Getting a worksample back is so exciting! I saw it in my inbox this evening and it was the very first thing I clicked on. I'm quite thrilled with the response. Being as this site is partly my journal, and thus hopefully accessable from anywhere, I've posted his comments below.
Work Sample #2
Comments from Kip Ault
June 6, 2005
Jessie Bader
Electricity and Magnetism
Dear Jessie,
Your class is academically very diverse: mostly males, 9 TAGs, 5 IEPs, 3 ESLs, 1 ADHD, 1 severely disabled, and a full range of academic achievement among the rest.
Indeed, young humans are social creatures.
You have made the curriculum sound very inviting. Once again, I note the great detail in your WS regarding accommodations for diverse learners. You will bring knowledge and skill in this regard to your first year of teaching and I encourage you during interviews to make this point.
Clearly, with Bonnie in charge, the science curriculum is exemplary on a national scale.
Your coverage of standards is exhaustive. Sometimes I hear feedback that the LC program is not doing as much as it should to help new teachers prepare to teach in a standards based environment. Work samples in science are evidence to the contrary; especially yours. It includes the Bernstein requirements that makes creating central to learning. This dimension is not captured in the NSES or Oregon benchmarks.
Great content outline. Your WSs have impressed upon me the great range of content knowledge you can work comfortably with-a true asset to middle school teaching and much needed in many schools.
Good focus questions; careful with the series and parallel comparison. Better: in what situations would wiring in series be useful? In what situations would wiring in parallel make sense?
By the way, students often have worked with magnetism and seen the concept of a magnetic field represented in 2, but not 3, dimensions. What is the shape of the earth's magnetic field? Probably something like a doughnut.
Your rubric emphasizes error rates as a means to ranking student understanding. Keep in mind how performing tasks may suggest such rankings as well-with tasks being thought of in a hierarchy of difficulty. For example, a simple task is to identify whether a circuit is open or closed. A complex one is to describe which elements of a circuit are arranged in parallel (the batteries, for example) and which are arranged in series (the light bulbs, for example).
Admirable shift in scores captured by your graphs!
I really have no good understanding of how or why magnetic fields come into existence either. Force is a useful idea even without knowing why it exists. It helps us to predict interactions at a distance given knowledge of material properties.
Energy is a slippery idea. You might enjoy reading a paper I wrote about children's conceptions of energy two decades ago. Energy makes change happen or at least makes change possible. What may change? Temperature. Position. What is mysterious about energy is its conservation. After changes occur, if we sum up our measures of energy, we find none lost and none gained. Of course, measuring energy is a conceptual challenge in itself.
One of the best pieces every written about the nature of conceptualizing energy in the context of simple electrical circuits was a chapter in Driver's book, Children's Ideas in Science. The chapter on circuits explains some of the conceptual confusions inherent to this topic. Current is constant; voltage is not. Voltage means the potential to accelerate charge; current is charge in motion. A circuit dissipates energy-converts electrical energy to heat and light and chemical change. I think paying attention to series and parallel circuits and how current divides or not or meets resistance or not within the circuit is about as far as middle school thinking about this subject can be expected to progress.
It is a "tennis game" topic. When you play tennis with a good player, your game improves. When students do electrical circuits with a teacher who knows the subject well, their knowledge improves.
Your year at Jackson has taught you the potential for learning physical science in a meaningful way by most students at the middle school level. This is a wonderful image to carry into teaching; you are most fortunate.
As for modifications, I recommend simply keeping the concepts introduced closely tied to the experiences shared. Introduce no more concepts than needed to account for (make predictable) the phenomena of interest observed: bulb brightness, battery temperature, etc. Use drawings to represent these ideas. Have students talk about what their drawings or diagrams explain.
Thank you for an eloquent statement on science literacy. Ownership, wonder, and community. I would add one more: skepticism. Scientific communities have institutionalized skepticism: they ask, "how good is the evidence?"
I note that each of your components of science literacy has multiple levels of interpretation. The community exists as a classroom, the neighborhood, and set of practitioners.
You have written a very compact, very meaningful statement. I hope an interviewer asks you about your philosophy of science teaching. Your answer, based on this essay, could land you a job.
Sincerely,
Kip Ault
