​Human beings tend to find comfort in certainty, which is what drives us to draw conclusions and make predictions about the future. But our conclusions are often incorrect and our predictions often wrong, so how can science help us make them better? 

Well, it has to do with inductive and deductive reasoning. This post (and this week's video) will talk all about inductive reasoning, and I'll talk about deductive reason in another post soon. 

If I were to summarise my ultimate vision for my teaching career, it would go something like this: Students decide what they want to learn, students manage their own learning, computers do all of the repetitive tasks (including grading, come on AI!) and the teacher facilitates the process. Most of the resources that I develop have one of those four goals in mind, including the one below.

This resource has been through a couple of iterations; it started as a Google Doc that had some good ideas but felt a little boring. Then it became a Google Sheet with the goal of incorporating some automation, but which ultimately proved a little unwieldy. And finally, is now just the right length so as not to scare the kids, that pushes students to properly consider their learning goals, and provides a way for teachers to track and assess the progress of individual students.
​
It's not perfect, and after a first run through with my grade 8 students earlier this year I'm aware of some flaws, but I do think it's a neat encapsulation of the possibilities I see for student directed learning, and how it can be assisted with technology.

Task Sheet Template for Student Directed Learning

In my last post I mentioned that the tool that I'd constructing for walking students through the thinking required to effectively analyse data possibly created more problems than it solved. I'm hoping that I've fixed that by creating this Google Sheet that auto-populates certain cells with required information, rather than relying on students to follow a colour code system. This means they can focus more of their cognitive energy on thinking about the data, rather than the structure of the report. I'm planning to use this as a formative feedback tool, so I might add some more columns for comments in future, but here is the first draft.

Data Analysis Tool for Students

Something that I've struggled with since teaching the MYP is giving students clear instructions on what they should include on practical reports. As teachers, it can seem straightforward because we have the skills required to write holistically and because we have a deeper understanding of scientific concepts. But to a student that is learning scientific concepts while simultaneously learning a new style of writing the process of completing lab reports can be confusing, frustrating and intimidating. I've tried various tactics to try and ease the cognitive burden for them (links to clarifying documents, checklists, prompting questions, sentence stems) with varying results. I can't claim that this latest effort at scaffolding my student's thinking is any more effective for student learning than any of those other approaches. In fact, at first glance it may seem unnecessarily confusing. But I tried it out with one group of students and found that the process of grading was much simpler when their thoughts were more organised. The next variation on this idea will likely be a spreadsheet that autopopulates cells with the necessary information, rather than relying on the current colour coding system. More to come.

Analysing Data Step By Step

My wife, Jen, is the travel planner of the family. She has a real knack not only for finding the best deals and all of the must-see places, but also for keeping track of a lot of information on flight times, hotel bookings, people to visit etc. I'm not the best at all of that, so when it fell to me to plan our upcoming trip back home to Australia I knew I would need some kind of tool to keep track of everything.
I first tried the online travel planner tools like TripIt and TripCase but found that they weren't designed to show the information as a timeline in the way that I wanted. Next I went to Microsoft Office Timeline, but with the free version you can only input ten events. Lastly I tried the templates available on Microsoft Excel, and while they ultimately proved a little unwieldy overall, they did give me some ideas for how I might design my own timeline tool using a scatter plot.
So I spent a couple of hours last Saturday putting this thing together. The only bug that I haven't been able to fix is the automatic scaling of the x axis when the dates are changed. It's frustrating but not too difficult to fix manually. And as you can see, the trip is coming along nicely!

(The dates have been changed from those of the actual trip for privacy)

​Travel Planner Timeline

When I started at my current school the focus of the curriculum was fairly content heavy and was presented to me as a list of knowledge targets for students to hit. This approach to planning didn't sit well with me because I couldn't see the consideration that had gone into choosing those particular outcomes. I wanted to know if they had been chosen because they were a useful thinking skill, knowledge required for completing MYP assessments, because they were scaffolding knowledge required for the DP, or for any other of a multitude of reasons.
So I came up with a plan for categorising the learning outcomes that were listed with the aim of identifying redundancies or areas where the focus had become too specific (one of the units had 30+ outcomes). I realised that once this information was logged, it wouldn't take too much effort to turn the data into a curriculum map that showed where certain skills (thinking, problem solving, ICT etc.) were being taught and where there might be gaps.
The final result of all of this was the three documents below.
The first is a common unit planner that I imagined would be completed by a team. This is where you would input commonalities such as Key Concepts, ATLs and so on. Here is also where you would categorise learning outcomes into types of knowledge or skill, as well as which DP subject area they are related to.
The second is an individual unit planner which, when given the link to the common planner, would import all of the information from the common planner. Individual teachers could then develop their own learning activities while ensuring that they can hit the mutually agreed upon outcomes.
Finally, there is a curriculum overview document that, again when the unit plan links are added, imports the data from all common planners and turns it into a full curriculum map.

Common Unit Planner
Individual Unit Planner
Curriculum Overview Document

Unfortunately the idea was not well received when I presented it to my team. I thought that I was swimming with the tide in taking the documentation that we had and using that as a starting point, but it turned out that there was some disagreement about the idea of using a list of outcomes as the basis for planning a unit. I may have had more success in trying to overhaul the curriculum first.
That said, I do think that there is value in the idea, if not the current product. And I have a couple of thoughts for how it could be improved or re-purposed:

1. In a completely student directed unit, you could have the student list the things that they learned in completing a certain project or investigation. Ticking the boxes will help them reflect on the learning that occurred outside of the content. And if the matching with DP subjects occurred over a number of years, it would help them identify which DP subjects they would be most suited to.

2. I could invert the approach of using the teaching happening in the classroom to create a curriculum map, and instead create a curriculum map that automatically filters down to the unit plans. I'm currently working on an ATL Scope and Sequence that could form the basis of a map along with a set of SOIs and Key Concepts. This would ensure that teams were vertically and horizontally aligned with the things that I personally consider more important and would leave room for flexibility in the knowledge outcomes.

Back in teacher's college one of my professors introduced me to a system for arranging groups of students in a class of 30. It was designed so that each student would have a chance to work with every other student once, but would never work with the same student twice. After the thrill of baring witness to such an elegant system subsided, I decided I could make it a little better. So a few years ago I had a go at applying the same concept to classes of different sizes. More recently I used some recently acquired skills in Sheets to make the system a bit more user friendly. The end result is three separate sheets that can be used for groups of 9-18, 20-24, and 25-28 students.

How to use it:

1. Enter the student's names on the first tab.
2. Click on the tab that is closest to the number of students in your class without going under, and which corresponds to the desired group size. For example, if I had 14 students in a class and wanted groups of three, I would choose the tab called '3s out of 15'. *
3. Choose a mix number using the dropdown box in the left hand corner to change the groups.
4. OPTIONAL - Assign roles to students by typing them into the grey boxes underneath the mix number.

Jumble Chart 9-18 Students
Jumble Chart 20-24 Students
Jumble Chart 25-28 Students

* Note: One of my goals was for students to never be in a group with the same person twice, because of some complicated maths, there are only certain combinations of class size and group number that work.

I've been working with the MYP for around a year and a half now and so far I've found that for the most part it aligns very well with my own teaching philosophy. But that's not to say that the process of working within the framework is always straightforward. For me this has been most apparent when designing and grading MYP assessments. I'm completely on board with the philosophy, but often have trouble with the particulars. After finally wrapping my head around Criterion B and C assessments I decided to turn my attention to Criterion A. Like many teachers, I have previously worked in a system where tests were based on percentages and while I would make every effort to include problem solving and information interpretation questions, it was never specifically required. For me this made the process of designing and particularly grading an MYP test quite challenging. After a lot of consideration I decided that the best way to approach writing MYP tests would be to write a test as I normally would, but then have a system set up to track the achievement levels and strands addressed, and subsequently the performance of students on each question. At first I thought about learning to design a program to perform that task, but realised that if I designed it in Google Sheets I could use Google Classroom to distribute copies to students. So after locking myself away for a full Saturday, this is what I've come up with. It's only the first version and may have some bugs, but let me know if you think this could be a useful tool. Just save a copy to your own Google Drive and start planning a test.

MYP Test Planner and Grading Tool

Late last year I stumbled across a room filled with old electrical devices that were now obsolete but the school had yet to throw away. What caught my eye was a pile of old overhead projectors stacked up in the corner. My grade nine students were studying a unit on electricity at the time so I saw an opportunity and jumped on it. The directions were to take the projector apart and reassemble it as a new device, then submit it with a report that explains the purpose of the device as well as how the individual components (lights, fans etc) work. Some students took advantage of being allowed to bring in extra bits and pieces from home but overall the project was pretty successful.