Interactive Notebooks with Training Wheels

An essential component to our new curriculum will be the use of Interactive Science Notebooks (ISN).  If you are among the uninitiated, check out the works of Kelly Marcarelli, Lori Fulton, and Brian Campbell.  .  I have also created a Pinterest board full of ideas to get you started.  

After conducting professional development for about 2000 teachers, I realized I needed to adopt a hybrid model to bring the other 5000 over to "light side".  There will always be a place for authentic ISNs in classroom, but I have to wean everyone off of worksheets first (#Death2Worksheets).   Thus the model I have adopted brings in the best of both worlds.  

It has the structure of traditional ISNs but built with efficiency in mind.     Traditional ISNs utilize some classroom time to building the ISN including paste-ins, foldables, and data tables.  These are all valuable tasks, but when there is only 30 minutes of instructional time (K-2 in my world), I want to make every minute focused on collecting and anything the data rather than making the data chart.  

To the purest out there that are now scowling,  I know what you're saying.  Learning how to build a data table is an instructional tasks.  Yes it is, but in NGSS the words "with guidance" appear quite a bit it the K-2 practices.  As we move to grades 3-5, the pages will get more open-ended.  Now, back to the show.  

There a couple of ways to sum up our model.  It still uses the left-right format, but when I first tried telling teachers that the output was on the left more than a few screams were heard.  So after some consultation with my friends in the 6-12 world (middle and high schools have used ISNs for many moons in my district),  a rephrasing of the model was developed.  

 

On the left side, the student is talking to the teacher.  On the right side the teacher is talking to the student.  Another way to look at this is through the lens of the 5E model.

                          

At the start of the lesson, students are asked to demonstrate what they know (or think they know).

During the lesson, students engage in understanding some phenomena.  This encompasses Exploration and Explanation.  Towards the end, students demonstrate their new understanding through a summative evaluation.  I sometimes have a hard time separating the elaboration from the evaluation because in many cases, they both require students to apply what they know.  For those of you writing SLOs, the left page captures where a student started and how far they have grown by the end.  

This is not THE way.  Everyday, this model evolves a little as we build the ISNs to compliment the curriculum.  Below, are a couple of the pages currently in production for the field test next year. I produce these using Publisher.  Our printshop copies and distributes to the schools.

K:Weather and Climate

K:  Pushes and Pulls

Lastly, as we move into grades 3-5, I am looking for a digital version to replace the paper based model for K-2.  I am having a hard time finding an efficient way for students to put down their ideas. As always, please comment.  Don't take my word for it.  Question everything.  

A Look Back on Two Weeks of Curriculum Writing

The dust has settled on curriculum writing.  My regiment of writers have started their vacations and I am left with a full Dropbox Don't worry.  I also have everything backed up on at least two flashdrives.  You only make that mistake once.  The files include unit level documents such as the scenario, unit outline, and pre/post assessments.  More importantly, there are a series of files for each lesson.  This includes the teacher lesson plan, student storyboard, interactive notebook pages, and lesson assessment.  The student storyboard is a draft document I will use to create learning objects for our learning management system.

Trying out hands on experiments is one of the perks of curriculum development

The objects will be composed in SoftChalk.   This program allows me to embed a variety of media.  The variety allows for a more personalized learning experience.  This even extends to the text on the page.  When a student clicks on a highlighted word, a definition or image will appear.

As we begin to think about a fully digitized curriculum, one of the big rules we came up with was "Device When Appropriate" or DWA.  I initially found  that my writers felt compelled to develop some digital asset for each lesson.  After talking with them about their lesson, it quickly became apparent that it was really not needed in all lessons.  In a number of lessons, it could also be a huge problem.  Think about a hands-on lesson involving water, soil, or chemicals.  One spill and you lose a computer.  Additionally, I am loathe to replace hand-on experiences with digital ones.  Experiments always work in the digital world.  Kids need to grapple with the gremlins inherit to science and engineering experimentation.

Sometimes a mirror is the best device to use

Many of you are familiar with interactive notebooks and are probably confused by the inclusion of them in my list of developed materials.   I've worked to convert teachers from a worksheet based format to interactive notebooks.  Until I can get everyone acculturated to using notebooks, I wanted to provide some training wheels.  The sample below gives you an idea of what is provided.  These pages are copied and bound in small books for each unit.

Each lesson would use two pages.  It starts on the upper left side with students being asked what they already know about the topic.  The right side constitutes the instructional side of the lesson.  At the end of the lesson, the the student is prompted to show what they now know as a result of the lesson.  The beauty of this format is teachers can see where students started and where they grew by the end of the lesson.

Lastly, perhaps the most important realization I had was the tendency of teachers to write curriculum which directs students to a single answer for a problem.  All the problems we wrote into our units are fairly open-ended in how they can be "solved".  I have attributed this tendency to twelve years of brute-force convergent thinking where all problems were solved with A,B,C,D, or E.