The lesson I created involved doing a class debate about nuclear energy.  I implemented it in the fall with all three of my honors chemistry classes.  As I was preparing for it, I was quite apprehensive because class debates can be difficult to run with high school students.  And my Kenan mentor was coming to observe my classes, so the pressure was even greater.  Fortunately, I was really surprised at how well the lesson went.  My students LOVED having the chance to debate their arguments.  And some of them were more talkative during the discussion than they were all year!!  I couldn’t believe how some of the shy students stepped up to the plate and really participated.  It is definitely a lesson I will repeat with my students as a way of improving literacy skills and science communication skills.  It also helped them understand some real world applications of what they learn in chemistry class.

In addition to using this lesson in my own class, it is also going to be incorporated into the NC Science Festival.  Over 20 teachers from across the state are going to pilot the lesson I created in their high school classes this spring.  We are hoping to improve the lesson by using feedback from those teachers so we can repeat it again for the 2015 Science Festival.  Several of the teachers participated in a webinar recently and they sounded enthusiastic about trying it.

Having said all that – I also must mention that my lesson had some definite kinks that needed to be worked out.  Following the debate, my students tried a technology called Padlet (that I learned about during our Kenan mountain week!).  They did a follow up online discussion that worked fine in my first class.  But in my second class, they started to realize I didn’t know which students made which comments.  So students named “Batman” and “King Tut” started popping up, making inappropriate comments.  It was also really messy and hard to follow the discussion.  Since then, my mentors have worked to adjust the lesson to use Backchannel, instead of Padlet.  I’m thankful we were able to test out the lesson with my students before creating the Science Festival documents!