180: Day 1: Lab design and rubric

OK, I gotta remember to take photos of my students in action…so for today I just have a photo of my lab grading guidelines and metric prefixes that hang all around my classroom. As you can partially see on my “Day minus 3” post, my room is designed with no “front.” Here are a couple of comments from students today:

• “Well, I’ll give you this: I’ve never seen a room like this.”
• “Where is the front of the class?” (My response, “There isn’t one”)

I’m really trying to get my students to understand that most of their learning will go on in their groups, so breaking up the sense of orientation helps to remove that sense that “knowledge comes from the teacher.” When I was presenting (talking) today, I made sure to be in several different locations during each class period.

Today, after introductions, I introduced the bouncing ball lab, and had them brainstorm how to determine the height of the bounce. It was interesting to see how many students/groups still went to just a guess, even after I explained they should use the meterstick and ball to generate some data to help with their prediction. Today we didn’t get to graphing, but proportions came up, as well as “drop in from 1 and from 0.5 and add the two.” Tomorrow, onto why we want to drop from many distances.

Here’s a Word version of my lab grading guidelines; it matches my pre-printed labels.