optional content and let students who work ahead design their own parts of the course. 

Running Labs in an Asynchronous Course

familymwr // flickr

 Recently on twitter I was asked how I manage labs in an asynchronous course. The answer is disappointingly too long to fit into a tweet. I promised to write a blog post about it; truthfully, I've struggled with this issue all year and was hoping to read someone's blog post to get some guidance. Perhaps readers may learn what to avoid or become aware of questions that need answering after reading here.

I've treated different labs differently - obviously! I've filled small bins with 2-3 lab setups. When students are ready for a particular lab, they watch a labcast video, complete any pre-lab assignments, grab a setup, then perform the lab. While this works most of the time, I learned quickly the flaws of this plan. 

Students who work ahead: 

Large sample size is important in science. Access to statistically significant (or insignificant) data is perhaps even more important than students designing experiments, in my humble opinion. The reason I haven't moved completely to inquiry labs is because I need each group to replicate trials of the same procedure to pool the data for statistical analysis. This presents a new challenge in an asynchronous course. Students who work ahead only have access to a small sample size. I've solved this problem by publishing data from previous years. Whether a student collects data early or late, their data will be compiled with other years of data. 

Lab setup: 

Labs are messy; some materials can't be neatly stuffed into bins. Some labs require time consuming set ups, like water baths. Some require perishables which have to be ordered weeks in advance, while others need to used within three days of arrival. 

I shifted to a synchronous approach for some labs. The resource intensive and perishable-heavy labs just require too much work to plan for different lab dates. I still offer some flexibility. I make some labs available for a few days. This gives students the time to catch up. I don't want students performing labs before they are relevant. My labs are strategically situated at specific parts of the learning cycle. It's important to allow some time for students to complete the prerequisite steps before performing each lab. 

I'm dissatisfied with my system because I still have to rush some students through steps and prevent others from going ahead. I dislike encouraging students to skip steps in order to complete a lab.  

Future Plans: 

It's clear to me that what's best for student learning, and not my convenience, is to make labs available only when students are ready for them. If my mastery learning cycles are designed in a pedagogically sound way, then rushing or prohibiting students from moving ahead is counterproductive. I also still believe that students must work with large sample sizes and inquiry is an opportunity for students to engage in critical thinking and take ownership of their learning. My solution is to have students design all/most of their experiments and stipulate they must have large sample sizes in their experiments. 

This will require some adjustments. I'll have to alter the labcast videos to introduce the challenge, show some of the available materials and offer suggestions. This will take a great deal of organization and resources. I'll have to develop an effective technique to predict when students will be ready for particular experiments and use that information to strategically order materials. 

Suggestions for Flipping the Science Lab

Here are some suggestions for managing labs in a flipped science course.  

1) Labcast video: 
Students should complete a pre-lab activity. At the very least, students should watch a labcast describing the experiment, lab safety concerns and demonstration of frequently confused portions of the lab procedure. The labcast video will save the teacher so much time by minimizing the usual clarification questions and giving students the opportunity to learn about the lab outside of precious class time. 

 

Example of a Labcast

2) Google Form for data collection:

If you are combining data from multiple groups, definitely use a Google form. Make sure students do not include the units because the spreadsheet will be unable to perform calculations. 

Sample Data Form

Consider whether you want to include required questions. Required questions defend against blank data entries. However, if there are legitimate reasons for skipping trials, then students will be unable to submit their data until you change that option. 

Finally consider adding an identifier question like student name or group number. If students make a mistake submitting data, you will need to identify and delete this data. (I had to learn this the hard way, notice the image above violates this suggestion!)

3) Publishing data: 
Add sheets to the Google form responses spreadsheet. You can use the array formula to send updated data from the responses to a calculation sheet. The calculation sheet can calculate and automatically update the mean, standard deviation, confidence intervals, etcetera. You can use array formula one more time to send the calculations to a published data sheet.

 Multiple sheets for calculations & data publication

The neat thing about Google spreadsheets is the option to publish just one sheet. I typically publish one final sheet and share the link with students.

Published Data

This workflow has been successful in my class. In most cases, students seamlessly move from different steps in the learning cycle to labs without much interruption of other students. The struggle I have with labs is more global and related to running an asynchronous flipped course, rather than merely a flipped course.

The Flip Class as a Vehicle to Universal Design for Learning: Week 9 reflections

Successes:

I received a wonderful letter from a parent. It was truly touching. I won't quote it here but I will explain the content. It was the parent of one of my exceptional students who has consistently worked ahead. The parent thanked me for allowing the student to work at his own pace and shared that this was the first time this student actually felt a science or math course allowed him to work at his own level. Now of course I'm sure that there are/were parents who could say something negative about the flipped class, so I won't overreach here. But I am glad that one of my main motivators to make the switch is actually happening. I do have a number of exceptional students who are ahead of the pace of the course and that number increases as time passes. If I stayed with the traditional model or even a synchronous flipped model, those students would still be kept hostage by everyone else's pace. They would never know what it felt like to get an education specifically geared to their them, rather than to the middle of the class.

I'm reminded of the Universal Design for Learning model. This model is inspired by a similar mode of architecture wherein the building is designed for the extremes rather than the middle. For example, if you build 7 foot doorways, everyone can fit through without ducking their heads. If you have wheelchair ramps at every entrance and exit, then everyone can enter and exit the building. The opposite approach would have doorways the same as the average height of people or only a few wheelchair accessible entrances and exits because most people can walk. If you design for the extremes, then everyone benefits.

The same approach can be done for education. If you design education by keeping in mind the extremes, those who are exceptional and those who have special needs, then you can reach all students. When I designed my flipped class, I kept in mind the strongest students I've ever had and the other extreme. I tried to design the course to meet those extremes, in order to reach all students. The traditional model is designed around the middle of the pack and doesn't do much for the most exceptional or those who struggle the most.

How do I meet the needs of the extremes?

1) First, by having my lectures on video, students can view the content on demand, rewind, pause or fast forward. They can watch the video several times. This really helps those who struggle the most because they typically need to hear and see things several times to get it. This helps the exceptional students because they can view the video once and move on and not be slowed down by the students who have questions or those who need to hear content repeated.

2) The first question I get from colleagues is what happens when a student has a question when they watch the video, especially at home. My students are required to complete a video form after/while watching a video. Part of the form is a required question. Students send their questions to me and I can respond, many times before they come to class. This works for students who struggle because they can ask any question without fear of asking a "dumb" question in front of peers. I can reply with an email or even plan to meet with the student during the next class. The exceptional student gets to ask a question that goes beyond the scope of the course and I can answer it without fear of confusing the students who might not even understand the question.

3) Asynchronous learning cycles further support individualized learning. Weaker students can slow down and work at their pace, while exceptional students can work ahead. The obvious implications are that some students will not finish the entire course, while others will learn content beyond the scope of the course. The former implication was hard for me to accept at first but when I remembered that the weakest students didn't actually learn all of the content in the traditional model anyway, I felt better about the decision. We rush all students ahead at a predetermined rate, usually equal to the pace of the middle students, without really considering that the weaker students haven't learned the earlier material. In a cumulative course, this approach is counterproductive. Either way, the weakest students will not learn as much in a year as the other students. At least in the asynchronous model, they have a chance of mastering some content and feeling good about really learning.

Adjustments:

I have a weird policy regarding lab reports that I'm rethinking. Since the first lab assignments, I haven't let students work on their lab reports during class time. The major reason is that the reports take up too much time; if we stopped going through the learning cycle for lab report writing, we would get through a fraction of the curriculum. My workaround has been to allow students to record data and perform calculations in class but write up their reports and make graphs at home; in addition, students who complete the mandatory learning cycle tasks for the week could also use the remainder of the week to either work ahead or work on the lab reports. So far, this is the best compromise that I've figured out and still trying to think of an alternative solution.

Speaking of labs, running an asynchronous course makes it difficult to run labs that require the entire class. So far, I've managed to share last year's data to allow faster students to complete their writeup without waiting for other classmates. Once all of the students have nearly caught up, the entire class set-up the experiment and collect data to be used for next year. What I would like to do instead is let individual students or small groups set up the lab as soon as their ready, then share last year's data with them. This way they are setting up the lab as soon as it is relevant; ahead students won't have to set up a lab they already wrote a lab report for! I still haven't figured out a way to avoid using last year's data in an asynchronous course because I don't want the quicker students to wait too long and don't want the slower students to arbitrarily set up a lab when they haven't even learned the prerequisite material.