new meeting date

Hi Cathy and Mark,

Any chance we could meet in the middle of the day 11:30 ish before November 15, as that is when I start coaching. If you want to come by next week on Tuesday my B2 and B3 classes are sharing their edible cell models and working on a cell game they are making. On Friday the students in my A3 class will be playing their cell games to review for an upcoming quiz. These are two other projects that the students tend to get excited about. The week of 11/12 we will be starting the egg lab, which you might find interesting as well.

Judy

Meeting date

Hi Cathy and Mark,

Let's put on our calendars that we will meet on Tuesday 10/30 at 11:30 over lunch to discuss my ideas for the year. I am looking forward to your feedback, as I am continually changing my ideas on what I want to try with my classes to get them to share their excitement about a science topic relevant to what we are studying. Thanks for coming to my classes and I look forward to more visits!

Judy

first steps

Hi Cathy and Mark,
Please take the time to read Asha's summary of my meeting with her this morning. I would love to hear your thoughts. I thought I would start by having both of you visit a class in which I get the students excited by doing a lab on the topic we are studying. I am going to have the students do a lab on plant and animal cells starting on Thursday 10/11( B3-2:30-3:45) and on Friday 10/12 (A3-2:30-3:45). My B2 class will do this on Monday 10/15 (10-11:15). We will start with the students looking at an animal cell and we actually have them get a sample of cells from their cheeks, quite fun! If you can be watching for what gets the students excited and give me feedback that should help me start to think about the tools/skills the students need to get excited on their own about a topic. I would love to brainstorm ideas with both of you as well. Let me know if you can visit any of those classes, even just for part. Asha said she would cover for you if you need her to. I will begin the lab at the start of the class on 10/11 and 10/12. On 10/15 they will be taking a quiz first, so we won't get to the lab until 3. That's it for now here's to a fun and exciting year of discovery!
Judy

Judy's Excellent Adventure

Thanks to Cathy S (Bloggess extraordinaire) for getting the blog ball rolling. But really thanks to Judy, with whom I had an awesome conversation (face to face, no less) this AM. Judy is a really passionate learner--she gets excited by sea slugs who store photosynthesis in their little bodies; color-blind monkeys; and DNA in strawberries. She is excited by any opportunity to learn, as evidenced by how stimulated she was by her recent classroom visit from David A, who offered her objective feedback from which she learned. And  that's the key--she knows how to be excited. Certainly, Judy's classes already offer the kids myriad activities to experiment and build and delight in that which they don't know, but he goal is to help them recognize HOW to turn on the excitement-for-learning switch at any time. But the end of the year, Judy's kids, when asked what they learned in Mrs.Bailey's class, will say, "I learned about seas slugs, and color blind monkeys, and cheek cells, but most importantly, I learned how to be excited about things I might have previously found boring." If that's not a 21st century skill, I don't know what is. These are the kids who, like Einstein, will stay with problems longer, delve into areas yet unprobed, and become the innovators of their generation. They are real Milo-Post-Tollbooth learners. They are the people who get interested in something simply because it's really cool and fascinating.

Judy is planning to start by identifying the essential elements in this skill. Clearly, we hope the kids get excited, but we can't just say to them, "Go get excited." Judy is going to teach them how to do so by helping them understand what tools they need to employ to do so. She's planning to attach these elements to a long-term project for which the task is simply--Go find a topic that makes you excited and once you've learned everything you can, teach us about it in a way that makes us excited as well. In order to help them kids along, she's going to help them find the entry point to the project, help them recognize how to research using inquiry and resources, and choose a presentation format that best fits their topic and their audience. After all, there is no way to know something entirely until you have to effectively teach it.

Some big questions that Judy's ideas brought up for me:
How do I balance having them do it themselves for ownership and helping them find what they need to by proving them with the resources?
What are the elements that go into excitement? Curiosity? Passion? How do I teach these things?
How do I assess the project and the process?
How does collaboration fit into this?
How do I build in check points?

I am, for one, pretty excited about Judy's vision of excitement.

Woo hoo!

I'm excited to finally be a member of a blog I didn't create.

Judy: Mark and I were talking today at lunch about how we need to start planning class visits. When would be the best day/period for me to come in as we look ahead to the next few weeks?

I'm free from 10:55-12:30 and then from 1:25-2:10. I can also drop in some x periods. Let me know what works best for you.