Submitted by: Kelly

In our final meeting of the year, we continued some of what we started last week. Kara shared an activity from her Food Sustainability 11th grade class. We answered the provided questions for Kalil. (Answers in this Jamboard.)

Then we spent around 15-20 minutes discussing the idea of accumulating resources for bulletin board space (potentially only in the high school based on the discussion) to share information and resources about activism in science and/or expand what we think of what science is and/or what it could be. It could be a starting point for sparking conversations among students or in classes. We didn’t have a lot of time, so it’s just a start that we could come back to in the fall (or not…! But it will be there either way!). The Padlet that we started is linked in the slides.

Here are the slides from this meeting.

Submitted by: Kelly

During our May meeting, we did some reading, reflection, writing, and commenting (and then discussion) on the bigger, conceptual level about science—based on a prompt from Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s recent book The Disordered Cosmos. We talked about the ways that science is inextricably linked to power, whether we could imagine a future of science that wasn’t that way, and the connections to and implications for our classes.

Next, we had two shares of ways that we have worked on incorporating anti-bias/anti-racist teaching into our pedagogy and/or curriculum this year. I (Kelly) shared about a sequence of activities from my 11th grade sustainable energy class, and Daniel shared about an ongoing intervention he has been doing with one of his 9th grade classes where the effects of the students being grouped by their tracked math classes seems to be impacting the motivation, participation, and the overall way that 9th graders have approached Chemistry this year. In our discussion, we connected the situation to the starting prompt and messages about power this grouping sends and reinforces for students. Links to documents, student responses, etc can be viewed in the slides from the meeting (linked below).

Our third activity was to create a Jamboard together (also linked in the slides) where we talked about what the 2.0 version of the science ABAR work could be, what we want to learn, and what things we could get started on next week in our final meeting to set us up to start the year with momentum. We talked about several ideas (which can be seen on the Jamboard), including more discussion of what Daniel shared and what we can do next year when students in 9th and 10th grade classes will be back to a less “tracked” experience to better understand the way that the math tracking impacts the experience and approach of our students in our untracked science classes.

Here are the slides from the meeting.

Submitted by: Kelly O’Shea

Science met and followed the plan outlined in this slide deck (which we used as a Pear Deck): https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1RVB6Wq7J-obBuJnImRim4-9ZskgEHlV1CBjctzJoEec/edit?usp=sharing

The workbook we are using in our meetings focuses on identifying ways that white supremacy culture shows up in our classrooms and helping us make changes to counteract/subvert/move away from that.

For this meeting, we focused on the October theme of “What am I teaching?
Procedural fluency is preferred over conceptual knowledge.”

There was a lot of great quiet reflection and thinking, and then we had a good discussion that landed on thinking about how many of our students seem to see procedural fluency as the hallmark of being successful and do not value conceptual knowledge in the same way. Although we feel we value it in our classes and thought about many ways that it shows up, we were thinking about how to help students shift that belief—and where we can act to reinforce that shift in values. (Personally, I was thinking about examining whether my assessments do a good enough job of testing for and showing the value of conceptual thinking.)

Then, we used the tools from the workbook we are using (see slides) to make plans and list steps for how we will act with accountability to work toward our goals. Some of the goals include: allowing more room for students discussing how they feel about areas in science that are inequitable, introducing scientific role models of diverse backgrounds, not rushing/compromising/cutting corners due to the current situation, working on assessments for concepts and not only skills.

We will work on our plans over the next month and reflect on our progress in the next meeting… as well as moving on to the next activity in the workbook as we continue to examine our classrooms and curriculum!