This was my second attempt to put some of the concepts we'd been discussing in the first PD cycle into play in Theory of Knowledge classroom.
I will post a reflection on my first attempt at a later date. Like a lot of first attempts, it was a little shaky, so I didn't feel any strong urge to broadcast the results.
In the case of this second project, things glued together better, thanks in large part to me using the project management tool Trello, which Deb recommended, instead of a spreadsheet to monitor work flow.
Another key improvement over the first cycle was the simpler nature of the task. In TOK we wrestle with some pretty heavy language and some very heavy concepts (Aristotelian empiricism vs. Plato's Theory of Forms, cartesian duality, scientism, etc.) To make things more accessible -- and to relate it to a parallel writing assignment, their introductory college essay, I challenged students to focus on telling a simple story about a person significant to the history of science.
I started with a project with an "auction" in which I announced the profile subjects, I was in the "market" for: Galileo, Mendeleev, Mendel, Einstein, Curie and Newton, along with two major philosophers of science: Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. I gave each student a post-it, 5 minutes to pick a topic and do some cursory research and told them to go the place in the room associated with that profile subject to see who else wanted to collaborate.
I'd tried this motivation before, so I had a feeling it would work well. It did. For the first day, I mainly kept out of the way. My only involvement was to play match-maker, recruiting students and throwing ideas toward the projects attracted only one or two takers. Once the room gelled into stable groupings, I basically instructed all groups to keep adding post-its until the bell rang. By the end of the period, I had a pretty good visual sense (via number of post-its) on which groups could work well independently and which groups needed help.
On the second day, I challenged students to come up with a "story board" depicting a key before, during and after storyline in which the profile topic (or the culture of science) made an important breakthrough. My key focus here was Mendeelev and his painstaking development of the Periodic Table.
On the third day, I handed out a blank sheet written in a storyboard template. At the time, I was hoping to get a member from each group to produce a storyboard for us to post on the wall, but only a few groups were able to deliver anything. I decided not to rush the process and used the class time to focus on pinning down project parameters for the second week.
Pinning down project parameters basically amounted to getting groups to name their leader, to start and share a presentation file to me and to confirm the existence (via a Homework form) of an ongoing "Works Cited" document. What instruction I'd been offering to the whole group had focused on the need to push past easy sources (e.g. Biography.com, wikipedia.org and to come up with something an academic would respect).
One new twist I added to this project was a peer grading component -- again through Google Forms. I created a 20 pt. rubric based on five main components, each scored on a 0 - 4 scale:
- Uniqueness of work product
- Quality of Overall Execution
- Quality of Content (including images and layout choices).
- Quality of Writing
- Degree to which the work offers a good representation of the Curtis IB program
The highest scoring presentation posted a 17.75 out of 20 points, proof that, even when given the chance to stuff the ballot box, IB students are pretty tough peer graders.
The following is a list of the top four scoring presentations:
- Dmitri I. Mendeleev [17.75 pts.]
- Galileo Galilei [17.56 pts.]
- Father of Modern Genetics [17.18 pts.]
- Marie Curie [17.08 pts.]
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