Last week I was grappling with a way to teach the Washington State Science Standards, in particular the INQUIRY A piece.
As is often the case, inspiration came in the nick-of-time. I would have my students
- gain an appreciation for the breadth of science
- practice some literacy skills
- generate some “scientific questions”
- work in groups
- practice some creativity
Here’s how it went. The room is arranged in groups. At the beginning of class, we review science as a pervasive quest for knowledge, which often looks like questions. Define/Review scientific questions, and propose a form that students can use “How does ____ affect ____.” (Is this Act 1 for Science, a la Dan Meyer?)
Tell students that there are pages from a magazine (suitably shuffled) on their group tables and that they are to get with partners and create a poster of 5 scientific questions which will be generated the following way. Your partner takes a page and finds a noun on that page. You take a different page and find a noun on that page. You then come together and form a question “How does noun #1 affect noun #2.” (Act 2, you have a tool/method, now apply it.)
Where this spins off into greatness is when students:
- find themselves reading snippets of articles from the Economist for context, since they have been “struck in the curiousity bone”
- find themselves posing questions like “do bees affect cancer?” which might lead to a long and fruitful career in science for this 9th grader
- realize that sometimes science questions look superficially quite silly but hide an incredible profundity, like “will dry ice slide down a sand dune?”
Finally for Act 3, we have a wall full of questions, from 4 periods of science students, which we can now take to the next level of refinement of the question, and posing more questions. Take a look:
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