Reflection on Inquiry: Circuits

Banchi and Bell (2008) state that a structured inquiry activity is one in which “the question and procedure are provided by the teacher; however, students generate an explanation supported by the evidence they have collected” (p. 26). In my inquiry lab on circuits, the question that students are answering is “How can you make the bulb light?” I have not provided the students with a procedure for lighting the bulb, but I am not requiring the students write a procedure either. It is possible that this lab would actually be classified as a guided inquiry activity because of the lack of procedure. Students are required to experiment, generate an explanation of how they were able to make the bulb light, and collect evidence of how circuits work.

Our opening "engage" discussion about what a circuit is and how a flashlight works was successful and enlightening. The students knew much more about flashlights and how they operate than I suspected. They were able to draw on their previous knowledge of positive and negative charges and apply that knowledge to the batteries and how they work; why the positive and negative terminals had to touch and why it could not be negative to negative or positive to positive.

Students had a hard time transferring the information they discussed about what a circuit is to the lab activity. Students were not creating "circular" circuits. Many of their circuits were line segments and their bulbs were not lighting. Students were getting frustrated when they could not get their bulbs to light. After letting the students struggle with their materials they were able to figure out how to get the bulbs to light and would shout out exclamations of joy such as "It's lighting!" or "We did it!" The amount of time that was required for my students to complete the explore activity was more that I realized. Students needed closer to 20 minutes to complete the explore activity as opposed to the 5 minutes that I had originally allowed in my plan. Because of this additional time, we were unable to complete the elaboration activity and will be completing that portion of the activity tomorrow. At the conclusion of our explore lab I had the students draw one of their circuits on the SmartBoard and we discussed problems that we encountered with the circuits and discoveries that we made. Student discussed the problem of not creating a circuit but a line, they discussed not having the correct part of the bulb touching the battery and the wire (we elaborated on this idea and discussed how a light bulb works), and some groups hypothesized about adding extra bulbs and extra batteries to their circuits.

When I plan inquiry labs in the future I will set aside more time in my planning for the explore activity and will allow ample time for the elaboration process as well. It was very difficult to allow my students to struggle through the creation of their circuits but being patient and not providing them with information showed that they could work through it and this made it easier for me to do in the future. This experience further demonstrated to me that I cannot take my students knowledge, or lack of knowledge, for granted and I should not assume anything about their prior experiences.

Overall, I feel the lesson went well. I performed this lesson with all six of my classes and was able to fine tune the lesson as the day progressed. We discussed a lot of real-world applications of circuits and I feel this helped the students retain the information better and take a more invested interest in the explore activity.

The students were able to successfully create their circuits, find new ways to make the circuits, and finally draw their circuits. Students were able to explain their drawings orally, ask pertinent questions about circuits and their applications, and feel confident in their ability to use their knowledge of circuits to solve the "circuit puzzles" in tomorrow's elaborate activity.
Additional time is needed for exploration and elaboration. In the future, I would like to give each lab table a flashlight so that they can explore the parts of the flashlight up close. Maybe we would discuss the flashlight and how it is a circuit before hand, and then have them explain how the flashlight works in detail after they have been able to create their light bulb circuits. Possible revisions could include having students hypothesize about and draw what configuration they think will make the light bulb light and then have them test their hypotheses using the equipment.
 

References
Banchi, H., & Bell, R. (2008). The many levels of inquiry. Science and Children, 46(2), 26–29.

The Melting Icebergs
I would like to begin by stating that I have a multitude of concerns regarding the semantics that are used throughout this activity. The title is “Melting Icebergs,” however throughout the activity mention is also made to “polar ice caps” (pp. 3-5) and “glaciers” (p. 3) (Laureate, 2010). All three of these terms are different and have different implications on world-wide water levels should they melt. According to Dictionary.com (2010), an iceberg is “a massive body of floating ice that has broken away from a glacier or ice field,” a polar ice cap is “either of the regions around the poles of the Earth that are permanently covered with ice,” and a glacier is “a large mass of ice moving very slowly through a valley or spreading outward from a center.” These definitions indicate that icebergs are present in the water, polar ice caps are found both on land and covering water as one pole is covered by land (Antarctica) while the other is covered by water (Arctic Circle), and glaciers are only found on land. The results of this experiment would be very different if we were to simulate all three different situations, as would the world-wide effects. Since this activity simulates only what would happen if floating ice (icebergs) were to melt, that is what I will address in my response, despite the fact that the question asks, “What happens if the polar ice caps melt?”

If icebergs were to melt there would be no overall effect on the water levels world-wide. I know this to be true, even before I experiment, because the ice that is floating in water has already displaced its volume. Because the icebergs have already displaced their volume, there will be no increase in volume in ocean water and no rise in water levels. This can be seen when you have ice in your drink. When the ice cubes melt, there is not more liquid in your glass; the glass does not overflow.

Questions I have about this inquiry activity are, were the authors of this activity trying to confuse the children who would be performing this activity? Was the intent to make the teachers studying this activity look at the wording used critically and see the discrepancies in the activity? Did the authors of this activity have a hidden agenda in which they want us to believe that melting ice at the poles would not have the world-wide effects that are commonly believed by scientists? My father is very much a right-winged republican and this is the sort of activity that he would have me do to “prove” to me that even if the ice caps were to melt, it would not have the drastic effects that us “crazy liberal scientists” believe. Did the authors of this activity design it to make us question the activity or did they really believe that it was a valid experiment to explore the consequences of melting ice caps? Questions I have about implementing this into my classroom are, how would I be able to preserve enough ice to make this activity possible in class? Would my students have enough background knowledge about all of these different concepts to come to the same conclusion that I have? What activities would we need to do beforehand for them to see the errors that I saw?
 
References
Dictionary.com, LLC. (2010) Definitions retrieved on March 21, 2010 from http://dictionary.reference.com.

Laureate Education, Inc. (2010). Melting Icebergs Experiment. Baltimore, MD.

The 5 E's Strategy

When I began the lesson planning process this week I was a little overwhelmed. Seven pages of lesson plan template were daunting to me. My regular lesson plans are very thorough and often times are three to four pages long which, by most teachers’ and administrators’ standards, is excessive. So you can image my astonishment to see that our lesson plan this week was beginning as a seven page template.
I did find the 5 E’s Strategy to be helpful in this week’s lesson planning. The 5 E’s is a strategy with which I was already familiar, however it is a strategy that is relatively new to me and I had not yet had the opportunity to carry it out in my classroom. What I appreciate about the 5 E’s strategy is how it begins with a hook into learning. The 5 E’s strategy starts with a students’ prior knowledge or a fairly simple engaging demonstration, maybe a discrepant event, and gets the students excited and engaged in what they will be exploring. Because students are already invested in the content, it makes it very easy to keep the students on task and focused on their lesson because they are already invested in learning more about this baffling event; they want to know how the magician performed their trick, so to speak. I also like the way that the 5 E’s strategy allows for exploration of each topic followed by explanation (Buxton & Provenzo, 2007). It is critical that students be able to reflect on their own findings and make new understandings from what they have experienced because it allows students to process for meaning (Hammerman, 2006)
The 5 E’s strategy was different from the methods that I typically take during lesson planning because I typically work from an over-reaching theme or question, plan activities that can help the students grasp the concepts and work with the vocabulary from those big ideas, and then after exploration we debrief about all of our activities and create meaning together. We very rarely elaborate or extend on our concepts due to time constraints, and often times, the explanation process happens many days after the exploration because the students are exploring different topics on multiple days. I think that more immediate explanation would help the students make more immediate connections to prior knowledge.
If I were to implement the 5 E’s strategy into my everyday lessons, I would be most concerned with the time constraints that would hamper these types of activities. To incorporate the 5 E’s strategy thoroughly and properly, it would take at least 2 days of class instruction for each lesson that was taught. To remedy the time constraints while still being able to teach all of the content, power standards as discussed by Dr. Reeves or paring back the curriculum, as referenced by Project 2061 would be essential (Laureate, 2010; AAAS, 2009).

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