In the interest of greasing the wheels of interdisciplinary work, we decided to start the year for all 10th graders with a statistics unit that will dovetail with work they will be doing in their Biology classes to design experiments and test null hypotheses using chi-square. All sounds awesome, except for the part where I haven't ever taught statistics before and haven't even looked at it since I took it in college myself a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Aack. I pestered just about all the stats teachers on twitter with questions, so hopefully, my plan for tomorrow isn't completely wrong and ridiculous. It's mostly adapted from The Pit and the Pendulum unit in IMP: Year 1, but amended to include more technology and be done in one day rather than several.
I have 45 minutes with each 10th grade class. As I usually do on the first day of school, I'm going to project a seating chart of groups and directions for doing a quick, individual writing activity so that I have time to go around, get names, and do administrative start-of-class stuff. This year, I'm going to be trying Google Classroom, so I'm going to have them join the class that I've already set up and complete the first assignment on there, which has a few questions for them to answer. My four questions are:
o Describe a class that you have really enjoyed – what was awesome about it?
o Describe a class that you did not enjoy – what was difficult or unpleasant about it?
o What are some questions that you have about the class?
o What are some questions that you have about me?
I'm going to collate the results and use them to structure the next few classes. I think that I originally got this idea from @delta_dc, who blogged about it here. I used it last year and I really liked how it transformed the description of the class and its procedures from a passive droning on by me to a more active engagement of coming from student questions.
Once this is done, I'm going to have students pair up within their groups and gather data on their pulse rate. They will record the data in a shared Google spreadsheet and play around with the charts available in there to analyze it. They will discuss in groups, then I will call on specific groups to share out their thoughts. The main discussion topics that I want brought up are:
o How can we represent this data?
o What might be interesting to find?
o How do we expect the shape of the frequency distribution to look? Why?
o What other variables might be distributed in a similar way? What variables do you think might be distributed differently?
o Why do we care about shapes of frequency distributions?
I will also try to work in some terminology related to normal distributions, measures of central tendency, samples and populations, and connect this content back to work that they did with probabilities last year. Depending on time, I will ask groups to debrief what makes for good groupwork and good class discussions either today or the next time that we meet because I really want to make sure that there is at least 5 minutes at the end of class for students to do an individual reflection, which they will also share with me through the Google classroom site.
The individual reflection will contain the following questions (students can choose to focus on one, two, or all of these):
o Something that I found interesting today
o Something that I found confusing today
o Something that I’m wondering about that is related to what we did today
This plan seems to contain all of the elements of a first day lesson that are important to me:
- something to start the class immediately to set the norm that we will start every class period with work
- a chance for students to share their prior experiences with me, which will help me plan better
- activities that use individual, pair, group, and class structures so that we can start setting norms for all of these and practice moving from one configuration to another
- learning of content that's central to the course
- a few different forms of technology, with which I definitely want students building familiarity
- end of class reflection
Excited to see how it goes and welcome and would appreciate any feedback!
Actual handout for group investigation:
UPDATE: Woot! Everything went better than expected! Kids were engaged and I got lots of interesting questions through the start of class Google survey. I also spontaneously decided right at the start of the group activity to do a "participation quiz" described by @samjshah, just not as a quiz, but as a way to give feedback to each group. I didn't categorize behaviors and comments/questions as positive or negative, just tried to record what I heard and saw objectively. It gave us a nice jumping off point to discuss group norms.
I did learn that when students complete a Google form that's part of an assignment, Google classroom doesn't count that as having turned in the assignment and continues to tell students that this assignment is due.
UPDATE: Woot! Everything went better than expected! Kids were engaged and I got lots of interesting questions through the start of class Google survey. I also spontaneously decided right at the start of the group activity to do a "participation quiz" described by @samjshah, just not as a quiz, but as a way to give feedback to each group. I didn't categorize behaviors and comments/questions as positive or negative, just tried to record what I heard and saw objectively. It gave us a nice jumping off point to discuss group norms.
I did learn that when students complete a Google form that's part of an assignment, Google classroom doesn't count that as having turned in the assignment and continues to tell students that this assignment is due.
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