Pedagogy in Practice

I was an early adopter of the one-to-one laptop program. I attended countless laptop training sessions, worked after hours to understand how to support student laptop use and care. I paid close attention to the goal set forth by the leadership. The stated goal was to provide 24-hour access to a digital device so that students could become the producers and evaluators of knowledge, not just consumers. Again, I was excited. This sounded just like what I heard Dr. Alan November say about students with access to digital devices. Other leaders would add that laptops allow students to locate, evaluate, and interpret information, as well as collaborate with others to engage in authentic, real-world task. Moreover, students would develop the skills they need to compete in the 21st-century economy.

After more than a decade later my students can locate digital content with the help of an up-to-date browser and complete assignments with meticulous directions. However, the skills to evaluate, interpret and collaborate remain difficult to teach within the structure(s) we currently have in place. The hardware, software and connectivity appear to be up to the task, but the continuity of prerequisite skills remains a challenging barrier. I have accepted this barrier as my personal challenge to improve technology integration in my classroom. I believe moving students from a basic or comfortable level of technology integration to seamless use of technology must begin with a clear understanding of what technology integration is and what integration looks and sounds like. Additionally, teachers and students must develop and take responsibility for a skillset gradient that can be learned and taught at different grade-levels. This will begin to address skillset gaps that will make barriers to technology integration more manageable in every classroom.

I am committed to collaborating with other like-minded individuals to learn better and more effective technology integration strategies. I will make myself available to assist my students and colleagues in ways that promote seamless technology integration in my classroom and on my campus.

One day toward the end of class I was foreshadowing for my students several topics we still needed to cover as we wrapped up the unit on land use. I quickly moved through a short list of topics. When I mentioned coal mining and its impact, most of my students had no idea or mental schema associated with a coal mine. One student asked me if a coal mine was similar to what she had seen while watching a western television show with a family member. I slowly responded, “Well it’s kind of like that”. Judging by the look on her face I don’t think she believed me. The bell rang and we said our goodbyes.

I continued to think of ways to make this content more engaging and hence easier for students to construct their own meaning of coal mines. Over the weekend I pulled out my materials from the Inquiry Institute I attended back in June. I read through the materials and notes I made and thought to myself I still need to complete some of these activities with my students.

I read the Ice Balloons lab and committed to get it worked in after the unit exam on land and its uses. I knew I needed a lesson for Monday that would help my students understand coal mining so I started to put a lesson together. I really did not want to present what I was developing so I stopped writing the lesson plan. I knew there had to be a better way to help my students understand this content. I picked up the Ice Balloons lab and read it again. I revisited the learning objectives associated with the impact of mining and realized that my objective should be to help my students understand how natural resources are extracted and describe the ecological and economic impact of doing so. I was making too much of the idea they had never seen a coal mine.

Ideas began to rush forward. I quickly started a Google search titled “Mining Lab” and my search returned 165,000 results. I opened several and decided I had found a framework to build an engaging lesson around. I knew from the Inquiry Institute that Inquiry lessons contained three significant pieces or components – an Inquiry Starter, a Focused Investigation and Sharing Understandings. It was clear, this activity was a great place to start. The cookie lab/activity asked students to engage in the process of mining/excavating chocolate chips from chocolate chip cookies. I located four different brands in the hopes that different brands would require different excavating technique and different tools. I sold several types of tools at different prices to students and reminded everyone that profitable teams control cost. Students worked in teams, purchase tools, worked for limited amounts of time, sold the extracted chocolate chips by gram mass, subtracted their expenses, determine their profit and compared their results with other groups. They reflected on their process using profit as their goal and completed at least two iterations. They were to submit their most profitable operation. Students built their own activity ledger to record their brand of chocolate chip cookie, cost, time spent, and the mass of chocolate chips excavated.

We used this inexpensive activity to develop an understanding of how natural resources are located, excavated and assigned a cost in the marketplace. With this experience as a backdrop it was simple to talk about what happened to the cookie during the excavation. The chocolate chip cookie quickly became a metaphor for a mine or the extraction of any natural resource from the crust of the earth. Students began to wonder aloud and ask questions like, “How could we restore the chocolate chip cookie (the land) after the chocolate chips (natural resources) were excavated?” Students began asking and answering their own questions. What happens to the land after natural resources like coal has been extracted? How does the water cycle impact a coal mining site? Does excavation debris become part of the runoff and end up as a pollutant in the watershed contaminating aquifers? Who should clean up these pollutants? Is it a law? Who enforces the law? What cost are associated with breaking the law? Can you place a cooperation in jail? If the energy from the combustion of coal is transformed into electricity and we all want electricity; is there an obligatory social cost that all electricity consumers must pay? These questions and others continued to be asked by my students and many of them were answered by their peers. I believe one of the most powerful things I can do to help my students master objectives and demonstrate mastery, is to make available something they can explorer, wonder about, and take notice of and using their five senses take some sort of action. Then explain the result or make a prediction. This is not an easy thing to do and I am committed to doing more of it.