Student Lab Development Rubric
By allowing my students to assess other students' work and then providing them with a Student Lab Development Rubric to evaluate their own work, they learn to design and refine high-quality experimental procedures. The Student Lab Development Rubric is one of the tools I use to help students build the experiments they've created and then display results and lab analyses. When students are the ones dictating how they will conduct their experiments, they invest more fully in the activity and come to realize that science involves constant critical analysis and reiteration. I like to move conversations away from "right" and "wrong" and more towards how we can improve each component of our lab activities. Initially, some students feel uncomfortable identifying that their work isn't up to the high standards of the rubric, but over time most come to realize that this process helps them improve their final products and understand the underlying purpose behind labs.
Planning is an essential part of a blended teacher’s practice. In blended environments, where students can be at different points in a course on various modalities, blended teachers need to be very intentional about how they plan. Check out the video below to see how Ben plans for instruction in his blended classroom.
Many of our students come to us far below grade level, some still struggling with adding and multiplying. To support these students, my co-teacher Mr. Elizondo developed an alternative program for students not prepared for high school level standards. While we want every student to work their way through the high school geometry curriculum at their own pace, we felt that our class would become prohibitive and demoralizing for students with low skills or severe learning disabilities. In the alternative program, my students work at their own pace through a series of worksheets that meet the same standards as you would see in a high school geometry curriculum except the difficulty has been adjusted to make it attainable for students in the program. The Alternative Mastery Program is a step towards greater personalization of the curriculum to meet all of my students' needs.
Keeping students motivated is very important in a self-paced course. Scholar Dollars is a strategy I developed to reward my students for working hard and making progress in the course. The concept of Scholar Dollars is pretty simple. Every time a student passes a Mastery Quiz, they receive five Scholar Dollars. Students receive 15 Scholar Dollars for passing a Level Test. Scholar Dollars can be used to buy school supplies, snacks, or even a pizza party. On random days, I switch up the payouts on Scholar Dollars - doubling the amount given, only paying for 100s on Mastery Quizzes or Level Tests, or giving all the Scholar Dollars earned on that day to one lucky student picked by lottery at the end of class.