As NSTA’s chief science safety compliance adviser, I look forward to sharing the latest safety compliance information, while helping teachers solve safety-related problems and issues in the classroom, lab, and maker space. I’m also looking forward to interacting with colleagues to help improve science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education in the trenches.

Specifically, NSTA has initiated this new safety blog to:

• share up-to-date information on legal safety standards and better professional practices for a safer working and learning environment and a safer STEM instructional experience;
• disseminate current information on safety incidents occurring in K–12 classrooms, labs, and maker spaces; and
• provide support and initiate dialogue in efforts to answer safety-related questions from bloggers, either teaching or supervising in K–12 classrooms, labs, and maker spaces.

Students learn STEM best by doing, not just reading.  Make it a memorable hands-on experience by incorporating safety!  Encourage your friends and colleagues to subscribe to the NSTA Blog and share their experiences and knowledge about safer science education experiences.   

Have a safer day!

Dr. Ken Roy

Submit questions regarding safety in K–12 to Ken Roy at safesci@sbcglobal.net. Follow him on Twitter: @drroysafersci.

The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.

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There’s a lot of talk about using data to drive teaching and learning, but what data and how should these numbers be used?

Are you confused? So were the authors of NSTA Press’ new book, The Feedback Loop: Using Formative Assessment Data for Science Teaching and Learning.  Erin Marie Furtak, Howard Glasser, and Zora Wolfe, explain how the onslaught of data drove them to develop the book.

“We had difficulty figuring out how to select and use the information available to investigate our practice. We wanted to become better teachers but were overwhelmed with other tasks and uncertain of how to begin examining these areas,” the authors state in the book’s introduction.

The Feedback Loop offers practical advice from people who get it. The authors break down how to set learning goals, analyze data, and make inferences about student learning to understand better what students know and where they need help. By creating a loop, teachers can see where students have problems and respond accordingly.

“The Feedback Loop is intended to go beyond thinking about pieces of data in isolation to reorienting them as a part of a larger system that you, the teacher, can design and act on,” the authors say.

Designed for middle and high school science teachers, the book provides step-by-step guidance for designing your own formative assessments. You will also practice unpacking the Next Generation Science Standards to make sure that your students are achieving them. The best part of The Feedback Loop is the anecdotes from teachers who share their own assessments and results. You can learn from educators who use these tools every day.

Read the sample chapter on Collecting Data.

Check out The Feedback Loop. This book is also available as an e-book.

I recently read an article about having students “reflect” on their work. I’m not sure what the value would be. What would this look like in a science class? –G., Ohio

At a professional development workshop several years ago, I heard a teacher say “I do lots of activities. My students are so busy, they don’t have time to think!” This statement haunts me to this day. I wondered what students learned by following someone else’s busy, fast-paced agenda of activities. It sounded exhausting, for both the teacher and the students.

Another time, I visited a classroom in a school that had 90-minute class periods. The teacher presented a series of activities, changing topics about every 15 minutes—lecture, worksheet, small group discussion, writing, hands-on activities, pop quizzes—but there was no common theme or unifying concept. These students were also “busy,” but I wondered what they were actually learning from this series of disconnected events.

From a Twitter recommendation, I recently read the article “You Really Can ‘Work Smarter, Not Harder’” describing a study on the value of reflection.  (Note: the working paper Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance from the Harvard Business School is downloadable here.

The study shows that learning is more effective if a lesson or experience is deliberately coupled with time spent thinking about what was just presented.

For teachers who already use reflective processes, it’s nice to have validation from more formal studies. Although, as with any study, there are problems generalizing to other populations, subject areas, and learning tasks, it seems that doing hands-on activities or investigations is only part of the learning process. Giving students time to process and think about what they are learning pays off.

Reflection doesn’t necessarily mean students staring into space (although that’s what I do when I’m thinking). Reflection is a process that involves articulating or summarizing what was learned, making personal connections to what was already learned, and formulating questions for future learning. Science teachers often use notebooking, exit activities, KWL organizers, creating graphics, or talking into a smartphone or app for these reflections.

I suspect most of our students need some examples of reflective thinking, along with a rationale as to why it is important to learning. Your modeling and guidance is important. Show students how you would reflect on your own learning:

• I learned that…
• I learned how to…
• I need to learn more about…

It also helps if each activity includes an explicit reference to the learning goals to form a basis for reflection. For example: In this lab, we will investigate the relationship between…. As you use this online simulation, pay attention to…. The purpose of this word game is to check your understanding of the key vocabulary for this unit.

For projects, give each student a copy of the rubric when the assignment is given. Ask them to fill it out and submit it with the project, along with their reflections in the form of personal feedback. At first, I asked students generically about the quality of their projects. The usual responses were I learned a lot, I had fun, I worked hard, I spent a lot of time on this. This was not enough to be helpful.

So I found that giving students some guidance in the form of “story starters” helped them to reflect more on their work:

• From doing this project I learned…
• If I had more time, I could improve this by….
• The best part about doing this project was…
• To make this project better, I could…
• Our study team could have improved our work by…
• Take a look at this part of the project to see how I…

This could be an interesting action research project for your classroom!