I’m really worried about the life science classes I’m teaching this year. These are students who have or cannot pass algebra and it seems in most cases they have failed previous science classes. Many of them are very unmotivated, and most of my students are failing so far despite my best attempts.

I am shadowing another life science teacher since I have not taught science before and have no curriculum of my own. In fact, I believe I’m expected to use the same assignments at the same pace so that all the life science classes are virtually interchangeable. This approach is not working out too well. I think I’m teaching it the exact same way as the other teacher, yet her classes have far fewer failing students. I cannot help be feel something’s wrong with what I’m doing. However, the teacher whom I’m shadowing is less than approachable.

My BTSA Support Teacher – I’ll call her Mandy – had two suggestions that together gave me a brainstorm. One, she suggested that I might ease my problem with students repeated talking during exams by randomly giving a candy to those who are behaving correctly. I love this idea. Two, she suggested I can justify changing up the curriculum a bit because “the current path is not working for these students.”

So I bought a bunch of bags of small candies at Wal-Mart. You can get like 200 pieces for seven bucks. Then I got plain and colored tongue depressors at Michaels. They even had some glow-stick bracelets at a good price, and I grabbed those too. Today, I located a few large beakers in the science hallway. I pulled out the markers.

Near the end of each science class today, I introduced “Five Questions”. I had each student write his/her name on a stick of his/her choice, decorate the stick and return it to me. I put all the sticks into a large beaker. Then I asked five questions, one at a time. The questions were right out of today’s notes and should be right there in front of the student. After each question, I pulled a stick out of the beaker and called on that student. If the student knew the answer, his/her stick went into a smaller beaker. A wrong answer landed the student’s stick onto my desk. When we were done, the students who answered corrected came up and picked their favorite goody from the goody jar. They were so excited! Many students were disappointed that they were not called. I told them they might be next.

Of course, many students still did not know the answers because these students did not bother to write the notes today. I am hoping that Five Questions is incentive enough to start writing notes. Subsequently I hope test scores will go up too, and perhaps even the general level of work completion and turn-in.

I’ll report back in a few weeks or months.

UPDATE 10/2/08

This has turned out to be very popular with my life science students. They are better at getting their materials put away and back into their assigned seats quickly so that we can do “5 questions” at the end of class. So far, the winners have mainly been those students who were already doing okay. I’m interested whether the less engaged students will start answering correctly, which means having paid closer attention in class that day. It may be slow going, but I’m hoping that this will have a positive effect. At the very least, it is a nice closure activity.

Having graded tests today for my graphic design class, I’m think I need to try “5 questions” there too. They do not appear to be taking the reading seriously and are just jumping ahead to do all the tutorials. This is detrimental to their understanding of the software and design concepts in general.

UPDATE 10/13/08

After viewing recent quiz scores in my design classes, I decided to try this game there as well. The kids in the design classes love it as much as the science students.

There’s a life science test coming up on Friday, and various design quizzes tomorrow and Friday. I’ll be calculating the average scores for these and see if there’s been any improvement in lesson retention so far.

UPDATE 10/17/08

My life science classes have shown some improvement. In 6th period, for example, last month’s Unit 3 test generated a 60% average grade. Today’s Unit 4 test generated a 66% average. These numbers include only students who took the test. This difference may have to do with the nature of the individual test questions and not my methods, but this result encourages me to keep trying 5 Questions.

Here are some stats:

UPDATE 11/18/08

5th Period did much better this unit test, while 6th period dipped but still did better in terms of % of As, Bs & Cs compared to Unit 3.

In my design classes we’ve been working on making posters for our classroom walls. Each poster gives a visual representation of the 4 main design principles as outlined on “The Non-Designer’s Design Book” by Robin Williams.

Proximity Poster
Alignment Poster
Repetition Poster
Contrast Poster

Back-to-School night is next Tuesday, so I recruited my students to select the best posters to display on the wall. I cut up star-sticker sheets into groups of three stickers. I have a medium rectangle table I can set up for special projects like this vote we did today. I let the students spread the posters out on the table to sift through.

We voted on the first three posters today (we’re still wrapping up the fourth.) Each student got three stickers for each round of voting, totaling nine votes per student. I had each period vote only on the posters for the other two design periods, not their own. I did this to discourage favoritism (and let kids avoid hurting each other’s feelings by not voting for someone standing right next to them.)

Here are the voting guidelines I put on the board:

Do:

• Select your fave 3 posters by affixing a star to the backs.
• Vote according to the quality of the design.

Do Not:

• Affix more than 1 of your stickers to the same poster.
• Vote according to the name of the designer.
• Keep the stickers for yourself.
• Let the posters fall to the floor or get crumpled.

The vote went exceedingly well. The students chose want they want in the room without my input. I love their choices, too, now that I’ve counted the star-votes. A few of students are really “stellar”, having received more than 30 votes across all three posters. One young lady got 65 in total. Just amazing.

Update 9/7/08
The top ten posters for each principle are now viewable in the gallery.

I learned last year that many of my students come to my design classes with little experience in working with computers. This year, I’ll be giving them a crash course on computer skills basics. I hope they’ll be excited with their newfound power. Some of the text if specific to our lab, but most of it will work on any Windows computer. I’m still writing a lot of it. It will be more filled out in the next two weeks.

For right now, design teachers can get an idea of the kinds of topics you really need to preteach for computer noobs.

Basic Computer Skills
* Windows XP Basics
* Using a Web Browser
* Keyboard Shortcuts
* Managing Files and Folders
* Using Microsoft Word
* Navigating the Student Server

Taking an idea from a veteran teacher, I developed a PowerPoint presentation for my syllabus this coming year. The syllabus in written form is about 8 pages. Instead of printing a copy for every student, I have it on the class website for reference.

On the first day of school, I’m going to show the syllabus PowerPoint and then give the kids a quiz. I think it might be more effective than just reviewing the syllabus in paper form. I added silly clip art to keep the slides visually interesting.

Below are four sample pages from the PowerPoint presentation. Here is the slide presentation in PDF format (1.9MB). If you want the original PowerPoint file ready for you to adapt for your own needs, email me see below.

UPDATE 8/4/08
Due to popular demand, I am making the PowerPoint version available online.
syllabus_08-09.ppt [6MB]

I made some interface posters of the software I teach: Photoshop CS3, Illustrator CS3 and Dreamweaver MX 2004. I thought I’d share them here. The originals are 32″ across by 24″ down. I’ll be using our large-format color printer at the school to print them and then I’ll find a laminator somewhere.

These PDFs are letter sized. Please email me if you’d like PDFs for the full 32×24 size.

Click on an image to view/download the PDF: