Up and Away - Rockets

Term 1 2019 

Room 12 and Room 14 (60 students) began our journey into Collective Knowledge Building by trying to discover what would make a film canister rocket go the highest.

Part 1: Open Exploration
Students were asked to form groups of 3 and were asked to select their group members using the following criteria; one group member had to be from the other class and one other group member had to be someone you haven't worked with before. We started off by framing the challenge by saying; 'What makes a difference to the height of the rocket?' We had different fuels on offer for the students - these fuels were named after planets (Earth, Mercury, Pluto, Venus, Saturn). Mrs van Dijk gave an extremely shoddy demonstration on how to make a film canister rocket - her rocket didn't even launch. Students were then given an 11 minute time frame to experiment to see how high they could launch their rocket. Throughout this time we roved around the students provoking thinking and encouraging idea development through the use of reflective questioning.

Part 2: Claims and Critiques 
Twenty minutes after the shoddy demonstration all students were back in ready to start our 'Rocket' conference. Students were given one sticky note to write their claim - they were also given sentence starters help them frame up their claims (“We claim that ...... makes the rocket go higher/stops the rocket going high. We think this is true because.......”). Once students had put their claims up onto the whiteboard we clustered the claims according to similar variables. Our 5 clusters were vinegar, shape of cup, amount of powder, shaking and type/amount of fuel. As this was our first time clustering the claims we do feel we could have split a few of these to make a couple more clusters. We selected the cluster that had the most claims in it to put onto our knowledge building canvas. We went through each of these claims and sought clarification from different groups if their claim was unclear. The students were then given a brief outline on the following four headings on the knowledge building canvas and were then given a sticky note to respond to one of the claims made (either by asking a question, supporting or refuting it with evidence, or building on the initial idea). Many of the groups struggled initially with this and thought they had to make another claim. It took a lot longer as we had to check in with each group and refocus them on the four headings.

Part 3: Building Collective Understanding
During this part of the conference we felt we were running out of time and didn't really understand how to use the line of trust effectively. The students had also been sitting for a long time and were starting to lose focus. During this we noticed that the students tended to trust their own claims the most based on their experiences rather than on the content of the canvas. After a short break we came back to the canvas and used the line of trust to get a collaborative census on what the level of trust was for each claim (see numbers beside each claim for the level of trust). This was an extremely effective discussion as this showed the students which ideas they should pursue when they went out further exploration.

Students were then given another 11 minutes to explore the claims to affirm or build new knowledge about what would make the rocket go higher. There were a lot of great discussions going on within each group and between the different groups.

Reflection: 

Successes: 

• 60 students collaborating (two classes joined together). 
• We were impressed with how the students selected their group based on the criteria we gave them.
• The students were all fully engaged throughout the knowledge building challenge. 
• The first lot of claims the students gave (with very little guidance from us) were well written and quite varied. 
• Giving the students the claim statement to help with the writing of their claims really scaffolded them thought this. 
• Reflective questioning through the open exploration and bringing the students focus back to the initial question (What makes the difference to the height of the rocket?) really helped to keep the groups focussed on the task. 

Next Steps: 

• The timeframe for our claims and critiques so that students are not sitting too long on the mat. 
• Giving them sentence beginnings for the other four headings on the knowledge building canvas (questions, supporting evidence, refuting evidence, building ideas). 
• Moving onto using the line of trust quite quickly so that students can rank each of the claims. This way they can start thinking about what they would like to investigate in their next open exploration phase. 
• Have a discussion with the students about what blind persistence is and why it is not effective when building knowledge. 
• If we were to use the rocket experience again we would be careful what we named the fuels so the students didn't try to use this as a rule/pattern for which fuel would work best. 

Mandatory/Non-mandatory Learners: 

• One of our non-mandatory learners who often struggles to work in a group (he doesn't feel like his is listened to) initially fully participated in the open exploration. At one point he stepped out and said that his group was not listening to his ideas, but quickly came back round and joined in. He struggled with the length of the conference and had checked out towards the end. We will need to be mindful of this in our next knowledge building challenge. 
• Two of our mandatory learners who are extremely low across the curriculum struggled to last the length of the open exploration stage and really not articulate any of their findings or the purpose for the challenge. We will need to find ways to simplify some of the next challenges so that these students can access them along with the others. 
• Another one of our non-mandatory learners was the child who insisted that the fuels went in a particular order - she was looking for a rule (Pluto would work better because it is the furtherest away from the Earth). She also was insistent that her idea was the right one even after other students refuted her claim. In our second round of open exploration she continued to explore her own claim further (blind persistence). Before the next challenge we will need to check in with her group more often and to question their ideas to ensure blind persistence doesn't continue. 
• We noticed one of our non-mandatory students tell his group to be quiet when another group came over to see what they were doing. At this point we were filming this group so reminded them it was about collective knowledge building and that we need to learn from each other.