06 summer - kim, dana, katie b
calorimetry

The summer during lesson study we started out watching video of our classes. Dana and Kim had taught the lesson, while Katie (Blaske) was still in her credential program. It was amazing to watch both classrooms because they looked almost identical. The level of student engagement appeared to be low mainly because most of the pre and post discussions about the experiment were teacher led. Our general feeling of the lesson study was that the experiment was valuable, but we still felt the lesson needed to be revised. We decided that the main problem was giving the students the handout from the Living By Chemistry (LBC) book allowed the students to be more passive in their understanding of the material. The handout also had the students changing/comparing too many variables; this made the relationships between mass of fuel, volume of water and temperature difficult for the students to find. We decided to change parts of the routine of the lab. We developed some questions to help us lead a better whole class discussion, which led us to change how we conducted our pre and post-lab discussions. We decided to have the students develop the data table that they use during the lab. We felt that this made the lab more inquiry based by being open ended. Another major change was in the post-lab discussion involved the students graphing their data. By having the students graph their data, we felt that students would visually see the relationship between variables. The final significant change that we made was to not focus on the math in this lesson study. The reasoning for this was not part of our goals for the lesson.

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