Reflections on my year of Modeling Instruction

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.

Improvements To Be Made

• 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.

With all of this said, I still find Modeling Instruction far superior to traditional instruction.  I had wonderful evaluations by my administrators this year.  I found that the majority of the time, the days flew by for both me and my students.  I LOVED the biology curriculum and can't imagine ever going back to teaching biology the "traditional" way.  I feel like with a little tweaking, I can make the chemistry curriculum work wonders for my classes.  I can undoubtedly say that learning modeling instruction has made me a better teacher.

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!

Reflections On My First Biology Modeling Course

It's hard to believe I'm through with biology for the year!  The main indicator of how successful this course has been will be my students' EOC scores, both their individual scores and their growth scores based on their last science exam (middle school).

My general impression of the AMTA biology curriculum is positive overall.  Breaking it down further:

The Good

• Class periods seemed to fly by for both me and the students.  The majority of days, my students were working right up to the bell.
• Engagement was higher overall:  I had no students completely disengage and check out for any period of time, as I have in years past.  Everyone participated on some level every day, even if their greatest contribution for the day was writing on the white board in pretty colors.  It was rare for me to have to pry heads off desks or deal with students refusing to work.  Attitudes were generally better than average.
• I truly liked the sequence and how the curriculum told a story.  The units built upon each other in a logical manner, so we rarely left a topic completely behind to begin a new one.  I found the sequence far superior to how our biology textbooks and state standards are organized, which basically divides biology into three or four major chunks that don't feel connected at all.
• I also loved the lab first/inquiry format.  It made our labs a lot more meaningful.
• While still heavy on the worksheets, the exercises really forced students to think.  They couldn't just jump around and answer the easy questions, nor did they have those random "critical thinking" questions that you see on traditional textbook worksheets-- I despise those things.
• My socratic questioning skills have greatly improved-- that shows in my administrator evaluations.  I was scoring 4s and 5s out of 5 in questioning, where in previous years I was scoring 3s at best.
• I do feel like many of my students have improved their scientific reasoning skills and have a better grasp on biology as a whole than in years past.
• My students also seemed more comfortable about speaking up in class (although this was occasionally to my own detriment, ha!).
• I also feel like I covered my state standards better than I ever have in the past.  Although I don't know if that's a function of the modeling curriculum, or just general experience with teaching biology for several years now.  Ecology, testing for macromolecules, and dihybrid crosses were the only things that I needed to add to the existing AMTA lesson plans.  I did more justice to some standards that I have frequently glossed over (cough cough evolution).  

The Bad

• I had an achievement gap all year that I could not close for the life of me.  The majority of my students excelled, but some could not grasp anything we were doing (evident in the MBCI results for my standard biology class). Those students continued to fall further and further behind.  What is even more frustrating for me is that several of the students on the wrong side of the achievement gap were trying very hard-- most of them weren't your unmotivated slackers who have given up on school.  They were doing assignments, they were participating-- they just weren't improving AT ALL.  I have never experienced this problem to this degree.  I usually pride myself on being able to teach something to everyone.
• Along the same lines, I had more course failures this semester than I have ever had for biology.  Out of 58 students, I had 3 failures.  While that number isn't excessive per se, it is higher than usual for my classes.  Also, all of those failing students were female, which really has me scratching my head and wondering if there was a connection.
• I'm worried about my EOC scores.  Even my honors students thought the test was really hard.  My students in years past also have always thought the test was hard, yet did fine when their scores came back.  I guess I won't know until I see their quick scores in January.
• There was NOT enough rigor for honors.  Part of this is my lack of experience with honors:  I'm still trying to figure out how best to differentiate my standard and honors curriculum.  About half my honors students have 100% averages this semester, which is a little bit embarrassing.
• My classroom is usually a bit chaotic and informal-- that's just my personality.  The atmosphere of my classroom was even more chaotic and informal this year.  Usually, I don't mind so long as the students are on-task and learning.  But the chaos became a bit of a problem towards the end of the semester, when my students suddenly seemed to regress into elementary school behavior with the holiday break approaching.  To be quite frank, they have downright ticked me off over the past couple weeks with their immaturity.  I want them to enjoy learning and be comfortable enough to take risks in the classroom, but I also want them to know how to conduct themselves in college or a workplace.

Improvements to be made

• Pacing!  Now that I've done it once, I know that I really need to pick and choose activities at the beginning of the year.  I would rather have the time to do some of the more in depth reinforcement/model deployment activities in units 5-7 than waste so much time on units 1-3.
• Along with the pacing, I am still struggling to find a good balance for board meeting discussions.  They often got cut short by the bell, or drug on FOREVER in the case of my large class.  Board meetings became boring meetings many times, with students only talking when they were directly questioned.  In my ideal classroom, the board meetings would hopefully become more student-driven.
• I didn't assign textbooks this semester and I feel like I should have.  I go back and forth every year about assigning textbooks.  I don't have a classroom, so I can't just keep a classroom set handy.  This year, I had a cart with books that I brought to class when I planned on using them.  I don't rely on the textbook heavily, but I do think it would have been helpful for my lower achieving students to have it as a resource (or at least address the excuse, "I couldn't do the homework because you didn't give us a book!).  The problem with assigning textbooks is that the students conveniently never bring them to class when they need them.
• I feel like I needed more assessment-- exit tickets, more repetitive questioning, individual grill & drill practice, etc.  Don't get me wrong, I thought the included exercises were very strong, and all of the questioning and discussion gave me tons of opportunities for formative assessment.  I also included weekly quizzes and daily bell ringers.  But with so much group work and collaboration, my weaker students kept managing to trick me into thinking that they were improving when test results said again and again that they truly weren't.  After every test, I was at least partially surprised by the number of failures.
• I loved the interactive lab notebooks, but they needed more structure. I'm thinking maybe a vocab or concept check list given at the beginning of each unit to match up to what they're writing in their notebook??
• I need to figure out a way to best incorporate the concept of "the model" for biology.  I fell back into the PowerPoint trap a lot in the middle of the year.  This may be slightly easier for most topics in chemistry.

It is going to be really interesting with chemistry next semester:  I had very respectful and mature students this semester.  They were "game" to work and generally well behaved.  Next semester, I unfortunately already know of a lot of the students in my classes... let's just say I don't exactly have the cream of the crop.  On my roster there are a lot of students with regular disciplinary problems, a lot of truancy, and a lot of students with history of failure.  It's going to be a different classroom culture than this semester.  At the same time, I have several students that I also taught for biology last year with the traditional lecture/lab pedagogy.  Some were good students, some were dreadful students. I'm curious to see how they will react to the modeling curriculum and if it is reflected in their EOC and ACT scores.