[Middle School] Art. Excrpt._Demo Lesson Plan Note 2

How can it be converted from simply a dramatic event into an opportunity
for scientific reasoning?

Students should gain an understanding of and abilities necessary to do scientific inquiry.

Instead of providing answers, I invited questions and asked for rationales.

I was prepared to respond with additional experiments to answer those questions with evidence.

The audience consisted of students of middle school age through adults.

“What could possibly be happening?” and “Explain your reasons for thinking that”—trying to get audience members to express their underlying hypotheses about mechanisms or fundamental understandings.

It was important to allow explanations to be tentative—to go unacknowledged regarding correctness or completeness.

With successive experiments, the suggestions and ideas began to converge
toward stronger explanations without my intervention.

In the classroom,
teachers can leave the activity unresolved and return to it the next day after students have had time to think about their ideas overnight.

To be prepared for questions, teachers
need to learn from prior reports and to have personal experience with variations on the basic experiment.

- Authorship

Christopher Bauer (cfb@cisunix.unh.edu) is a professor of chemistry at the University
of New Hamsphire, Department of Chemistry, UNH Durham, NH 03824