In the past few weeks, I've continued to refine my student-led inquiry activities. With my physical science class, my goal was increase the amount of reflection students did during the experiment. To help this along, each group took a break at the beginning of the second day to reflect upon their data so far. The groups then split up and reorganized, so that students got a chance to get input from others on how to address any difficulties that came up. This seemed to help somewhat. There were some difficulties getting students to be open to conversation with people with whom they were not used to working, but there was some reflection shown, and the second day of experimenting went well. Similarly, for my year-long class, we're splitting the current experiment into two sections with an intermediate stage for additional research and narrowing of question. I'm hoping the second stage of the experiment will relate a little more closely to class content than the first stage did, and thereby show the students' learning.
I've also been incorporating some writing for thinking into the flow of the experiment. Our recent district PLC work gave some ideas on structuring writing, so I've been scaffolding the work for my students- having them start by answering simple questions, then working those answers together into a longer passage with more depth. My main difficulties come in convincing the students to think deeply about their work, though it seems that the ability of students to choose their own experiments is helping somewhat.
My next goals: continue to work on experiments that involve repeating and modifying technique, and continue developing thinking skills through writing. I'll address mixed-group uncomfortableness through other classroom activities. One technique I've used before that I want to reintroduce is having students design three experiments, then pick the most interesting to actually carry out. This seemed to make the students more interested in the final project that they chose.
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