Arts Education

My school is focusing on vocabulary instruction this year with the hope of increasing academic gains in several areas. To that end, I was asked to design an inservice with one of my colleagues for our staff to show how we could use blended learning tools to discretely teach vocabulary this year. Because my standard vocabulary approach had been to merely tell my students the meaning of a word and then keep teaching, I was surprised to be asked to lead this one. Still, I viewed it as a chance to learn something new and dove in. Last week completed the seventh session of this professional development that included an introduction to vocabulary instruction, a station rotation of Marzano strategies, and vocabulary centers. Our first portion of the inservice introduced the idea of tiered  vocabulary. We used  Pear Deck  to acquaint our peers with Tier 1, 2, and 3 vocabulary words. Tier 1 words are words the students come to us knowing. Tier 3 words are the content-specific word...

Last year I did a lot of writing about asking students to draw models of particles to demonstrate their understanding of chemical concepts. I started this about ten years ago with my PLC and I always gain insight into my students' ideas when I look at their drawings. Drawing has become a regular part of my chemistry class and is incorporated on almost every test. To that end, last week my students read about the classification of matter (elements, compounds, and mixtures). The next day in class they took an open-note quiz. I provided particle pictures and they had to answer questions about the pictures, like "Which one represents a mixture of two elements?" and so on. I have done something similar in past years as a check of their reading comprehension. What follows has been a guided notes activity and some demonstrations for extra emphasis. This year, instead, I split the students into three groups based on their quiz scores and provided differentiated learning experie...

This weekend marks the end of my first ten days with students who have MacBook Airs as part of our 1:1 initiative this year. Overall, the first ten days have been good - the students are bringing their devices to class and they are charged and ready to go, for the most part. Some days we have used them a little, some days we haven't used them at all. In a perfect world, technology saves time. What I am struggling with, though, after these first ten days, is the time I am losing to using technology. How do I make time for this change? On day 4 we do a quick review of the scientific method, followed by our first lab of the year. Because we had the MacBooks at our disposal, I used Pear Deck to gauge their understanding of what they read the night before. Pear Deck is great - kids sign on with their Google info, so it is fast - and can be used as an easy student response system. I wasn't really presenting information, just asking questions and seeing answers through Pear Deck . W...