Hello Readers!
There have been a TON of great ideas for guided inquiry (modeling instruction, POGIL, Target Inquiry, etc.). I do a ton of guided inquiry in my classroom. I have engaged in professional development on facilitating group work (through POGIL) and read what I hear is THE book on group work (which really is quite good- “Designing Groupwork”).
Basically, facilitating group work is challenging. These guided inquiry tasks are NOT just worksheets. They are data sets that need to be analyzed and dissected, and meant to be analogous to patterns of thought chemists would do to analyze data (ok, ok lots of it is fabricated, but still, it IS what professional chemists do with their data).
In this blog post, I am going to share a VERY sticky situation from my AP Chemistry classroom to you fine teachers. This event happened a few weeks ago and it is still bugging me. At some point in the near future, I will share what I did next as a comment to this blog post (what a cliffhanger!).
So, my AP chemistry class looks like this:
20 students (60% male, 40% female)
All are in the 10th or 11th grade
All took one year of chemistry with me (either general or honors chemistry)
Varying math levels (Alg II through beyond Calc I)
Students are allowed to choose their own seats
We meet for six 55 minute periods a week
In addition to one 55 minute period each day, one day a week they stay for a “double period” so we have more time for labs. AP Chemistry is taught the last period of the day to facilitate this practice.
Our school is a self proclaimed problem based learning school - students are expected to engage in tasks that make them do the heavy lifting.
The Dilemma:
Students engage in a variety of tasks in my class: lecture, guided inquiry (both in and out of the laboratory), and sometimes time to work on practice sets.
I have one student who I will call Josh (not his real name). Josh has been a pretty high achiever both last year and this year.
However, Josh has not demonstrated that he trusts the students in his group. He will try to isolate himself even though he sits between two other students.
A few weeks ago, my students were working on a lab titled “Energy in Chemical Reactions” (basically, they were using Q=mcΔT in a variety of scenarios).
The first day of the lab, most students figured out how to successfully apply the use of Q=mcΔT in the lab scenario.
On day 2, most students were fine continuing the lab with just a different system, but using the same ideas. While working that day, Josh was seriously confused about how to use Q=mcΔT - he kept wanting to find the change in enthalpy per mole of reaction instead of the total Q. He was frustrated that his calculations didn’t jive with other data students had posted on the board.
When he called me over for help, after I asked him what he and his group mates had worked out so far, his response was blatantly said “My group members don’t know so I haven’t asked them.”
I told him he needed to engage his group members before I would come over again to actually help. Then I left.
My Take:
I felt like if 85% of the class was fine it did not warrant a whole class re-teach and I was not helping Josh by showing him how to do it if he had so many resources at hand.
On one hand, I felt like a terrible human being to leave Josh in the lurch. On the other hand, I felt like he was being disrespectful to his peers that had valuable contributions to the conversation at hand that he chose to not engage in. I felt like my choice was better for him in the long run.
Welcome to my classroom. It is often challenging. It is at times frustrating. It is always loud. It is where my students learn.
What I would like to know in your response below:
What other questions might I ask myself about this scenario?
What would you have done in my place?
What would your next steps be?
What struggles do you have with facilitating group work?