I started my first full-time teaching position this semester—high school biology. According to the students, they did not do many labs last semester. I’m eager to do inquiry activities with my students, and obviously I want to do so safely. The department chair gave me copies of the safety contracts and handouts to use. Do you have any other suggestions as to what I should consider before our first lab activity?
—Jena, Dover, Delaware
Congratulations on your new job! I’m sure your students will learn from and enjoy the lab investigations and activities. I would recommend investing in a copy of the NSTA Press book Investigating Safely, which has many suggestions and resources for high school science.
It’s hard to take over in the middle of the year, so before you do your first activity, take time for an “inspection:”

• Check the utilities. Note the location of electrical outlets. Avoid using long extension cords or outlet multipliers. If there is gas in the room, find out where the master valve is and keep the gas turned off when not in use. Report the location of any leaky faucets or nonfunctioning gas jets and electrical outlets to the maintenance staff. If there are appliances such as a dishwasher or refrigerator, put a sign on them that they are not to be used for non-science related materials (e.g., washing coffee mugs or storing lunches).

• Be sure that the eyewash station, emergency shower, and fume hood are functional and accessible to the students. Look at the date on the fire extinguisher for a recent inspection. Report any issues to the safety officer.

• Put cleaning materials such as a dustpan, paper towels, hand soap, and a box to dispose of broken glass or other sharp objects in accessible locations.

• Identify and label areas where students can get class materials (paper, pencils, stapler) and where you can set out the materials for lab activities. Teachers often put lab materials in trays or plastic boxes for each lab team.

• Inventory your student safety gear. You must have goggles or other appropriate eyewear for each student in a class and a way to sanitize them at the end of each class, unless students have their own individual ones. Other safety gear may depend on the subjects you teach (e.g., aprons, gloves, tongs)

• Check your room for compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).  Students who use wheel chairs may require extra room and lab tables should be at the appropriate height. If students use assistive technologies for vision or hearing, can they be used at your lab tables? Work with special education or guidance faculty to decide on the best way to accommodate student needs in advance so all can participate as fully as possible in the class activities. (Investigating Safely has a chapter on this topic.)

• Decide how many students can safely work at each lab station. Most are set up for a maximum of four students. If you don’t have enough lab stations for all students to work at once, you’ll have to plan to work in “shifts” during the period or across several days, including seatwork for students who are waiting their turn.

Before your first activity, do an orientation with your classes, reviewing safety issues and your routines. Show them where the safety equipment is, and demonstrate how/why/when to use it. Create your lab groups ahead of time. Your first activity should be one that does not require a lot of materials and that does not have many safety issues. During this “dry run” with full classes, circulate around the room and take notes. Remove anything blocking student access to the lab stations or exits, such as extra desks, extension cords, or carts. Decide where students should stow their backpacks, coats, and other personal gear. Stand at each lab table to determine if students can see the board or screen. Look for any corners where you can’t see the students. Adjust your plans and routines, if necessary, based on this assessment.
It is a challenge to engage students in planned and purposeful science investigations that are also interesting and relevant to them. Safety concerns can seem overwhelming, but planning (and over-planning), awareness, and common sense will see you through.
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/40964293@N07/4018106328/

Video analysis is a powerful tool to help physics students understand motion and other phenomena. For example, in this video by Dale Basler (physics teacher and co-host of Lab Out Loud), students can analyze the speed and position time graph of the camera in a grocery store checkout line.

Grocery Store Conveyor Belt Stops from Dale Basler on Vimeo.

One of Basler’s grocery store videos was a grand prize winner in a recent Vernier video analysis competition. Check out the winners here.

In my early childhood experiences in a small creek below our house where neighborhood children waded and built dams, I learned many science and engineering concepts — the pushing force of moving water, its erosion of the sandbank, annual flooding depositing silt on the banks, algae growing on rocks in the backwaters, and the rounded edges of rocks in the creek making it hard to stack them. I would love to have such a creek on the playground, minus the polluted water and danger of drowning, of course.
A teacher writing on the NSTA Earth Science list tells about the misconceptions she has seen held by her 9^th grade students: “…my students had to describe an island they had “discovered” and how the features of that island had come to be [and make a poster showing a model of their island]…, These students had performed fairly well on my more traditional assessments up to this point. When they presented their projects, I discovered that many, maybe even most of these honors and GT [Gifted and Talented] level students believed that islands float in the water; water flows out of the ocean and into rivers; and that rivers can flow up over mountains and even bisect islands. I am aware of misconceptions, but every time I come across a new one, I am newly surprised by it.”
I remember being similarly surprised by how differently a kindergartener and I viewed the landscape. We were on a bus on a bridge crossing over a major river, just a five minute drive from the school, and I said, “Look out the window!” My 5-year-old seatmate looked and said, “Wow, it’s a huge swimming pool!” Thinking that I would be helping him understand that we were crossing a river, I said, “Look out the other window.” He did and said, “There’s two of them!”
By learning what our students understand we can choose experiences that will help them build their knowledge. Digging riverbeds into the sandbox and building bridges to cross, making an island in the middle of a sandbox lake, or doing it in miniature indoors with small bowls and plasticine clay to build the landscape before pouring in a little water, are activities that young children enjoy. The sand will dry out and plasticine clay will dry off, to be used another day. By asking questions and having the children draw their created landscapes, teachers can help children build understanding which they can use in 9^th grade Earth Science class.
Peggy