National Board Certification Post 1: Planning Instruction

As I embark on the National Board Teacher Certification process, I am using this space to post some of my work and thoughts. Component 2 of the process is a portfolio documenting Differentiation in Instruction. This portfolio is intended to demonstrate how instruction is differentiated in unit.   There are multiple pieces to the portfolio to document the process and the results including Instructional Context, Planning of Instruction with Activity Samples, Analysis of Student Work with Samples, and Description of the Summative Assessment. In this post, I'd like to focus on the Planning of Instruction.

Before I do that, though, here is a little snippet from the instructional context. The class that is being featured is a general physics course with 25 students. The students are in grades 10 and 11. Their ages range from 16 to 18 years. Twenty one of the students were in-person learners and 4 were attending virtually. This is a general algebra based introductory physics course. The course is fully inclusive. Four students in course have identified learning disabilities including ADHD, EBD, difficulties with written language, and executive functioning disorders. The limitations in the ability to do hands-on and group laboratory activities due to COVID-19, required some rethinking of activities. These included activities that students could complete on their own whether they were in person or virtual. This led to the leveraging of digital resources for experimentation and collection of data in labs.

What follows is the a description of the Planning of Instruction. I've embedded example of instructional materials where appropriate.

The unit which I have chosen to focus on is energy. Specifically, we are focusing on the law of conservation of energy. The major goals for this unit related to conservation of energy include: 1) Students carry out investigations in order to identify and quantify forms of energy present before and after a transformation 2) Students analyze data in order to identify and quantify forms of energy present before and after a transformation 3) Students can construct explanations based on data before and after a transformation related to the law of conservation of energy.  Energy is a key topic across all science fields. The topic of energy is one of the Crosscutting Concepts identified in the Next Generation Science Standards and Wisconsin State Science Standards. Conservation of Energy and Energy Transformations is a Disciplinary Core Idea identified by both the NGSS and Wisconsin State Science Standards. Going beyond simple knowledge is key to the NGSS science practices. The ability to investigate, analyze, and provide explanations are 3 key science practices connected to this science content. With energy conservation, we have the ability to study systems that connect directly to ideas students have learned in biology and chemistry coursework. Biology and chemistry are courses that the majority of students have completed before physics.

This sequence of the unit was as follows: 1) Lecture on gravitation potential, kinetic, and conservation of energy 2) Practice options related to this lecture 3) Energy skate park activity 4) Energy review via kahoot 5) Mini-Marble roller coaster activity  6) Mass and springs activity 7) Elastic energy lecture 8) Practice options related to this lecture 9) Energy quiz 10) Autodraw energy transformations activity 11) Popper lab 12) End of unit assessment.  

Over the years, I have learned that the majority of students encounter kinetic and potential energy in their middle school science classrooms but have significant gaps in their memory of it.  Since many students have been exposed to the concepts of potential and kinetic energy at some point in their schooling, the lecture at the start of the unit attempts to elicit these ideas and build on this prior knowledge. 

In lecture, the presentation tool Pear Deck is used to allow students to interact live with the presentation. By logging into the Pear Deck presentation session, students are able to see the presentation on their individual device, for the majority of students this is a school issued Chromebook. They can then respond to prompts during the presentation via their device. This allows me to see individual student responses to questions I pose to the class as we are progressing through the lecture. I am able to see instantly who is understanding the current content and who is struggling based on lecture questions in real time. After providing content via lecture, students choose 2 practice options from a menu to more fully engage with the material. Practice options include, but are not limited to, guided practice with the teacher, problem sets, simulations, videos, quiz games, and reading connected to the content. 

This pick 2 practice gives students the opportunity to use the lecture as a launchpad to dig deeper into the content. The path they take is related to their comfort with the content. This pick 2 practice also gives students the opportunity to experiment with different modes until they find the ones that match best with their learning preferences. The preferred option may change if students struggle with a specific piece. But, this is an important opportunity for students to be more aware of how they learn and work with information best. The guided practice is designed for those who may have struggled with the content during the lecture or would like more teacher prompted practice. These options include ones suggested by students from end of unit surveys from past units. This ensures that the choices given to students are driven by student voice. 

While the lectures provided opportunities for introduction to the content and working with it, the activities and experiments provide opportunities to apply science skills such as data collection and analysis related to forms and conservation of energy. There were multiple opportunities for formative assessment throughout the unit to determine individual student progress including the practice options and the energy quiz. The activities that are being featured in the portfolio entry are energy skate park activity, mass and springs activity, and popper lab. Each of these activities involves a different energy transformation and the application of the law of conservation of energy. All lab activities are created in Google Slides rather than Google Docs as it allows for easy integration of different modes of communication such as insertion of audio, video, and images. Slides also makes it easy to add and annotate images or create drawings on a slide. Leveled templates are used for lab reports. For those that would benefit from scaffolds with mathematics or writing, those are included in the template. This year, there were differentiated templates created that included scaffolds and different templates created for students who were virtual when needed based on the activity. Students receive their own copy of the template through a Google Add-on called Docotpus. 

Energy Skate Park Template 

Energy Skate Park Template - Differentiated

Mass and Spring Template 

Mass and Spring Template - Differentiated

Popper Lab Template 

Popper Lab Template - Differentiated

The major issues in teaching conservation of energy are both conceptual and mathematical. In terms of their conceptual understanding, students may not think of energy as being conserved because in most of the transformations they encounter some energy is dissipated so they may not “see” it anymore. In our initial stages of understanding the law of conservation of energy, we ignore dissipated energy to make the transformations more clear and easy to understand. In many cases, this can cause a disconnect between what is taught in class and what they have experienced in the world. Mathematically, a major challenge is dealing with formulas that involve exponents as are found in kinetic and elastic potential energy. 

The use of simulations like energy skate park have helped us meet the conceptual challenges by visualizing the energy transformation and seeing what it would look like with and without dissipated energy. The use of guided practice and scaffolds in templates have helped with the deployment of mathematics. We never apply a formula in a lab until a learner has been exposed to and has the opportunity to practice with it. In addition, for those students who struggle with algebra, their lab templates have scaffolds built in to help guide them through the calculations. 

Student assignments are submitted via our Learning Management System, Canvas. Rubrics are set up in Canvas for the 4 major Science Practices: Carrying Out Investigations, Data Analysis, Using Mathematics, and Constructing Explanations. The rubrics for each assignment are posted on the submission page. As these same practices are used throughout the year, students gain familiarity with them over time. The key is applying them to the different content across units of instruction. Beyond a simple rubric score, comments are left in the digital submissions students make if they fail to meet the standard on an assignment. Students can then address the feedback and resubmit and their submission will be rescored. 

It was tough trying to get all of my thoughts and instructional design process into the page requirements. Once I got writing I felt like I could keep on going. But at some point, I had to stop and so I did. The next section of this portfolio will focus on analyzing student work across the 3 chosen instructional activities.