Grade 3-5 2009 Summer Institute Workshop July 7-9, 2009

1. Grade 3-5 2009 Summer Institute Workshop July 7-9, 2009

2. Schedule for the day • Introductions and overview • Process Skills Circus • Energy Transfer Activity • What is Electricity • Overview of eesmarts • Go With the Flow • Electromagnetism Inquiry • Recycling Activity • End of the Day Go-Around • Lunch is 12:00-12:45

3. Summer Institute Objectives • Experience eesmarts lessons and activities and discuss ideas regarding how to incorporate them in the classroom. • Actively engage participants in grade-level appropriate activities and discuss differentiations for a variety of students. • Experience modeled activities, discuss science pedagogy and learn how to turn activities into more inquiry based lessons.

4. Process Skills: The AINQs and BINQS Start Here! Summer Institute 2009 PIMMS/Wesleyan Univerisity

5. Process Skills are the tools for: • gathering information • generating and testing new ideas • building new knowledge • learning scientific concepts • constructing scientific explanations of the world

6. Important to Inquiry-Based Learning Tools students use to carry out scientific investigations

10. Take Home Messages ■ Students use process skills to build a conceptual understanding of science content. ■ Students of all ages use all of the process skills. Each skill can be practiced at simple and increasingly complex levels. ■ Process skills are not used separately but as intertwined, coherent sets of skills. ■ Teachers can redesign activities to help students develop stronger process skills.

11. Three part to this workshop • Process Circus-work with pairs and rotate through six activities that use a variety of process skills • Develop a common vocabulary of process skills • Practice identifying process skills and modify science activities to help your students raise their skills to higher levels

12. Process Skills • Observing • Questioning • Hypothesizing • Predicting • Planning and Investigating • Interpreting • Communicating

13. Process Circus • Working in pairs do the experiment at each station. • Using the Process skills Identification sheet check all the process skill experienced in each station. • For each station circle the process skill that is used for the underlined set of directions. • No More than twenty minutes to complete activities

14. Group Discussion Working in new groups, discuss what you identified as the main process skill at each station. Note areas of agreement or disagreement. Tools to assist: Process Skills Identification Sheet Directions for Activities at the Stations 10 minutes

16. Process Skills Identification

17. Process Skills Identification Process skills are not practiced discretely. Someone who is observing, for example, may be doing some predicting and hypothesizing, and possibly even interpreting, virtually simultaneously. Pulling the skills apart and distinguishing them from one another can prove tricky.

18. Process Skills Identification Continued In actual practice what we call process skills are not individual skills but combinations, or blends, of several skills. But as teachers, we need to address the skills separately so that we can identify where students are in their development of each skill in order to focus on helping them strengthen particular skills.

19. A Tool to Help Identify Process Skills in Action

20. Group Discussion • Discuss the skills further by comparing the way you have been talking about the process skills with the way the skills are described on the hand outs • Remember these are descriptors of what learners are doing when they use certain process skills Approx. 10 min.

23. How Hypothesizing, Predicting, and Interpreting Differ

24. A Tool to Help Develop a Common Language

25. Process Skills Definitions In order to work effectively with process skills in the classroom, and to create a foundation for discussion of process with your peers, it’s important to develop a common language to describe these skills. Process Skills: Definition and Examples-13a-13c

26. Definitions and Examples

30. Small Groups In groups of 2, discuss these definitions and examples. How do these definitions fit with your own understanding of the skills? How close were your thoughts to the stated definitions. During your discussion, pay attention to those skills you had disagreements or confusion about.

31. Student Learning: Condensation Anecdote Read Over Each Paragraph and Underline the Process Skills Observed 10-15mins

34. Why Process Skills Are Emphasized • They are important in learning science content • As intellectual tools for generating and testing new ideas and for building new knowledge • Research on learning indicates students change their ideas when they find their present ideas do not sufficiently describe or explain an event or observation • Look to anecdote, students use previous knowledge to help explain and eliminated those ideas when they did not explain condensation

35. Importance Continued • Process skills play a critical role in learning science content • In the Anecdote, observing skills were need to notice that there was a film of water on the outside of a cold class; questioning skills were necessary to pose questions to be investigated; planning, investigating and interpreting skills in order to rule out the hypothesis that water leaks out of glasses or to conclude that temperature was a factor ;hypothesizing skills help to make the connection between the water on the outside of the glass and water on the windshield of a car on a cold morning.

36. Indicators of Development of Process Skills

41. Level 4 Level 5

42. Changing the level

43. Let’s Share Your Results

45. Working in Grade Level Groups • Look at the Observing levels 1-6 on your hand out and make the descriptors more student friendly • For example: At grade 6-8 level two might be: uses more than one sense to observe traits of an object. Or to help not English speaking students:

46. When students are doing good science, they are getting a workout of their process skills in the service of learning the science content. Students don’t start with strong process skills. We as teachers have to work on developing there skills – ratchet those skills to higher developmental levels.

47. Take Home Messages ■ Students use process skills to build a conceptual understanding of science content. ■ Students of all ages use all of the process skills. Each skill can be practiced at simple and increasingly complex levels. ■ Process skills are not used separately but as intertwined, coherent sets of skills. ■ Teachers can redesign activities to help students develop stronger process skills.