Watch from 0:20-10:201)

The first thing that stands out to me when I look at my SATIC sheet is that I don’t always lecture, but when I do I go on for about a minute. I know that I can be fairly long winded, and that can be a result of me trying to make sure that I am understood clearly.

I also noticed a tendency in the second five minutes to repeat the student comments. I believe that was primarily a matter of making sure I heard my students correctly, and I see it as a better alternative than asking my student to repeat themselves because it shows them that I was listening to what they said.

One thing I looked for when determining my patterns was what I may have done in the first five minutes and not done in the second five, or vice-versa. I noticed that in the first five minutes I asked several extended answer question, accounting for more than one in five of my utterances. I seem to have moved away from that once the students got further into the activity, as is evidenced by me not asking any more extended answer questions after I lectured to my students. I’m not sure which one it is, but I think it’s either because I felt that my students understood the concept well enough, or because I thought that they seemed particularly confused by those questions. Neither option is an excuse not to ask extended answer questions, but it is certainly helpful to see my tendencies.

In the second half of the video segment I was more likely than in the first segment to use student ideas or questions. It was still only two instances, accounting for 1 out of 8 utterances, but that seems to have replaced the extended answer questions as the students got more involved.

I think that overall the best way to describe my tendencies according to the SATIC sheet is that the first five minutes was about what I was saying. I asked the students questions meant to get them to think, lectured, and gave directions, as evidenced by the fact that 16 of the 19 utterances in that section were me lecturing or asking questions.. The second half was more about what the students were saying, as evidenced by the fact that 11 out of 16 of my utterances in that section were related to student comments. Before the activity it was a matter of me trying to get the students engaged and thinking, and once we entered into the activity it was about what they were saying. I think this is a good tendency, as it shows that I am most interested in getting my students to think, and to hear what they are thinking.2)

As we have talked about all semester, conceptual change theory requires that we first must reveal the student misconception, and then we must prove it to be wrong. I think the desired pattern would be similar to how I spoke to my students, though with shorter lecture time. This is just saying that the pattern would be similar, I don’t think that what I did addressed student misconceptions as well as I would have liked. It would be very hard to understand what students think without asking them questions about what they think. After this it is important to cause them to doubt their misconceptions. This is also best accomplished by asking questions, because people tend to believe what they want to believe. You can tell someone they are wrong, but having them discover it for themselves will yield much better and more consistent results. After they have discovered that they didn’t understand the concepts as well you are better able to get them to try new things to figure out what is true. This involved asking them some questions about their own thinking, as well as asking them to explain themselves.3)

As I mentioned in the paragraph above, I think that on a SATIC sheet my pattern looks pretty good, minus the one minute lecture followed by giving directions. I think that even though

my pattern looks acceptable, the questions I was asking should be shifted so that I can better seek out student misconceptions. What I did at the beginning was review what we had done the previous week, and asked what they had learned from that. The students had some difficulty with recalling exactly what the content was, so I focused more on that at the beginning before moving on, but what I probably should have done after asking about the previous week was to seek out misconceptions for a longer time. I did some asking about what they thought would happen based on the changes to the exploration we were doing by using only solid objects, but I could have done much better.4) Who can tell me what we talked about last week?

Measuring what things?

So what did we find?

Did we get more weight, less weight, did it stay the same, did objects disappear out of the cup? This question probably could have just been omitted. It was essentially restating the previous question, just with more structure to it.

So what else did you use?

I know both groups used more materials than water and ice. What other materials did you use, and how did you use them?

So what other materials did we use?

So what were the conclusions you arrived at for both?

Do you guys still have your notes from last week? If you have your notes from last week it would be good to pull them out. How could you use your notes from last week to help you right now?

So what were we trying to do?