AP Physics: Board Meeting

We discussed the buggy lab today for our first board meeting of the year. I followed Casey Rutherford’s Observations, Claims, Evidence framework and my students were eager to dive in, but I think they didn’t know enough about what other groups did really dig into some of the discussion points. I usually just have students put their graph and equation on the whiteboard in an effort to make it readable by 30+ people, but I want them to share more about their experimental design next time and am toying with a couple ideas. I’m leaning towards either doing a gallery walk prior to the whiteboard discussion, so that we can sacrifice some readability in favor of more information on the whiteboards, or getting a few more whiteboards so that groups can have one for results and one for the set-up of their experiment. I thought about starting the discussion with each group giving a 1-2 min description of their experiment, but I worry with 8-12 lab groups in a class, that will be too much information to keep track of.

Earth Science: Earth’s Spheres

Students did a foldable interactive notebook activity to compare the biosphere, atmosphere, geosphere, and hydrosphere. I think both my students and I were a little frustrated to set aside the really good thinking they’ve done on ocean currents the last few days to work on something that didn’t feel connected. I’m teaching in a colleague’s classroom and following his sequence, in large part because we only have one class set of lab equipment and multiple sections of the course every period, so scheduling labs gets tricky, but I need to work around that to give my class more sense of coherence.