That being said, I can't just do straight up lecture, drill and kill. So I try different things, some work and some don't. In AP Enviro there is a lot more to experiment and try new things because the curriculum is problem based and fits well with a problem based learning approach (PBL).
On Twitter a while back I saw a post (maybe Alice Keeler?) about having students write an email. Other posts commented on how difficult it was for students to communicate in written form beyond a "text" lingo. At the time I thought it sounded like a good way to have students create an authentic writing that would actually be helpful in the real world. The thought went away until last week.
Dave Burgess mentions in his book "Teach like a pirate" that creativity is not something you have or you don't, you need to cultivate it. And by being open to new ideas you might find a new idea pop into your head. (totally my paraphrase on the subject)
A few weeks ago my husband and I bought a new camper trailer and were being given the walk through with the service technician inspiration struck, sort of. The tech was showing how to pull the plug on the hot water tank and showed us the metal core that keeps minerals from clogging up your tank by attracting them to this core. As he continued I thought "that's electrochemistry! Just what we are studying in AP chem!" I didn't get a chance to think much past this until a couple weeks later.
Confession: I'm a crappy lesson planner. I don't like to plan each step of each lesson. I know the big picture, I know the pathway but I resist planning each detail. One day during lunch I was thinking of the electrochemistry problems I should assign my AP chem students and thinking of alternatives. Then I remembered the water heater discussion! I wrote an email from a concerned customer who was having problems with her hot water heater. Here is the letter.
I instructed my students to read the email and reply in a thoughtful manner, reminding them that the customer was a biologist who wanted to know how her hot water works. This was met with some resistance and whining. Students complained they had no idea how a hot water heater works, or what could be wrong with one. I pointed to their chrome books and said research it.
What happened was interesting. First they started to research reluctantly then they started to talk about what could be happening with the hot water heater. They asked for my help in clarifying things and I asked them to think back to solubility and why some elements would precipitate out and build up in a hot water heater. Then I saw back and listened to these bright students pull the things we had been learning all year long into an explanation. Some letters were better than others and some really went into detail like this one.
The results of my experiment:
- instead of just doing more calculations students were actively engaged in talking about chemistry
- they were retrieving information we had learned last trimester and applying it in a new way
- they were writing about chemistry and reinforcing what they had learned
Overall, positive results. As a teacher, hearing my students talk on their own about chemistry and figuring it out this was one of the best lessons I had witnessed. It was also a lesson that I gave them very little information and direction.
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