After two intensive periods this morning, both my 8G and 8H class finished their Fishbone Diagram's on the science concept "How to Separate Mixtures".
These pictures represent the completed Fishbone Diagrams for 8G. The effort my students put forth can be clearly seen, however at this point with a new approach I cannot clearly say the overall effect this approach will have towards student achievement. In my future summative assessments I hope to be able to accurately judge the effectiveness of this instructional approach.
Today was the initial attempt at using the Fish Bone graphic organizer in my classroom. While it took the students a while to brainstorm ideas to include in the Fish Bone (which may be in part related to the fact that is was a Monday morning), the students were quite receptive to the project. It will be interesting to see the final results!
One of the techniques discussed by Dr. Bennett is the use of Fish Bone diagrams to help students develop specific concepts. Below is a fish bone template borrowed from an elementary teacher in our district. My only concern with this diagram is that "Am I telling my students how many headings I want?", "Am I taking away from their learning experience?".
Because of these questions, another teacher and myself edited the original template (we just removed the bones). This allows students during a Think/Pair/Share with the class to develop as many headings as they see fit for a specific concept. This new template ca be seen below:
And lastly, to help students here is an example of a completed fish bone.
The above information has also been placed inside of a smart notebook file (see attached file to this post) to help guide students through the process of using a Fish Bone Diagram to discovering "Separating Mixtures" as seen in Unit 1 Topic 3 of Grade 8 Science in Alberta. As well, here is a mini lesson guideline that shows our basic implementation of this idea: http://docs.google.com/View?id=ddmqct2t_265dt8mbmf5And lastly, lastly, to get myself and my class ready to try and implement Fish Bone Diagrams for concept attainment in Science 8, I found this old 80's video by Barnes and Barnes... ENJOY... Let me know if you have any ideas that can be used to enhance this approach...
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