Literacy is a huge issue at this school. The focus is really on improving ELA scores which are quite low. The administration demands that the teachers all work on literacy but gives no guidelines on how. So what does a science teacher stuck in an old model do?
There is essentially zero writing in this class. The teacher doesn't even write lecture notes, they are recycled (and pretty awful, overly academic and difficult to understand the wording) PowerPoint slides from another teacher years ago. Often we put a worksheet on the document cam and write the answers that students supply. That is the extent of teacher writing. Students write very little as well. They copy notes (which is less writing and more copying), answer worksheet questions (although often times they are bullet point answers, not even complete sentences), and lab reports. The lab reports aren't what you think. They copy a Pre lab (title, materials, methods), collect data, and answer analysis questions in complete sentences. Once they wrote a conclusion but again it was in more of a question answer format. Not once have they had to write a paragraph. Most of the writing happens in class because the instructor doesn't believe that students would do work outside of class. The answers are also covered at the end of an assignment so many students just copy those rather than thinking about their own answers. Thor and Marc are meeting writing expectations. They complete the assignments and the answers in their lab ports show at least some degree of thought. Lately however, Marc has been off task during class and not completing work, just copying the corrected answers. Gabriel generally uses class time to nap or socialize and is not meeting expectations at all. I am still waiting on a lab report he was supposed to finish with his ELD teacher.
The bar for writing expectations is disgustingly low. I think we should provide sentence frames for actual lab write ups. That would provide students the scaffolding they currently need for science writing which we could later remove. From what I have seen from homework I assign, the students will rise to the challenge. It is especially interesting to note that in their lab report conclusions, when students were asked how they could improve the lab, many of them wrote "more writing." For a school struggling with literacy it is disappointing that they would exclude it from content classrooms in this way.
There is essentially zero writing in this class. The teacher doesn't even write lecture notes, they are recycled (and pretty awful, overly academic and difficult to understand the wording) PowerPoint slides from another teacher years ago. Often we put a worksheet on the document cam and write the answers that students supply. That is the extent of teacher writing. Students write very little as well. They copy notes (which is less writing and more copying), answer worksheet questions (although often times they are bullet point answers, not even complete sentences), and lab reports. The lab reports aren't what you think. They copy a Pre lab (title, materials, methods), collect data, and answer analysis questions in complete sentences. Once they wrote a conclusion but again it was in more of a question answer format. Not once have they had to write a paragraph. Most of the writing happens in class because the instructor doesn't believe that students would do work outside of class. The answers are also covered at the end of an assignment so many students just copy those rather than thinking about their own answers. Thor and Marc are meeting writing expectations. They complete the assignments and the answers in their lab ports show at least some degree of thought. Lately however, Marc has been off task during class and not completing work, just copying the corrected answers. Gabriel generally uses class time to nap or socialize and is not meeting expectations at all. I am still waiting on a lab report he was supposed to finish with his ELD teacher.
The bar for writing expectations is disgustingly low. I think we should provide sentence frames for actual lab write ups. That would provide students the scaffolding they currently need for science writing which we could later remove. From what I have seen from homework I assign, the students will rise to the challenge. It is especially interesting to note that in their lab report conclusions, when students were asked how they could improve the lab, many of them wrote "more writing." For a school struggling with literacy it is disappointing that they would exclude it from content classrooms in this way.