04 summer - dana, kim, katie b
hess's law

Beginning this entire endeavor was overwhelming, to say the least. We remember sitting on the patio with our new program officer, Nicole (I think this was the first time she really spoke to us), saying “We’re going to do a lesson study!” None of us knew what we were getting ourselves into. None of us had taught yet, two of us had done their student teaching, and no one had any idea what actually was feasible. As a cohort, we decided to focus on energy and came up with “graduation goals” about this topic, and then divided into four groups based on content areas. The chemistry folks created a concept map about important energy content. One group focused on endothermic and exothermic reactions, and our group focused on thermodynamic properties of Hess’s Law. We tried to consider what students would need to know before this topic and what would come next. Our goals were broad, not measurable or valid, and naïve. We were thinking about this topic more as college students, and not as science teachers.

Looking back at these documents five years later, we laugh. So many things say “teacher-led”, we say something about diagrams and have no idea what we meant, and we can tell that we did not know what we were talking about. We’re glad that this idea never was developed into an actual lesson, since we pitched this idea for the LBC cheeto activity soon after this meeting.

documents and resources

• Concept Map - our concept map to figure out energy ideas
• Learning Goals - what we wanted all students to know
• Lesson Plan - our skeleton lesson ideas for Hess's Law

(c) 2009 ronnster/oharanator productions