Synthesis
~~~bringing all the pieces together~~~
White Paper
12/6/14
To: Ms. Fisher (other 3rd grade teacher/planning partner)
RE: Science and Social Studies Through Sports
To: Ms. Fisher (other 3rd grade teacher/planning partner)
RE: Science and Social Studies Through Sports
Throughout my master’s class on creativity, I have been exploring seven cognitive tools that are important for creativity: veja du, perceiving, patterning, abstracting, embodied thinking, modeling, and playing. I also developed ways that our students can use these creative tools in the classroom, all focusing on the theme of using a variety of sports to teach science and social studies. For each of the seven, I have some ideas for planning activities that would engage students with that type of creativity through the lens of science and social studies in sports. I hope that we can collaborate to improve and implement these lessons throughout the third quarter through a recurrent theme of the relationship between sports and both science and social studies. This theme will strengthen our students’ abilities to build connections across disciplines because it will be grounded in an area where they already have some experience and knowledge, sports. Using sports as our theme will keep students engaged in the subject areas that we often place on the back-burner for the end of the day and keep them working until the busses are called.
Through this plan, the first cognitive tool that our students will explore is veja du. Unlike the familiar concept of deja vu, in which something new suddenly seems completely familiar, veja du is about looking at something familiar anew in a completely fresh way. Although the only activity I created for this section of the class was a series of pictures of my coffee maker that show it from different perspectives and indicate how it can be seen in alternate ways based on the angle of the view in the picture and which parts of the coffeemaker are included in the picture, the principal of those varying, refreshed views can be used for a science lesson about observation to introduce this new theme. We can give students different items used in sports, including balls and other equipment, and ask them to come up with other things that they look, feel, sound, or smell like. Through asking students to take items that they already have a clear conception of and asking them to look for new elements of them in all different senses, they will begin the process of building unforeseen connections that will return throughout these activities while also learning more about how to observe carefully, like a scientist.
The second cognitive tool they will experience is perceiving, which has been described as “seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought,” or the process of looking at something familiar in a different way (Root-Bernstein, 44). Our students are all familiar with the visual and auditory experience of a bouncing basketball, but they may not realize how it connects to science concepts of velocity, time, and wavelength, and the related musical concept of rhythm. By asking students to compare what they can see and hear about a bouncing basketball to a video of students tapping pencils to make music, they will notice that what they had perceived as a simple basketball skill like dribbling has the possibility to create something like this Basketball Bounce Beat. Through this discussion, they will build connections between sports, music, and science by perceiving a bouncing basketball in a way they had never thought about it before.
The third cognitive tool is patterning, through which “we organize the random events we see, hear, or feel by grouping them,” a constant subconscious process we use to to organize our perceptions of the outside world (Root-Bernstein, 92). In the activity using this cognitive tool, students will do two different experiments designed to help them discover patterns about friction. First, in a traditional science experiment, students will push hockey pucks along different surfaces in order to compare how the characteristics of the surfaces affect the stopping distance of the puck, which can then be used as an example of the relationship between friction and surfaces. However, the standard lesson will also be reinforced by a second experiment in which students describe the surfaces of different balls used in sports and then play catch with them and see how easy it is to catch different balls. We can then ask them to describe the pattern of which balls were easier to catch, providing another example of how different surfaces affect friction. This will open up the possibility of students making additional connections to their understanding of sports, such as why wide receivers wear gloves to increase the friction that helps them catch more passes, while also giving them practice with creating multiple patterns to describe a new science concept.
The fourth tool is abstracting, which “by simplifying, yields the common links, the nexuses, in the fabric of perception and nature” insights that can only occur after the simplification has happened. (Root-Bernstein, 78). Unlike the other activities for the first three tools, in which students were directly engaged in practicing the cognitive tool as they worked through the assignment, the lesson I planned using abstracting is based on two abstractions that I created. This proves how, as teachers, although it is very helpful for student learning and growth for them to be practicing the cognitive tools themselves, it can also crucial for us to use the tools ourselves in our planning in order to create more meaningful and engaging lessons. Using what I learned about this tool, I created two abstractions of how baseball has changed over time that can be used to help students explore the differences between different periods in Michigan history, a tree that has “seen” the different time periods in its inner and outer rings, and different versions of Take Me Out to the Ballgame that are appropriate to each time period. Drawing on their knowledge of baseball, we can ask students to identify important differences between the rings and songs in order to discover historical differences and also learn more about the relationship between sports and society, all through the educational power of these two abstractions.
The fifth tool is embodied thinking. “Before painting a bamboo, you must make it grow inside of you…” (Root-Bernstein, 197). This quote shows what I think about embodied thinking, specifically the important connection between body thinking and empathizing illustrated by the process of using the entire body to feel bamboo, experiencing what bamboo experiences, in order to comprehend it fully. For this lesson, while we read a story about LeBron James signing with the Cleveland Cavaliers, the students will act out different words related to the economic concepts of choice and scarcity. They may end up acting by bowing down to "the king" or acting like they are handing out money. We can also connect this activity to a discussion of the marshmallow experiment, in which children were asked to choose between 1 marshmallow now and 2 marshmallows later, further illustrating how economic tradeoffs affect our feelings and decision-making. By embodying their thinking into kinesthetic movement, students will experience how economic motivations affect our thoughts and feelings and make connections between social studies and their knowledge about sports players and teams.
The sixth tool is modeling, which allows you to “throw out a large number of structures that might otherwise be thought possible” through experimenting with possible designs and noticing various advantages and disadvantages that do not obviously appear before the models are constructed. Our students will get to experience this when they are asked to use classroom materials to build the best possible ramps to get their marble across the classroom as quickly as possible. After they go through the process of trying and failing and trying again to invent the best ramp model for their marbles, we can show them some examples that would have gone well and others that would be better suited for this than for marbles. By discussing their ramps and these examples of ramps in sports, our students will make connections between science and sports while also using modeling in the same way engineers would.
The final, and probably easiest, cognitive tool is playing, which has “no success or failure...no holding to account, no mandatory achievement,” making it a learning opportunity for students that is intentionally distanced from traditional school concepts of right and wrong, allowing all students equal access to the initial thinking about a new topic. The way I thought about providing this equitable opportunity for engagement is through a lesson in which students, in pairs, are given cards describing activities that they will act out or draw. Then, the whole class will discuss and vote to classify those activities as sports or not sports. After this, students will be asked to explain how the activities that are “sports” are related to science and how the activities that are “not sports,” which will sound as if they are more science-like, could actually be related to sports. This playing activity, in a low risk, engaging way that does not require too much background knowledge about the domains of science, will reinforce how closely connected science and sports are in the real world.
In conclusion, please consider working with me to implement these lessons based on connecting sports to both social studies and science. Even beyond building our students’ creative skills through these seven key skills, these lessons will inspire, in both our students and ourselves, enthusiasm and engagement for subject areas that are often pushed to the bottom of the barrel and the end of the day.