Name: Karen Trine
Bio: After learning to love teaching while living in Africa and China with the Peace Corps, Karen settled in Chicago and has been teaching chemistry at Lane Tech for nine years. She sees science as a universal language for expressing wonder and joy, with the bonus potential for bridging cultural gaps.
Narrative of Amazing Teaching Moment:
Students begin this weighted average activity by working together as a whole class to calculate an average. The scenario is a farming analogy, where each student has welcomed a new litter of pretend piglets into the world. Note cards with cute photos representing the litters are distributed to each student, communicating how many pigs are in each litter. I reward the fastest of my five classes that correctly determines the average number of pigs per litter in our farming community.
One student summarizes her class’s method for calculating the average number of pigs per litter, then students brainstorm alternative methods. This opens the door to using a weighted average to determine the answer. Students usually resist this solution initially for being harder or more time consuming, but with a quick change of scenario, the value of a weighted average is evident.
Instead of imagining ourselves as farmers averaging pigs, we try to design a method for finding the average atomic mass of one particular element. Immediately, it’s obvious we could never collect all the atoms of an element in the whole universe. What’s doable though is analyzing a representative sample of that element to determine what percent is what isotope. With this percent composition data and our new weighted average skills, finding the average atomic mass of an element is easy. Students finally see where those decimal mass values on the periodic table come from! Student feedback indicates that learning weighted averages felt like finding the missing piece of a puzzle. Previous teachers assumed students knew how to do this, when in fact many didn't. Also mentioned was how practicing on familiar topics was nice because it made tackling isotopes less intimidating.
Hashtags: #studentchoice #pigs #weightedaverages #chemistry #atomicmass #competition #freeforall #organizedchaos, #LaneTech, #MSUrbanSTEM, #periodictable
Big 5 Ideas:
Bio: After learning to love teaching while living in Africa and China with the Peace Corps, Karen settled in Chicago and has been teaching chemistry at Lane Tech for nine years. She sees science as a universal language for expressing wonder and joy, with the bonus potential for bridging cultural gaps.
Narrative of Amazing Teaching Moment:
Students begin this weighted average activity by working together as a whole class to calculate an average. The scenario is a farming analogy, where each student has welcomed a new litter of pretend piglets into the world. Note cards with cute photos representing the litters are distributed to each student, communicating how many pigs are in each litter. I reward the fastest of my five classes that correctly determines the average number of pigs per litter in our farming community.
One student summarizes her class’s method for calculating the average number of pigs per litter, then students brainstorm alternative methods. This opens the door to using a weighted average to determine the answer. Students usually resist this solution initially for being harder or more time consuming, but with a quick change of scenario, the value of a weighted average is evident.
Instead of imagining ourselves as farmers averaging pigs, we try to design a method for finding the average atomic mass of one particular element. Immediately, it’s obvious we could never collect all the atoms of an element in the whole universe. What’s doable though is analyzing a representative sample of that element to determine what percent is what isotope. With this percent composition data and our new weighted average skills, finding the average atomic mass of an element is easy. Students finally see where those decimal mass values on the periodic table come from! Student feedback indicates that learning weighted averages felt like finding the missing piece of a puzzle. Previous teachers assumed students knew how to do this, when in fact many didn't. Also mentioned was how practicing on familiar topics was nice because it made tackling isotopes less intimidating.
Hashtags: #studentchoice #pigs #weightedaverages #chemistry #atomicmass #competition #freeforall #organizedchaos, #LaneTech, #MSUrbanSTEM, #periodictable
Big 5 Ideas:
- Student Generated Questions - When crafting questions themselves, students become invested and examples are authentic. Students develop confidence in new topics when able to step into the teacher role.
- Real World Examples and Applications - Lessons include concrete examples students have been exposed to in their day-to-day environment. This hooks the students and assists conceptual understanding.
- Kinesthetic Component - STEM learning incorporates movement or other types of hands-on activities which deepen understanding of a concept.
- Cooperative Learning - STEM learning requires different opinions and views for discussion. A cooperative group of students with different backgrounds will provide the different views.
- Multiple Modalities - Involves providing diverse presentations and experiences of the content so that students use different senses and different skills during a single lesson.