WEBVTT
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Hey fellow science teachers, welcome back to the lab bench.
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I'm Elise and this is episode four.
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We're practical today.
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I'm five weeks into the school year, so we're in it.
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You might be deep into your first unit, maybe starting your second, or maybe you're well into your second unit, and you've probably already run a lab or two.
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So today's promise is this.
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I'm going to share what a real inquiry lab actually looks like, how to build toward it without losing your minds, and what to do when lab data comes back messy or unexpected.
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This is the lab map, science education on filter.
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I'm Elise.
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Let's get into it.
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Oh, lab day.
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My most favorite day in a science classroom.
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The students file in, they grab their procedures, and immediately ask, What are we doing today?
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They follow the procedure step by step, they fill in the data table, they generally like that they're doing a lab.
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They answer the analysis questions, they did the lab.
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But did they investigate anything?
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But wait, a lab where students already know the answer isn't a lab.
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It's a hands-on confirmation exercise with extra steps.
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Here's what the NGSS standards actually want from science labs because this gets forgotten or kind of watered down in a lot of science classrooms.
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The science and engineering practice number three from the NGSS is planning and carrying out investigations.
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Not following a procedure, planning one.
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That means students identify and control variables.
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They decide what data to collect and how much.
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They think about precision and accuracy.
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They select their own tools and equipment.
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Those are all things we typically do for them the second we hand out a cookbook lab quote-unquote investigation.
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A confirmation lab tells students what science already found out.
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An investigation asks them to find out something new.
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And students can tell the difference every single time you are doing a confirmation lab versus a true investigation.
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They are experts at detecting when they're going through motions that don't lead to anything substantial.
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Before I give you the fix, I want to be clear on the barriers for these types of activities because if I skip this part, it's going to sound like I've never actually done a lab with a bunch of teenagers.
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On the teacher side, true inquiry investigation means releasing control of the procedure.
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It means tolerating productive struggle instead of stepping in the second things get messy or confusing for your students.
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It means managing time when kids are designing, which we know we never have enough time in our very neatly scheduled curriculum plan for the year.
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And on the student side, most high schoolers have been handed a cookbook procedure since middle school for labs.
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Ask them to plan their own investigation and they freeze.
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They don't know what they're doing.
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They don't know how much data is enough.
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They mix up a controlled variable with the control group constantly.
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And I don't blame them for that.
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The confusion is proof or evidence that they can't do this.
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It's that they were never taught how to do this.
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And on the systemic side, you've got time, budget, safety, pacing guides breathing down your neck if you're a standardized test subject like I am.
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Those are all real limitations, and I'm not gonna pretend that those aren't problems when you do this.
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Genuine inquiry is expensive in more ways than one.
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So, how do you actually build this skill without setting your classroom on fire in week one of school?
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Don't throw students into open inquiry cold turkey.
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You scaffold it across the entire school year, and you're gonna use these three different tiers of inquiry levels to get your students to the full open inquiry.
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First one is structured inquiry.
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Structured inquiry is where most of your students are right now at this point in the school year, the beginning.
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You are giving them the question to investigate.
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You're even telling them what materials to use, and you're probably giving them a procedure to follow.
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But as they are doing it, make the planning visible while they're going through the lab.
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As you circulate around the room when they're doing the lab, ask why they would need to, why is step six there?
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Why is it important that we do step six?
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Or point out a variable that's already built into the design of the lab.
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Ask them what would happen if we didn't have the control group.
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If true inquiry investigation is learning how to drive a car, at this point they are still just a passenger along for the ride.
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Guided inquiry comes mid-year.
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Now your students have a learner's permit and they are driving with you in the passenger seat.
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You provide the question, and maybe you say these are the materials that you can choose from, or you may mandate they use certain materials, but students are writing their own procedure.
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They're identifying their own independent and dependent variables, they're planning how they're going to collect their own data, and they're going to submit that for your approval before they go anywhere near your chemicals and your glassware.
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This is where your students are going to struggle, but it will be a productive struggle.
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This is where you, as the teacher, need to bite your tongue the most.
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You may see your students make decisions that may lead to poor experimental outcomes, but you need to let them make those mistakes.
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Mistakes and failures are the best teachers in this kind of scenario.
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Open inquiry is late in the school year.
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This is the point where your students have a driver's license and can drive the inquiry car on their own, but they still need to ask permission to use the car and tell you where they're going and when they're going to get home.
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At this level, students generate the question themselves from a phenomenon, decide on the materials to use, and they design the entire investigation from start to finish.
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It's messy, it takes a ton of time, and if you build through the school year with the other two levels of scaffolded labs, they will be far more successful than you could ever expect or imagine.
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If you are this far into the school year and still instruct structured or just dipping your toe into the guided inquiry level, that's where you should be.
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I'm not saying that you need to throw your students in the deep end and give them a completely open-ended investigation right now.
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Meet your students where they are, give them the tools and the scaffolding they need to get to that open inquiry before the end of the year.
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A few easy strategies will help you implement this gradual release model into your real life classroom.
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Scaffolded planning templates will walk through students through the question hypothesis variables like the independent, dependent, controlled, uh, the writing their procedure, what sort of data table are they going to collect, the materials are that they're gonna use, and also the safety requirements that they need to observe while they are in the lab.
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All of that's in one place.
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Strip the scaffold back gradually as the year goes on.
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What is a fully detailed template right now in September should be closer to a blank page come spring.
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Explicit variable instruction is really important too.
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And I mean explicit.
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Don't assume your students absorb independent versus dependent through osmosis.
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Practice it first with scenarios that have nothing to do with science.
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Sports performance, cooking, sleep.
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Once they can identify a variable in something familiar that they see every day of their lives, they can transfer that skill to the lab.
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This is actually the exact idea behind a station bundle I offer on the SCPs and CCCs.
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It's built around non-scientific everyday scenarios that students would be familiar with.
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So students can practice these skills in low stakes, honestly, kind of fun, before you ask them to do it for a grade or on an actual investigation.
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If you want a ready-made version of that everyday scenario practice instead of building it from scratch, that bundles on my in my resource, my web store, my TPT store.
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I'll put a link to it in the show notes.
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Back to the labs.
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Then there's a pre-approval process.
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Students don't start until their plan has been reviewed by you.
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Or it could be a self-checklist, a peer review.
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The idea behind this pre-approval process is that it's going to catch safety issues and also will reduce the amount of time that may be wasted in the lab when they're doing their experiment.
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And that this is allowing that to be fixed before it happens for real in the lab.
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And a materials menu give students a list of what you have available because this isn't a free-for-all.
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You're not going to go out and buy them a gallon of milk because they want to use milk in their experiment.
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What do you have available in the classroom?
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What chemicals are available in the classroom that they would already know how to use?
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This actually is a really good exercise for them because it mirrors the constraints that scientists work with every day in their labs.
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Scientists don't have endless budgets.
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Sometimes scientists are working on very strict grants that they have and they have limited money.
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So this is a real-world scenario for working in a lab.
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You have a constraint on the materials you can use and it gives your students that experience.
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Now let's talk about the mess itself.
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Because a great investigation design is going to completely fall apart and disintegrate if your classroom just descends into chaos as soon as these students come in and start doing their own designed procedures.
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I'm not going to walk you through every single system I use, just the ones that I think have the biggest impact.
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First of all, organizing materials.
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I have trays organized by group number.
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I have a refill station for water, oil, whatever we're using in bulk, as well as gloves and pipettes.
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That way students can get the materials that they need instead of waiting for me to come over and personally resupply them.
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I do believe those things in a prominent location in my room so it's not in an obscure corner.
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So I can at least keep an eye on that station so I know students aren't just using it as a free-for-all.
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When the materials are chaotic and distributed around the room chaotically, everything downstream is just going to fall into that chaos.
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So material organization.
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Then my pre-lab setup is super important.
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I make students complete a very short pre-lab checklist before they start doing anything.
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Very simple.
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Are your goggles on?
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Do you have the materials on your list?
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Is your plan approved?
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It takes less than 30 seconds and it saves you, the teacher, from being the answer to wait, what do I do?
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And they wrote the procedure, so they shouldn't be asking you anyway.
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But making sure that they have their safety equipment on all of their materials, then they can certainly start on their own.
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The third one is a cleanup system.
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There needs to be a clear checklist, a timer, and I love to give one person in every group an inspector role because they're checking that their group has done everything on the checklist and they are making sure everything is cleaned.
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I also like to assign a couple other students as super inspectors because they're going to be going through and inspecting the entire room and making sure everything is where it's supposed to be.
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Materials weren't tossed into the sink, not hung up to dry, or chemicals were returned to where they needed to go, all that stuff.
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So you have your group inspector and then you have your whole class inspector that's making sure your entire classroom is ready for the next class and it's not chaotic as soon as the next class walks in.
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If you want a full breakdown of all the systems I use for lab day, I do have a blog post about it and I'll put a link to it in the show notes.
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And honestly, the roles that I provide is where most of the confusion and chaos in the groups is going to be alleviated.
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If your students don't know their individual responsibility within the group, that is going to lead to some accidents and some experimental errors.
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So I also have free lab role signs and responsibilities that will give every student in the group an actual job with a list of responsibilities.
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So this way they walk into lab day and it's not three kids working in the lab and two watching or whatever your breakdown is.
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Everyone has a role and the group members will hold each other accountable to the roles that they've been assigned.
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It's a super small thing, especially in a high school classroom, but you will not believe how much these kids embrace these roles and these responsibilities that are bestowed upon them.
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And one more thing while we're on this topic, if you're still building out a first week of school foundation or you feel like you missed something from the first week of school, it's not too late to go back and reteach some of those important science skills.
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I have a first week of school product that I will share a note.
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Um I have a first week of school products uh unit.
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It's a five-day unit that has an entire day dedicated to lab safety and the scientific method.
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It's all built for you.
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It's a stations activity.
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I'll put a link to it in the show notes.
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It's on my web store and TPT.
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Like I said, it's never too late to go back and reinforce these skills.
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Here's the part that I think is the most important of this entire episode.
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In a cookbook lab, unexpected results are a problem.
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Students get the number that they know is not right, and they ask you as the teacher, what did we do wrong?
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But in a real investigation, those unexpected results are amazing and they're awesome.
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It's the whole point of doing a full inquiry investigation.
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So picture a student group whose results don't match what everyone else got.
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Your instinct is going to tell the group where they went wrong so they can fix it.
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I want you to resist doing that.
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Ask them to defend their results, their conclusions, with the data they actually collected.
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That's claim evidence reasoning in action.
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It's not a confirmation exercise.
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They are going to explain what they can conclude from their data based on what actually happened in the lab in front of them, not what the answer key says was supposed to happen.
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So give your students that freedom to use what you know is bad data to support their claim and push back on them when they make a claim that does not support the evidence they actually collected in the lab.
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Because I've had students do that too.
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They know what was supposed to happen.
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They look around at the other groups.
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They got different data than that group did.
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So they write their claim based on what all the other groups got.
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No, that's not what your evidence says.
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You cannot do that.
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So here's what I want you to walk away with.
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Ultimately, wrong data is not a total failure as a lab.
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It's a discussion your class needed to have anyway, because I think another topic that's important is about error and variability and accuracy of instruments, about what actually should count as evidence and data to support a claim in the first place.
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So this is where the trust gets built because students learn fast that you're not grading them on landing the right number.
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You are grading them on the thinking that got them there, and that they're gonna trust you to give them the grace to make these mistakes and run with maybe wrong evidence.
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You don't need six new units to try any of this.
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Pick one lab you're already running, move it one rung up the gradual release ladder.
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See what happens.
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If you want a hand with that first move, I've got three tiered investigation planning templates, one for each level of the gradual release model that I described earlier.
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And I will put that in the show notes.
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I'm also going to send it to my email list for free.
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So if you're not on my email list, you should get there.
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Because I send them stuff all the time.
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Next episode, we're back to philosophy.
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I'm making the case that ed tech has been sold to us as the fix for exactly the kind of learning we've been talking about today.
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And instead, it's making things worse.
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That's episode five.
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Follow the show wherever you're listening, and I'll talk to you next time.
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I'm Elise.
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This is the lab bench.
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Let's get to work.
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Hey fellow science teachers, welcome back to the lab bench.
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I'm Elise and this is episode four.
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We're practical today.
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I'm five weeks into the school year, so we're in it.
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You might be deep into your first unit, maybe starting your second, or maybe you're well into your second unit, and you've probably already run a lab or two.
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So today's promise is this.
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I'm going to share what a real inquiry lab actually looks like, how to build toward it without losing your minds, and what to do when lab data comes back messy or unexpected.
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This is the lab map, science education on filter.
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I'm Elise.
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Let's get into it.
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Oh, lab day.
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My most favorite day in a science classroom.
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The students file in, they grab their procedures, and immediately ask, What are we doing today?
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They follow the procedure step by step, they fill in the data table, they generally like that they're doing a lab.
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They answer the analysis questions, they did the lab.
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But did they investigate anything?
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But wait, a lab where students already know the answer isn't a lab.
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It's a hands-on confirmation exercise with extra steps.
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Here's what the NGSS standards actually want from science labs because this gets forgotten or kind of watered down in a lot of science classrooms.
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The science and engineering practice number three from the NGSS is planning and carrying out investigations.
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Not following a procedure, planning one.
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That means students identify and control variables.
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They decide what data to collect and how much.
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They think about precision and accuracy.
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They select their own tools and equipment.
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Those are all things we typically do for them the second we hand out a cookbook lab quote-unquote investigation.
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A confirmation lab tells students what science already found out.
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An investigation asks them to find out something new.
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And students can tell the difference every single time you are doing a confirmation lab versus a true investigation.
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They are experts at detecting when they're going through motions that don't lead to anything substantial.
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Before I give you the fix, I want to be clear on the barriers for these types of activities because if I skip this part, it's going to sound like I've never actually done a lab with a bunch of teenagers.
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On the teacher side, true inquiry investigation means releasing control of the procedure.
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It means tolerating productive struggle instead of stepping in the second things get messy or confusing for your students.
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It means managing time when kids are designing, which we know we never have enough time in our very neatly scheduled curriculum plan for the year.
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And on the student side, most high schoolers have been handed a cookbook procedure since middle school for labs.
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Ask them to plan their own investigation and they freeze.
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They don't know what they're doing.
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They don't know how much data is enough.
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They mix up a controlled variable with the control group constantly.
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And I don't blame them for that.
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The confusion is proof or evidence that they can't do this.
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It's that they were never taught how to do this.
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And on the systemic side, you've got time, budget, safety, pacing guides breathing down your neck if you're a standardized test subject like I am.
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Those are all real limitations, and I'm not gonna pretend that those aren't problems when you do this.
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Genuine inquiry is expensive in more ways than one.
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So, how do you actually build this skill without setting your classroom on fire in week one of school?
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Don't throw students into open inquiry cold turkey.
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You scaffold it across the entire school year, and you're gonna use these three different tiers of inquiry levels to get your students to the full open inquiry.
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First one is structured inquiry.
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Structured inquiry is where most of your students are right now at this point in the school year, the beginning.
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You are giving them the question to investigate.
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You're even telling them what materials to use, and you're probably giving them a procedure to follow.
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But as they are doing it, make the planning visible while they're going through the lab.
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As you circulate around the room when they're doing the lab, ask why they would need to, why is step six there?
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Why is it important that we do step six?
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Or point out a variable that's already built into the design of the lab.
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Ask them what would happen if we didn't have the control group.
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If true inquiry investigation is learning how to drive a car, at this point they are still just a passenger along for the ride.
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Guided inquiry comes mid-year.
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Now your students have a learner's permit and they are driving with you in the passenger seat.
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You provide the question, and maybe you say these are the materials that you can choose from, or you may mandate they use certain materials, but students are writing their own procedure.
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They're identifying their own independent and dependent variables, they're planning how they're going to collect their own data, and they're going to submit that for your approval before they go anywhere near your chemicals and your glassware.
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This is where your students are going to struggle, but it will be a productive struggle.
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This is where you, as the teacher, need to bite your tongue the most.
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You may see your students make decisions that may lead to poor experimental outcomes, but you need to let them make those mistakes.
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Mistakes and failures are the best teachers in this kind of scenario.
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Open inquiry is late in the school year.
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This is the point where your students have a driver's license and can drive the inquiry car on their own, but they still need to ask permission to use the car and tell you where they're going and when they're going to get home.
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At this level, students generate the question themselves from a phenomenon, decide on the materials to use, and they design the entire investigation from start to finish.
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It's messy, it takes a ton of time, and if you build through the school year with the other two levels of scaffolded labs, they will be far more successful than you could ever expect or imagine.
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If you are this far into the school year and still instruct structured or just dipping your toe into the guided inquiry level, that's where you should be.
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I'm not saying that you need to throw your students in the deep end and give them a completely open-ended investigation right now.
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Meet your students where they are, give them the tools and the scaffolding they need to get to that open inquiry before the end of the year.
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A few easy strategies will help you implement this gradual release model into your real life classroom.
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Scaffolded planning templates will walk through students through the question hypothesis variables like the independent, dependent, controlled, uh, the writing their procedure, what sort of data table are they going to collect, the materials are that they're gonna use, and also the safety requirements that they need to observe while they are in the lab.
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All of that's in one place.
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Strip the scaffold back gradually as the year goes on.
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What is a fully detailed template right now in September should be closer to a blank page come spring.
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Explicit variable instruction is really important too.
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And I mean explicit.
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Don't assume your students absorb independent versus dependent through osmosis.
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Practice it first with scenarios that have nothing to do with science.
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Sports performance, cooking, sleep.
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Once they can identify a variable in something familiar that they see every day of their lives, they can transfer that skill to the lab.
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This is actually the exact idea behind a station bundle I offer on the SCPs and CCCs.
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It's built around non-scientific everyday scenarios that students would be familiar with.
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So students can practice these skills in low stakes, honestly, kind of fun, before you ask them to do it for a grade or on an actual investigation.
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If you want a ready-made version of that everyday scenario practice instead of building it from scratch, that bundles on my in my resource, my web store, my TPT store.
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I'll put a link to it in the show notes.
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Back to the labs.
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Then there's a pre-approval process.
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Students don't start until their plan has been reviewed by you.
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Or it could be a self-checklist, a peer review.
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The idea behind this pre-approval process is that it's going to catch safety issues and also will reduce the amount of time that may be wasted in the lab when they're doing their experiment.
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And that this is allowing that to be fixed before it happens for real in the lab.
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And a materials menu give students a list of what you have available because this isn't a free-for-all.
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You're not going to go out and buy them a gallon of milk because they want to use milk in their experiment.
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What do you have available in the classroom?
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What chemicals are available in the classroom that they would already know how to use?
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This actually is a really good exercise for them because it mirrors the constraints that scientists work with every day in their labs.
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Scientists don't have endless budgets.
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Sometimes scientists are working on very strict grants that they have and they have limited money.
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So this is a real-world scenario for working in a lab.
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You have a constraint on the materials you can use and it gives your students that experience.
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Now let's talk about the mess itself.
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Because a great investigation design is going to completely fall apart and disintegrate if your classroom just descends into chaos as soon as these students come in and start doing their own designed procedures.
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I'm not going to walk you through every single system I use, just the ones that I think have the biggest impact.
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First of all, organizing materials.
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I have trays organized by group number.
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I have a refill station for water, oil, whatever we're using in bulk, as well as gloves and pipettes.
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That way students can get the materials that they need instead of waiting for me to come over and personally resupply them.
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I do believe those things in a prominent location in my room so it's not in an obscure corner.
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So I can at least keep an eye on that station so I know students aren't just using it as a free-for-all.
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When the materials are chaotic and distributed around the room chaotically, everything downstream is just going to fall into that chaos.
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So material organization.
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Then my pre-lab setup is super important.
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I make students complete a very short pre-lab checklist before they start doing anything.
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Very simple.
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Are your goggles on?
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Do you have the materials on your list?
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Is your plan approved?
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It takes less than 30 seconds and it saves you, the teacher, from being the answer to wait, what do I do?
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And they wrote the procedure, so they shouldn't be asking you anyway.
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But making sure that they have their safety equipment on all of their materials, then they can certainly start on their own.
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The third one is a cleanup system.
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There needs to be a clear checklist, a timer, and I love to give one person in every group an inspector role because they're checking that their group has done everything on the checklist and they are making sure everything is cleaned.
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I also like to assign a couple other students as super inspectors because they're going to be going through and inspecting the entire room and making sure everything is where it's supposed to be.
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Materials weren't tossed into the sink, not hung up to dry, or chemicals were returned to where they needed to go, all that stuff.
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So you have your group inspector and then you have your whole class inspector that's making sure your entire classroom is ready for the next class and it's not chaotic as soon as the next class walks in.
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If you want a full breakdown of all the systems I use for lab day, I do have a blog post about it and I'll put a link to it in the show notes.
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And honestly, the roles that I provide is where most of the confusion and chaos in the groups is going to be alleviated.
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If your students don't know their individual responsibility within the group, that is going to lead to some accidents and some experimental errors.
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So I also have free lab role signs and responsibilities that will give every student in the group an actual job with a list of responsibilities.
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So this way they walk into lab day and it's not three kids working in the lab and two watching or whatever your breakdown is.
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Everyone has a role and the group members will hold each other accountable to the roles that they've been assigned.
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It's a super small thing, especially in a high school classroom, but you will not believe how much these kids embrace these roles and these responsibilities that are bestowed upon them.
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And one more thing while we're on this topic, if you're still building out a first week of school foundation or you feel like you missed something from the first week of school, it's not too late to go back and reteach some of those important science skills.
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I have a first week of school product that I will share a note.
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Um I have a first week of school products uh unit.
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It's a five-day unit that has an entire day dedicated to lab safety and the scientific method.
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It's all built for you.
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It's a stations activity.
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I'll put a link to it in the show notes.
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It's on my web store and TPT.
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Like I said, it's never too late to go back and reinforce these skills.
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Here's the part that I think is the most important of this entire episode.
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In a cookbook lab, unexpected results are a problem.
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Students get the number that they know is not right, and they ask you as the teacher, what did we do wrong?
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But in a real investigation, those unexpected results are amazing and they're awesome.
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It's the whole point of doing a full inquiry investigation.
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So picture a student group whose results don't match what everyone else got.
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Your instinct is going to tell the group where they went wrong so they can fix it.
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I want you to resist doing that.
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Ask them to defend their results, their conclusions, with the data they actually collected.
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That's claim evidence reasoning in action.
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It's not a confirmation exercise.
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They are going to explain what they can conclude from their data based on what actually happened in the lab in front of them, not what the answer key says was supposed to happen.
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So give your students that freedom to use what you know is bad data to support their claim and push back on them when they make a claim that does not support the evidence they actually collected in the lab.
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Because I've had students do that too.
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They know what was supposed to happen.
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They look around at the other groups.
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They got different data than that group did.
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So they write their claim based on what all the other groups got.
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No, that's not what your evidence says.
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You cannot do that.
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So here's what I want you to walk away with.
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Ultimately, wrong data is not a total failure as a lab.
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It's a discussion your class needed to have anyway, because I think another topic that's important is about error and variability and accuracy of instruments, about what actually should count as evidence and data to support a claim in the first place.
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So this is where the trust gets built because students learn fast that you're not grading them on landing the right number.
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You are grading them on the thinking that got them there, and that they're gonna trust you to give them the grace to make these mistakes and run with maybe wrong evidence.
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You don't need six new units to try any of this.
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Pick one lab you're already running, move it one rung up the gradual release ladder.
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See what happens.
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If you want a hand with that first move, I've got three tiered investigation planning templates, one for each level of the gradual release model that I described earlier.
00:18:09.839 --> 00:18:11.839
And I will put that in the show notes.
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I'm also going to send it to my email list for free.
00:18:14.319 --> 00:18:16.960
So if you're not on my email list, you should get there.
00:18:17.200 --> 00:18:19.119
Because I send them stuff all the time.
00:18:19.440 --> 00:18:21.839
Next episode, we're back to philosophy.
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I'm making the case that ed tech has been sold to us as the fix for exactly the kind of learning we've been talking about today.
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And instead, it's making things worse.
00:18:30.720 --> 00:18:32.160
That's episode five.
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Follow the show wherever you're listening, and I'll talk to you next time.
00:18:35.519 --> 00:18:36.400
I'm Elise.
00:18:36.640 --> 00:18:37.920
This is the lab bench.
00:18:38.000 --> 00:18:39.200
Let's get to work.
