school board presentations on Modeling Instruction
COMPILATION: school board presentations on Modeling Instruction
Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2007
From: Les Burns via Jane Jackson. [Les leads Modeling Workshops in northern Iowa.]
My physics class did a demonstration of whiteboarding for the school board before Christmas. The board members asked the students very interesting questions about the process and their feeling about the learning taking place. The students were very positive and I couldn't have answered the questions any better. It was interesting that during the whiteboarding two of the board members (both engineers) asked them about the graphs and the math. The students were used to processing during the whiteboarding, and students answered the questions completely. It was another bit of evidence that Modeling is an effective process.
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Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2007
From: Jim Stankevitz (to Jane Jackson). [Jim is a Modeling Workshop leader near Chicago.]
My experience with school boards here in Wheaton has been that for the most part they are very supportive of such presentations as you describe. For the most part, board members rarely get the opportunity to see for themselves what takes place in the classroom, and would welcome the chance to have either a teacher or better yet, a teacher and his/her students give them an idea of what's taking place in their district. I have given such presentations to the board here (and to the sub-committees on technology), and they have been favorably received.
I'm not sure that all first-year modelers would be adequately prepared, but I was successful in my presentation to our board's technology committee BEFORE I started modeling, thanks to you and the information you provided in the few months before the workshop. Our board was especially responsive to the published FCI results that gave a statistical indication of the improvement that could be expected in my students' performance on the FCI.I'm confident that most good teachers could make a persuasive presentation. By the way, I gave David Hestenes (and Larry, I think) some sample PowerPoint presentations that included a presentation tailored to a school board. ... [Ed note: Download at ]
One additional note: our district is a unit district that encompasses 20 schools (2 high schools, 4 middle schools, and 14 elementary schools), so our board meetings are usually packed with many agenda items. In a district like ours, a brief presentation would be favored, but in many stand-alone high school districts, a longer demonstration (with students) of modeling would be appropriate.
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Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2007
From: Jane Jackson
I called Jim and asked him to tell me more. He said that every two or three years, his school board comes to his high school. Each department is asked to present something new for 15 minutes. The last time they came, he sat them down at his computers, he had whiteboards there, and samples of students' work. He gave a presentation on the modeling method. He said it would have been even better if his students had been there.
He said that he knew what the school board wanted: hard data on the effectiveness of the modeling method. So he gave them that. It resulted in a tremendous infusion of technology into his classroom. Now his whole department is using whiteboards, and Jim and Tom Todd (a Phase 2a modeler at U WI - River Falls 1997-‘98) are leading in-services for the science teachers.
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