Change is Good! (and necessary)

As the focus of my ARP changes, I feel compelled to change the layout of my blog. Over the past few weeks, it has occured to me that change scares many teachers.
Last week I was asked by my principal to present content area reading and writing strategies to my colleagues. As I embraced this challenge with excitement and hope, I was unprepared for the response I got from my math and science peers. Although in our heart of hearts, we know that traditional lecture isn't the most effective strategy, we (teachers) tend to grasp and hold tightly to strategies that are comfortable to us. To my amazement, many teachers found it impossible to ADD more strategies into their time limited daily lessons. After thinking about this for the past 9 days, I've decided a few things:
1) Change is difficult for many teachers (and CHANGE DOESN'T mean ADD).
2) English and History teachers "totally get" the reading and writing strategy game.
3) Students struggle reading vocabulary dense textbooks.... (BORING)
4) Science and math teachers must experiment with new reading and writing strategies with their students, if they are ever going to encourage the excitement and exploration in these content areas.
So....this is what I did.
In my physics class instead of traditional lecture, I asked the students to read Chapter 5.2: Velocity-Time Graphs (v-t graphs)and use "Post-It's" to write down ideas, questions, interesting facts, formulas, examples, and real-life applications (Day 1). After the Post-It note session, I asked them to organize their notes and create a double-entry journal (Cornell Notes) including their important information (Day 1 Homework). Small groups used v-t graphs to calculate velocity, displacment, and time (Day 2). Individually, each student composed a sentence about each line segment in the graph to "tell a story" about the object's motion (Day 2 Homework). Finally, 6 small groups created a story to share with other groups to graph and calculate (Day 3).
In my chemistry class instead of test review questions, I asked the students to compose a 1 page, single-spaced story about electron arrangement. The students began with a brain-storming activity to create story ideas (1/2 day). They were assigned writing groups (oh no.... writing groups in chemistry?) to collaborate how they were going to incorporate as many vocabulary words as possible into their story (Day 2). Each student created a rough draft of their story idea (Day 2 Homework). The writing groups met for one last revision session and began writing their final draft of their story(Day 3 and Day 3 Homework). Day 4 Test Day......I received incredible stories about electron arrangement and a much deeper look into the content.

So, this is what I know..... teachers who have the courage to try new ways of dispensing content area information, may very well be surprised with what they recieve....... and by the way, their test scores were great! Because if they didn't really understand the content they couldn't write their story!