Monday January 17 - Resource #3

 Herro, D., & Quigley, C. (2016). Innovating with steam in middle school classrooms: Remixing     education. On the Horizon, 24(3), 190–204. https://doi.org/10.1108/oth-03-2016-0008

A lot of the sources that are available on the web are for elementary school teachers, additionally last semester I tried to focus my inquiry on the upper-year Physics 11 and 12 courses so I wanted to find a source that could better represent applications to a grade 9 classroom as this is related to my new question. This article looks at middle school classrooms and investigates how STEAM integration has been successful and unsuccessful. From the reading I gathered a number of useful ‘tips’ for moving forward with my inquiry:

• 1.      “it became clear that incorporating the “A” in STEAM required increased involvement by arts and humanities educators, in both professional development and classroom settings” – need to collaborate with educators from the subjects we want to integrate.
• 2.      the amount of time to create an authentic unit that involved science, math, ELA, social studies, arts and technology was inordinate and likely impossible without administrative support – planning time became a huge constraint

Thursday January 13 - Resource #2

Herro, D., Quigley, C., Andrews, J., & Delacruz, G. (2017). Co-measure: Developing an assessment for student collaboration in STEAM activities. International Journal of STEM Education, 4(1), 1-12. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40594-017-0094-z

As I prepare to develop a STEAM integrated unit for my Physics 9 class, one topic which still eludes me is assessment. From my assessment course I know that I need to be assessing students’ competencies as they work through the unit. In building a magic show it seems fitting to assess competencies related to communication, collaboration, and related areas. The core competencies for the unit focus largely on communication, and collaboration goals. For me, assessing collaboration is totally new. The goal of this article is to develop a rubric, “to assess student collaboration, at the individual level, when students are working in K-12 STEAM activities.” The article looks at how this assessment can be valid, and reliable. The article also provides information regarding what attributes of collaboration can be assessed for example, “Negotiates roles within group.” Finally, the article gives specific applications of rubric attributes to STEAM activities. I think that this article will be useful in considering the criteria for assessment that I would like to include on assignment rubrics in my transformed unit.

Monday January 10 - Resource #1

 Gerofsky, S. (2007). “because you can make things with it”: A rationale for a project to teach mathematics as a multimodal design tool in Secondary Education. Journal of Teaching and Learning, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.22329/jtl.v5i1.126

  This article discusses the ways that mathematics education can be contextualized for students. In the article, there is a discussion of the importance, in math education, of making learning immersive and hands-on. It discusses how math can sometimes feel disembodied or disconnected from the lives and interests of students. I feel that this sentiment can be transferred to physics education. This is related to my inquiry because I am purposing a fully immersive experience for students to relate physics to something they might find interesting, hands-on, and relatable (a magic show). The reason I chose this article is that I am connecting with the author about my topic and before I draft questions for her, I would like to fully understand her area of specialization in order to prompt these questions.

Final Post of Inquiry 1 :(

What I learned:

• There is a place for fun in the Math classroom
• Inquiry is about:
• giving students choice
• asking questions
• allowing students to do the work they are interested in
• "Country Life" by the Watersons

New ideas and insights I take away:

• "disembodied" learning does not promote real learning
• The garden can be a great place for a math classroom
• STEAM learning can have advantages for many students
• There are so many applications of STEAM in the STEM classroom
• Art + Math
• Dance + Math
• Theatre + Physics
• Nature + Math/Physics
• Art + Astronomy
• Math + Astronomy
• Math + Seasons
• Math + Physics 
• Film + Math/Physics
• Storytelling + STEM

Suggestions for improvement:

• Maybe if the presentations were spread over 3 days instead of 2 they felt a bit rushed
• A little bit more feedback on the blog posts might have helped

Something Neat...

 

Exit Slip 12/2/2021

From today's class on permutations, I think I learned a lot about how to teach through the arts. I found that it was relevant to my project on STEAM integrated education. I resonated most with the poetry (word) permutations because I saw many cross-curricular elements including:

• Teaching adjective order
• Teaching homophones, homonyms, and homographs
• Teaching musical notes
• Dance
• Drama
  
• Chemistry (meth, eth, prop, but, pent)

It should become apparent from my inquiry project why I believe that integrated teaching is useful and important. I am always looking for more cross-curricular elements to classes and this is a great one.

I have been looking for more examples of this and I found this really cool youtube video that I suggest looking at: https://youtu.be/26e4cnTUym8

Inquiry Work Day 1

 For access to Mine and Sheldon's Annotated bibliography see the following link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10QrknEGkb_sS5MoXrq3ZGSi-iXIDspoAD6LyL_VetJ0/edit?usp=sharing

Connection with the outside world:

    As I went on practicum Susan put me in contact with 2 amazing people. Her husband, Mr. Phil Byrne, and Ms. Mati Burnabei. I had conversations with both of these people on practicum. I would say that both of them have given me insights into my inquiry project. Ms. Burnabei is listed as a contributor on the Secondary Science First Peoples Teacher Resource Guide which I think is highly relevant to the topic of STEAM as it is my belief that before one can propose a dramatic storytelling feature in a science classroom they must first reflect on those who have done it first. Indigenous people have used storytelling, narrative, and dramatization as a pinnacle of their education for centuries. One thing I noticed was that Ms. Burnabei talks explicitly about First People's applications in her syllabus for Physics 11. 

    Mr. Byrne's class is perhaps more obviously related to the inquiry project and exploring his classroom gave me some great insight into STEAM education. While this program is in the arts and technology education branches, the amount of physics I could see was extensive. The students looked at relationships between power, voltage, and current and how light dissipates with the inverse square of the distance. They even could calculate the length of a shadow in a film set. Moreover, these students demonstrated a significantly greater understanding of proportionalities than many of the Physics students I worked with. Seeing the math and science as an application to something they were passionate about meant that students were engaged longer and had more avenues with which to gather observation. As a teacher, this reminds me that staying within neat but somewhat arbitrary curricular lines limits student achievement and leaves behind many diverse learners. I hope that many of the aspects of "Physics" that I saw in the "film" classroom I can keep in mind as I think about Physics + Theatre integration.

Plan for the Presentation/Slides:

See a running draft of the presentation outline at the following link:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_Q-oJgZiwwhyNteb1jCDPD4wxITb2HjciffRXv2tXQs/edit?usp=sharing

Plan for the hands-on activity:

    Based roughly on something presented in one of our sources the hands-on activity we are considering is to show the TCs an example of a Physics + Theatre activity they could use in their classrooms. Participants will build a structure, or prop, from given materials and use that prop and apply tension. They would also model tension building in a skit, perhaps related to emotion or relationships. While there might not be enough time for drafting the entire skit and building the structure the class will get to see what an activity would look like.[See Sheldon's Blog for further elaborations].