I have spent the last two weeks teaching relatively high-level cellular energetics (enzymes, cell respiration and photosynthesis) for 1.5 hours (M-Th) followed by a 1.5 hour lab on the same subjects to a group of Birmingham city and Jefferson county students. In my lessons I incorporated a variety of new methods that I picked up in my EESL 650 class - teaching math/science to English learners. I had my students keep interactive notebooks which they filled with notes, graphical organizers, and 3.8 paragraph answers to practice short essays and writing in science. Vocabulary exercises such as repeating back scientific terms as a group so that students would not be 'afraid' of stumbling over the pronunciation of words were included to help alleviate anxiety when speaking in public. Lots of new methods for both myself and my students!
So... the moment of truth arrives with the results of the post-test (a 15 item test encompassing the material we had been studying) - 50% of the class gets a 50% or less (range: 2-7) and 50% gets > 50% (range: 8-14). I was feeling pretty grim but then I had not been privy to the pre-test scores, hmmmm... So I talk with the Impact Alabama staff and find out that the highest pre-test score was a 6 and most were in the 0-2 range. So now I am feeling a bit better as I did not 'teach to the test' but rather emphasized general concepts. All-in-all feeling that I and my college-age mentors had a positive impact on these students. Now for the upcoming week where they will design and carry out their own experiments and present them in a mini-poster format (http://www.nabt.org/blog/2010/05/04/mini-posters-authentic-peer-review-in-the-classroom/). Results later!
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