It is my first time to view a science classroom teaching in Japan. In fact, it supprise me a little. I know the science education in Japan is of high quality. They get much better score than the other counties and teacher are respectable profession. But I never thought the classroom are so interactive and effective. You can click here to view the video.
This eighth-grade science lesson is about the formation of clouds. It is the third lesson in a sequence of 19 lessons on weather. The lesson is 53 minutes in duration. There are 25 students in the class.
http://timssvid1.s3.amazonaws.com/JP5%20Air%20compression%20and%20expansion.mp4
Here is my record of the time usage of the class:
00-03 Review what they learn
03-07 Demonstration
07-17 Demonstration of key skills for today’s experiment
18-36 Student activites(4 experiments and group take turn)
36-50 Sumary of experiment result and draw conclusion
50-52 self-evalation
I watched the video twice, first I just got a glance of it very quickly. The second time, I watch it very carefully and make notes of what teacher and students were doing.
First, I found a very interesting thing that the Japenese teacher used about 17 minutes to engage students and make demonstration at the begining. He also used about 17 minutes to sumary the results and conclusions at the end of the class. Acording to psychology studies, people are most likely to remember what happened at begining and at the end. People usually can only concentrate for 15 minutes. So most TED videos will not last more than 17 minutes. I don’t know if the teacher did it popurely. But he did it really well.
Second, the class is very interesting and vigorous. Students really had fun with the activities and record and try to explain.
Third, it keep a good balance of knowledge-centered and student-centered. The most important ideas and inquiry skills were embodied in student activities.
At last, I want to say although the teacher said nothing about modeling. But he raised a question for students to study. Students want to explain but had little idea and experieces. So they did the activities that teacher prepared for them. Before experiments, they make their explannation and predictions, they recorded the result on the handouts, they have to revise their explanation and building a more powerful causal model to explain all the phenomenons. So we do can found the shape of modeling in this class.
