It's the last day of school for the students! One thing I love about teaching in Tennessee is getting done school before Memorial Day... although we pay for it when teachers have to report back at the end of July!
Let's talk about my experience with the Chemistry Modeling Curriculum:
The Good
- Scope & Sequence: While it needs some further tweaking to better match my state standards, I still find the scope and sequence far superior to the traditional textbook order.
- Motivation: My students, for the most part, worked well for me all semester. While they may have not been quite like the eager students I had for biology, I still did not have the typical complete shutdowns that I so frequently see with standard level students.
- Curriculum: I felt the majority of worksheets, assessments, and activities were really strong. There's a difference between having the students do a fill-in-the-blank textbook worksheet and actually having them draw out their thought process on paper. The latter describes the modeling curriculum assessments.
- Emphasis on Particles: I loved the constant connection back to particles. Don't get me wrong, many still struggled conceptually with the particulate nature of matter... but I really believe they struggled less than usual.
- Energy Bar Charts: I also grew to love the energy bar charts. I feel like that is a great way to have students thinking about energy and endothermic/exothermic processes. I hated them at first, but I honestly think they help even me better understand energy transfer.
- Improved Understanding: The students who "got it" seemed to really get it. In both biology and chemistry I had students achieving some of the highest individual EOC scores I've ever had in my career.
- Understanding of Labs: I still love the "lab first" style of pedagogy, as the students are making constant connections back to the phenomena they see in the laboratory. Also, I feel like doing the labs first improves their observation making and conclusion forming skills, since they don't truly "know" what they are supposed to be seeing from the get go.
- Engagement: My biggest criticism of the chemistry modeling curriculum is that it is not very engaging for your average, low-performing chemistry student. There are some great, engaging labs in the curriculum-- like the exploding can, the mass & change lab, describing chemical reactions, etc. But then there was this lull from the 2nd half of unit 1 through about unit 6 were there is nothing but demos or overly complicated/dull labs and complicated worksheets. Also, the videos and "discussions" were not well planned for the average teenager who doesn't give a darn about school or chemistry.
- Difficulty Level: I also thought a lot of the curriculum was too advanced for the average standard chemistry student: the vocabulary, the numeracy skills expected, the prior knowledge assumed, etc. I'm all for having high expectations and challenging students, but at the same time, you have to meet the students at their ability. The lesson plans read like they were written for an AP chem class, not a class full of ELL students or kids coming out of resource math. There were a lot of the notes, articles, and activities that I just could not use. Interestingly, I actually had the opposite problem with the bio curriculum. I thought it was just right for standard students, but too easy for honors.
- Math Pedagogy: The factor/label method used with the PVTn and BCA charts still makes zero sense to me. I didn't teach it, because to me, it seemed more confusing to teach someone who already struggles with math a totally new way to solve equations as opposed to reinforcing what they already know.
- Achievement Gap: This was a big one. The modeling curriculum created an achievement gap with both my biology and chemistry students. My brightest students thrived, while the lowest performing students just could not "get it." The low performing students appeared to do worse than they would have with traditional instruction. Some of these students who struggled are good students who do their work and try, they just have very weak critical thinking and conceptual skills. While the EOC class averages were still good, I had an increased number of EOC failures with the modeling curriculum, which is a HUGE problem that needs to be addressed.
- Scope & Sequence: While I like the scope and sequence, there are definitely some revisions that need to be made to work with a block-scheduled, single semester, EOC-based chemistry course. For example, I just did not like unit 1. Something about the way it was arranged made simple topics incredibly difficult. I think I damaged my rapport with many students right off the bat in unit 1. And then I had to cram a lot of incredibly important standards into my "unit 8," since those topics are not covered in the modeling curriculum until units 10-14. While I thought these topics worked well together at the end, I do need better pacing so I'm not flying through such critical topics with so little time. And then there's the fact that my students didn't even touch a periodic table into over halfway through the semester. There were points at this semester when I felt like my students were doing more physics than chemistry, which only bothered me because of our limited amount of time.
- Absences: At my school, standard-level juniors just don't come to school very much. They have cars, they have jobs, they are involved in extracurricular activities of all types, good and bad. It is SO hard to "make up" an inquiry-based lesson.
- Pacing/Sticking with "The Model": Pacing issues caused me to more or less abandon the modeling curriculum for quite a few topics.
I really want to take a Level II workshop this summer, but there aren't any in my area. I do have great intentions of taking some time to improve the curriculum for me next year.
One thing I'd like to do is go through the textbooks for biology and chemistry and align the chapters/sections to the modeling curriculum, since the obviously go in drastically different orders. I want to do this for a few reasons. Firstly, it will make my life easier for absent students. "Go read pages 20-25, and 141-144" is a whole lot easier than handing them a stack of random notes created in class. Secondly, I truly believe that textbook reading is a skill needed for college readiness. We barely got to read this semester in chemistry and I think my students are worse for it. Lastly, I feel like having the textbook connection may help some of my low performing students. I've noticed with most of these students, they take beautiful notes... but they just can't make the connections from them. Since so many of the low performing students have been victims of their education being only rote memorization, maybe referring to bold face words and chapters in the textbook will help them out.
Another thing I'd like to do this summer is to create a thorough PowerPoint for each unit that can be posted on my website. Last year, I posted all of my notes on my website in advance so students could print them out if they so desired. I ended up not liking that, because students would follow along on their technology devices instead of taking notes in class-- a good skill, but they weren't making the connections and recalling as well had they written it down. But, I do like students to have the ability to refer back to the PowerPoint in case they missed anything. I did not use PowerPoints consistently for every unit, and still don't really plan to do so, but I'd like to have them prepared.
I'm still not sure what else would be best to help my low performing students who fall into the achievement gap. Graphic organizers? Vocab lists? The chemistry curriculum has these pretty cool list of topics covered for each unit, but I found the wording on the lists a bit advanced for my students. I definitely plan to brainstorm more for next year! At this point in my career, I feel very blessed to be at a public school that has not yet mandated canned curriculum. It gives me the freedom to constantly improve my teaching skills!
