Our First Science Talent Quest

For the second half of the year our major area of inquiry has been science. Specifically the "big question" - is the world a better place because of science?

Working with a concept-driven curriculum, our key concepts have been Causation, Change and Responsibility. We started with a large number of teacher-directed workshops on topics such as flight, air pressure, fire and change, biomechanics (with the Olympics), earth sciences, electrical circuits and the history of scientific thought.
We organised a field trip to Werribee to study the sewerage farm and used a BBC video about the "Sewer King" (Joseph Bazalgette) as a Thinking Routine to engage students in the central Key Concepts.
For more on Thinking Routines, click here. These are philosophy-based lessons, widely used at BEPS to get beyond factual-recall to the deeper level of inquiry. It was mainly in these sessions that students looked beyond their own set of activities to the bigger questions of science itself.

Then we organised several "Hands on Science" sessions as incursions in the classroom - they focussed on chemistry. Also a number of students attended science lessons in the lab at Fitzroy High School.
Some of the photos here (click on them for bigger versions) indicate the sort of things kids have been doing this term and last.
So, after considerable preliminary teaching, we asked the kids to launch their own investigations as part of a "Science Talent Quest."
Students chose their own working group (or chose to work alone) and their own topic - though quite a few requested assistance to narrow down their actual investigation and make it achievable.

Students worked at specified times on their projects, and also during Independent Learning Time, hypothesising, testing, observing, recording, revising and to some extent analysing - in other words learning about the scientific process.
A major thing they have learnt is that science is more about theory than fact, less about what is known and more about exploring the unknown.

These experiments, surveys and investigations have been recorded in their log books. They included extracting DNA, comparing the properties of softwood with hardwood, magnetism, electrical circuits, forensic science, UFOs and extra-terrestial life, e-Numbers, the development of language, bacteria and the growth of mould (including making the agar to go in the petrie dishes), lots of experiments with water, goo, baking soda and fire, several investigations of the life sciences, including trying to find out what makes you ticklish.
These long period of inquiry culminated in an afternoon expo, attended by the rest of the school plus parents and other family members.
The value of such Exhibitions - used extensively in many school systems, including the IB - is that students are required to make their learning visible in front of a real audience. It is more authentic.
Our students will be assessed by a rubric taken from VELS, which covers their Science Knowledge & Understanding, the degree to which they "worked like scientists" and also the extent to which they were able to communicate their knowledge (tying directly to the VELS Communication Domain .)