{"id":4864,"date":"2015-02-06T15:27:31","date_gmt":"2015-02-06T21:27:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kabt.org\/?p=4864"},"modified":"2015-02-07T05:59:35","modified_gmt":"2015-02-07T11:59:35","slug":"can-we-have-an-argument-please-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kabt.org\/?p=4864","title":{"rendered":"Can we have an argument, please? (1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I’ve been experimenting with argumentation in my classroom this year and I am really excited about the prospects.\u00a0 There are many improvements to be made, but I would like to share my experience with you thus far.\u00a0 In this post I’ll discuss the process.\u00a0 I will share actual argumentation lessons and how they’ve gone in subsequent posts.<\/p>\n

At the end of last school year, during a department meeting, the topic of modeling instruction came up.\u00a0 One of our physics teachers had attended a physics modeling workshop over the summer and was implementing the ideas into his classroom.\u00a0 Asked if interested, most of our biology department seemed intrigued by this idea.\u00a0 We started with everyone, 4 full-time biology teachers, getting a class set of white boards (1, 4×8 sheet of hardboard panel board can be cut into 4, 2×3 pieces, with a bit left over for smaller boards).\u00a0 The idea was to have a 2×3 board for each group of students.\u00a0 Since I have 5 sections of biology with 7 groups in each section, I ended up with 35 boards.\u00a0 It is important that each group get their own board as they may be working on it over several days.\u00a0 The other thing that came up was getting us into a biology modeling instruction workshop.\u00a0 Funds for travel, lodging, and workshopping are somewhat limited especially for 4-5 biology teachers, so, under pressure from us and our department head, our district is bringing in an outside “expert” this summer to conduct the two-week workshop!\u00a0 (By the way, if any of you are using modeling in the biology classroom or have been to training, I would love to hear about your experience.)<\/p>\n

OK.\u00a0 So now that I have whiteboards in my classroom, how am I going to use them.\u00a0 At first, it was a really nice tool for groups of student to show and share data that they were collecting from experiments or a way for them to make a graph from their data and\u00a0 share it with the rest of the class.\u00a0 In the middle of last semester, my student teacher and I developed an argumentation lesson that really made me think about how powerful this piece could be in the classroom.<\/p>\n

Argumentation can look a couple of different ways, but we modeled our first lesson after information we found in two different sources, both from NSTA Press.<\/p>\n