The Rookery

For our engineering unit, Amy, Cathy, Rachel (our student teacher) and I decided to push a little bit.  Our kids are very used to working in groups and they've become very good at it.  Usually, teachers structure groups that will ensure success — a mix of experience and inexperience, leader and followers, quiet and vocal.  But after some initial discussions with the students about gender roles and science, we decided to mix it up a little bit.  Students are divided into teams for the theme and those teams are for the most part single sex.  In addition, students who have similar roles in most groups have been placed together — so there are groups made entirely of kids who generally act as leaders, others filled with the quiet listeners.

On Wednesday, Rachel and I gave the teams a challenge — to design the tallest tower possible with 5 minutes, 16 straws, and 1 pair scissors.  No planning time — just go.  Student recorded the height of their tower and gave themselves a cooperation score.  We did a second trial, this time allowing for planning.  When we debriefed, we spoke to the kids about emotional involvement in a task — too little and something is boring, too much and we yell at each other and aren't successful.  The students talked a bit about what raised their emotional involvement to unproductive levels (time pressure, competition).  Armed with that knowledge, they tried a third time.  Not every group got something up but they all reported that they were working together better as a group.  You can see the difference on the tape below — the first clips are from the first trial.  There is little talking, some students sound stressed, one announces when looking around her table, "Hey!  Are we all working on different things?"  (they were).  

The second clips are taken from a later challenge after we had talked about ways to raise emotional involvement in a group to good levels (encouragement, friendly competition) and keep it from getting too high (de-emphasizing stressors like time limits, encouragement, humor, communication, planning).  You'll see students interacting more, sharing ideas with each other, articulating what they are doing to others and, at one point, claiming that the two minutes they have is actually twenty minutes ("We seem to work faster when we think that we have more time.")

We'll have several more days of mini-challenges like this in which we'll focus a lot on group dynamics.  We'll also be looking at some fundamentals of engineering like process, materials and forces but the majority of that work will begin the first week of February when students will begin a more in depth explorations.

Sorry for my voice blaring about halfway through the video — I don't always remember how loud it is if I talk while taping.