Handouts are available below   Big Idea   Teaching students how to use CER to craft an argument is done better if students have lab data to practice with. Ideally, this data is something that we measure through an experiment, but experimental data may be especially difficult to get on the first day or week…

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Handouts are available below   Big Idea   Do you ever start the school year with some advice to students on how to succeed in science class this year? Or do you offer inspirational quotes on hard work or motivation? I have done both. But, this year, I’m planning on starting with something that –…

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Handouts are available below   Big Idea   What’s the big problem with many science research assignments we give our students today? They can all be done with ChatGPT and AI. I have a colleague who ran into this problem with her science class and their space research project. Now, I still think research projects…

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Handouts are available below Big Idea When it comes to writing tests while using standards based assessment, my students need to demonstrate greater depth in their written responses in order to demonstrate greater levels of proficiency. However, because I need students to give more depth, many students now spend more time forming their responses and,…

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Handouts are available below   Big Idea   Strength based comments take a lot of time to write. Recently, it took me 7 hours to enter the comments for each of my students in 6 science classes. It takes this long for a number of reasons: it’s difficult to find comments that match the strength…

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Handouts are available below   Big Idea   Are you looking for an easy and engaging activity to introduce CER next year? Here’s one you can try – and to add a bit of fun, you’ll be working with a colleague and collecting some summer vacation artifacts over the summer to use as part of…

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Handouts are available below   Big Idea   How do we get more marks out of the projects we assign? This is important because I want to reduce the amount of time I spend marking projects while still getting more feedback and marks regarding my students. This is especially important because switching to Standards Based…

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Handouts are available below   Big Idea   An issue some teachers using Standards Based Grading (SBG) are grappling with is that there are no percentages, no cumulative points, no tests out of 50 or 100 or whatever in SBG. Instead, we use proficiency scales and rubrics that assess whether a student’s current level of…

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Handouts are available below   Big Idea   Are you looking for a way to improve student reading comprehension in your science classroom? Have you tried Bionic Reading? It’s an app that bolds the first few letters of each word in a text – and it’s theorized to help individuals read faster and comprehend more.…

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Handouts are available below   Big Idea   Here’s a question that comes up a lot in my workshops: If Standards Based Grading is meant to assess the science skills (aka. curricular competencies, SEPs – science and engineering practices) a student can demonstrate, what about the science content? Aren’t we doing a disservice by not…

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