November+30,+2009+class+notes

Discussion of self-documentation activity: Themes: plants, animals, food, nutrition, local environment What would you do with this? relating to tangible experiences in their real lives food and cooking: following a recipe, relating that to building something in the body, ingredients required; experimentation in cooking (see what happens), perfecting a recipe let students conduct own experiments at home (giving practice for culminating projects/science fairs, etc) at home products something wierd at home that you want to experiment with design experiments answering questions they have about those themes as a class, focus on one of the themes, come up with a list of questions that we have together about that theme and break up into groups to test them have an opportunity to share and see what other people are good at, learn about the people you work with poems written by ss talking about things that ss are good at, incorporating cultural backgrounds and relating it into science incorporating technology photography--different ways of presenting information various ways to bring in reports (storyboard) incorporate physics into biology (bike riding, physics of a car) on the survey: when do you do science in your life? Mostly blank sample answers: cooking, baking, burn stuff can do a daily opener: what science did you do today? history of things: science in other parts of the world assign activities or homework that allow them to incorporate cultural practices--making assignments geared around it--how to make it science related? going into your communities study of local communities in the classroom: developing communities different ways of learning having homework assignments based in the communities letting them talk about themselves and their experiences show them how science can be a part of their lives, incorporate those as examples in their teaching find a solution for your community or culture for a problem that you think some sort of scientific way you could approach something that you think could be improved have what they are learning be immediately applied to what matters to them it's not just to explore but to make the world a better place the impact--global impacts, it's not just right here, it goes out to the communities even in the interviews--I want to see something that matters to me, they want their science to be related to that
 * Science slides:**
 * Expertise slides**:
 * Cultural practices slides**

Reflecting on cultural aspects moving pictures around from science to the cultural piece hard time finding artifacts activities of people based on the effort I put into it based on my expertise: that is an artifact of my expertise hard to define what culture means, felt like I was more defining the culture of myself let myself redefine culture--night life, northwest outdoors-y person stretched my thinking even the things that you wear reflect a cultural aspect different aspects of culture like seeing people's pictures--makes my colleagues come to life outside of class finding commonalities between people

1. What is assessment? 2. Why do we assess? 3. What are challenges to assessment?
 * Talking about assessment**

Assessment is a way to tell what students know so that you can address instruction success and student success difficulty: telling the difference between your instruction weaknesses and student comprehension and effort checking if they "got it", making sure students comprehended the information correctly the school and parents: giving feedback to the students about how they're doing finding out where students are at (pre-assessment)--what do they have on this already? in what form is that knowledge? who is responsible for the assessment's outcome? Is it all the teacher's fault if the students don't get it? Where does the students' responsibility come into play?
 * 2: are we doing our job? how can we adjust to better serve students & their understanding?