04 summer - holly and katie
endothermic/ exothermic reactions
We’re just getting started and already I’m overwhelmed. We have this great opportunity, and I’ve already learned so much and I haven’t even started my credential program yet. I simply know that there is this big thing called inquiry and that we’re supposed to embrace that and use it in our lesson study. I’m not real sure what this whole idea of lesson study is, but I know it sounds a lot like prepping a lesson, but more long term. At the same time it seems really scary since I have to prepare this idea of teaching, and I won’t be teaching it for at least a year, but most likely two since my student teaching is not likely to overlap this point in the curriculum. As a whole we’ve settled on energy, but our group settled on endo/exothermic reactions. It was great to get something on paper and have a working plan. I remember having lots of ideas and trouble organizing them. We had so many big ideas and wanted to do everything. It was hard to pare down to a single idea to focus on rather than a broad topic like energy.
How are we going to turn this idea that should take 5 minutes to teach into a 2-3 class lesson that can evolve into a lesson study that forms and changes and improves over out time in the fellowship? I’m scared, overwhelmed, excited, and really nervous all at the same time.
So in spite of our many emotions we eventually created a plan for a three day, very open-ended, inquiry activity. It involved students writing their own procedures and performing the experiments they have designed. The goal was for students to realize that during the course of a reaction heat may be gained or lost and this results in a change in temperature. Our hope was that they would develop the concept of endothermic and exothermic reactions and then we the instructor would apply the official terminology to their already developed ideas.
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