Thoughts during/following session
with
Paul, Dina, Sandy, Glen, Jason, Bruce, Katherine
The importance of connecting with where students are
- DNA too "abstract" at beginning of 7th grade, need to start with more immediate things that motivate interest in that, diversity/evolution?
Completing the science "loop" in laboratory exercises
- Start not with arbitrary observations but motivated ones
- Let students create story, design new observations themselves to test story
- Ask not for "conclusion" but rather for new story motivating new observations
Further questions about whether wanting "truth" is inherent or acquired
Two sets of room corners as another example of "making things up" in drawing (straight line instead of curve between them)
Given brained parallels
- pointless to try and design/control input
- need instead to facilitate output, put enough around students to generate productive expectation/input mismatches
The basic loop is operating all the time, whether one knows it or not
Re metacognition and self-advocacy
- exciting notion of integrating "science" (as story telling) with this
- need to be aware of/sensitive too state of students coming in, primary concern of adjusting to new environment/identities
- might lead with biological diversity and its importance both in communities/ecosystems and evolution
- could be followed by encouraging students to self-characterize their differences, in a variety of ways including "learning"
- could be followed by readings in things like Jamison, Grandin on virtues of differences
- could be followed by "culture as disability", offer students important reality that they can be/are in fact participants in shaping culture (and can have quiet grin at forms they have to fill out)
- can't do neurons at outset, too "abstract" (see above), but could integrate "psychology"/brain into this from the beginning (show differences using Time to Think - need to counter presumption that "faster is better")
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