On Tuesday, I started Phase 1 of the book-room project. I photographed all the books in storage and created a Google spreadsheet and Google folder that teachers could use to view and reserve books. Any books that are not marked as keepers in the book room spreadsheet will be relocated to long term district storage next week. As mundane as this problem is, I’m still highlighting it in this blog just to point out (not for the first and last time) that spreadsheets can solve all sorts of problems.
Tuesday afternoon, I observed freshmen in Mr. Beckett’s and Mr. Foster’s Physics & Engineering class presenting demos and free body diagrams that represented Newton’s laws. Students drew numbers from a hat to determine which of the 3 laws they would present. The students described the law, performed their demo and then drew a fee body diagram to represent the object in their demo. These informal presentations were formative assessments in the middle of a project dedicated to the motion and forces associated with race cars and race car tracks. This Sunday, students from this class will go on a field trip to the Cirque de Americas to learn more about race cars and tracks from actual race car drivers.
Wednesday morning, I observed freshmen and sophomores in Mr. Fishman’s Intro to Electronics circuits designing and building circuits that are simple keyboards that can play an octave of notes. The students were using their notebooks, charts that showed the final results of calculations that connected resistances to specific frequencies (notes), and pictures of circuits as design aides. It was cool to see the students puzzling through the problem of how different switches were changing current paths to pass through different resistors in order to produce different outputs with specific pitches.
On Wednesday afternoon, I observed students in Mrs. Garner’s Painting 2 class having a Socratic discussion on Beauty. In preparation for this discussion, the students conducted research on Beauty inspired by various quotes on the previous day. It was interesting to hear them talk about different strategies for creating beauty and different factors that can impact people’s perceptions of beauty.
On Wednesday evening, the Robotics students met and continued building prototypes of robot mechanisms and field components. We are hoping that our mill will come online early next week. After the mill is repaired, we will be able to build the competition version of our robot.
On Thursday afternoon, I observed juniors in Ms. Thompson’s and Ms. Tillson’s US History / ELA 2 class. They presented their rationale and strategies for solving STAAR problems on World War 2. They also participated in a discussion on how to use the CRAAP method to analyze the validity of sources. They are using this strategy to find good sources that will help them write songs about the Cold War.
Thursday evening, I met up for dinner with Nadirshah who was in town for the TCEA 16 Conference. We ate at one of my favorite restaurants, Whip in, and had long deep conversations about what is needed to drive innovation in education. I shared with her my Many Hats idea that describes the many roles educators have to play in order to innovate. We also talked about the systems that need to be built and maintained in order to spread innovation in equitable ways. Somehow in the middle of this I suggested that we need a tool (a rubric, checklist of sorts) that describes early, middle, and advanced implementations of strong horizontal and vertical teams in education. I’m hoping that Nadirshah will apply her big brain to drafting this tool so I can use it one day.
Friday morning and afternoon, I attended a STAAR-WARS themed training on STAAR test coordination. I kept myself engaged during this 200 slide presentation by pumping my arms and swinging my legs in time to the presentation. My Fitbit went up to this 15K+ steps due to this motion and I was able to stay alert during the whole training. I learned that test security is written into Texas law and violations can be prosecuted as Class C misdemeanors. *shudder* Serious stuff. I knew that violations could lead to losses in teacher certifications; I didn’t realize that violations were also misdemeanors.
.