Constructivist group work

Today I (tried to) embrace a constructivist view of teaching Excel.

All last week students have been collecting information about their particular career. Last Friday, I demonstrated the basics of how to write a formula in Excel and setting up a spreadsheet.

I wrote up instructions for the assignment and placed it on Moodle:

• As a group you will select data from your career research to analyze in Excel and graph the results.
• Choose which data you are going to analyze in Excel (ie, national salary, Oregon salary, years of education, etc..).
• Set up your spreadsheet with your data.Include a descriptive title and column labels.Choose several functions to analyze the data (SUM, AVERAGE, MIN, MAX, COUNT)
• Format your spreadsheet in an attractive manner.Select one set of data to graph.Look up resources for making graphs (charts) in Excel. See: http://p6compapps.wikispaces.com/Excel
• Choose a graph that best represents your data (line, pie, bar, etc)Be sure to include Chart Title, labels, and make full page.
• Print one copy of chart and spreadsheet.
• Turn in by Friday, February 23rd.

I gave the students 3 resources:

1. Excel wiki page: contains notes and directs students to pages in the textbook for help
2. Excel help menu
3. WINK tutorial showing how to make a graph in Excel

... and then I let them get together in their groups and plan how they were going to accomplish their goal (and I left them alone).

Observations:

• Groups immediately started talking about their plan
• Many groups divided up the task and each person is graphing one aspect.
• Groups realized they did not have all the information they needed and I observed several going back to their sources to find facts
• Many asked for clarification of how I wanted them to set up the spreadsheet - and I turned it around and told them to decide as a group.
• I was suprised how many kids were working independently.
• Two groups were very social and talking a lot (which included some chatter and some instructions.)
• I observed two students going back to the book for specific instructions.
• 4-5 students were able to make their graph in one period - but several reported that they were missing data.

I will definitely need to check for understanding in a couple of days and plan more activities with graphs to make sure ALL students understand the steps.

If I was truly embracing a constructivist view I wouldn't give them any specific directions at all ... (baby steps .. baby steps)

Teaching skills and embracing a constructivist view

Today I was feeling a little uneasy about giving up my formal sequence of lessons of "how to do <insert skill here>. I am trying to embrace more of a constructivist approach in my lessons and allow the students to discover the information as needed. My tendancy to teach them everything they need to know about, for example, indents - unfortunately, this showed up in my lesson today.

I have created a wiki to list the Word skills as we use them in projects, and give students references to pages of my former textbook to access for additional help but today I found myself going back to my old ways and conducting a lesson on "the 5 different types of indents". Why was I doing this? Was there a need to learn indents or did one of the activities require the students to learn what the indent markers on the Word screen??? NO! It was me and my controlling behavior that showed up instead. Its great to point out a few things to help students to make their lists, or citations easier to read - but I taught the skill just for the sake of teaching the skill - the exact thing I didn't want to do in this Unit.

So, part of this ARP is for me - to help me change my behavior and trust that when the students have a need to learn indents, I can take that time and turn it into a "teachable moment" and the students will be more engaged because they have a need to learn that skill.