Are you in search of an genuine technique to get your science college students to grasp essential ideas, construct connections, and interact in high-level educational dialogue? Or possibly you want an enticing exercise within the days earlier than a break that also helps meet your requirements. Enter hexagonal pondering.
I used to be first launched to hexagonal pondering after observing a lesson in a social research class at my college. The 2 lecturers main the lesson had been following the process as described by EduProtocols, and my instructing companion and I had been fully impressed by what we noticed. A bit of little bit of digging revealed that the idea of hexagonal pondering has been broadly mentioned in instructional media. It’s even been lined right here on We Are Academics. Nonetheless, whereas the items I learn mentioned it could possibly be used for any content material, I didn’t see many examples that includes science. Let or not it’s recognized, hexagonal pondering not solely can be used within the science classroom, it’s an ideal match for science content material! Is your curiosity is piqued? Learn on to study extra about what hexagonal pondering is, and the best way to convey it to your personal science classroom.
What’s hexagonal pondering?
Getting began with hexagonal pondering is easy. Every pupil or group of scholars receives a set of paper hexagons with key phrases printed within the middle. The aim is to rearrange the hexagons so that every facet that touches has a connection. We Are Academics author Betsy Potash explains,”Ideas are … moved round to construct an online of linked concepts. Essentially the most fascinating half comes within the debate about the place to attach what, and why. No two webs will ever look the identical, and neither will the reasons of the connections college students have made, whether or not given in writing or aloud.”
A fundamental instance could possibly be connecting “rain” and “snow” to “precipitation,” since each rain and snow are examples of precipitation. Nonetheless, college students who made this association and allowed one facet of “rain” to the touch the opposite facet of “snow” would should be ready to clarify a connection between these phrases as properly. A surface-level connection may repeat the concept rain and snow are each precipitation. A extra refined rationalization may introduce that the 2 types of precipitation are each water at various temperatures. As you may see, the extra phrases you introduce, the quicker the rigor of the exercise snowballs (pun meant!).
Past vocabulary
I’m certain at this level your mind is buzzing with methods to make use of hexagonal pondering to bolster essential vocabulary. However don’t restrict your self! Offering hexagons with concepts that attain past vocabulary phrases is a incredible technique to improve the cognitive calls for in your college students.
My instructing companion and I selected to implement hexagonal pondering on the finish of our unit on plate tectonics. As a part of their work with the OpenSciEd mannequin of instruction, college students had developed lists of investigation concepts and associated phenomena earlier within the unit. We added all of those to color-coded hexagons. The colour coding allowed college students to visualise connections between the investigations they carried out all through the unit, scientific ideas that they had investigated, and the associated science concepts they may now clarify utilizing these ideas. Moreover, we supplied clean hexagons of every coloration. This gave college students the choice so as to add particular investigations or phrases that had not been supplied.
Moreover, utilizing totally different colours allowed us to rapidly see how built-in the scholars’ connections had been. Teams that had massive clumps of a single coloration tended to make extra literal connections. Against this, teams with a fair combine of colours noticed extra nuance in how the ideas and actions had been linked. As soon as teams agreed on the association of their hexagons, they glued them to a big sheet of chart paper.
Explaining connections
When it got here time for college students to clarify the connections their group had created, we known as on coloration coding as soon as once more. This time, every pupil in a bunch of three or 4 chosen a distinct coloration marker. College students annotated their group’s chart paper of their chosen coloration. With a fast take a look at the chart paper, I may see which group members had been actively collaborating and who wanted extra help to get began. If one pupil within the group selected to do their writing in pink marker, and their was no pink marker on the chart paper, it gave me a cue to test in with this pupil.
As you may think about, having 4 college students clustered round a chart paper may get crowded rapidly. To maintain college students from being on prime of one another and maintain the reasons neat and simpler to learn, we used a numbering system. Every connection college students selected to clarify had an arrow with a quantity connecting the 2 hexagons. On a separate sheet of paper, college students would write the quantity and the reason that went with it. College students actually took possession of this and received inventive with the location of their arrows! Some college students drew arrows extending by as many as 4 hexagons, and supplied explanations of how the 4 phrases collectively illustrated a bigger idea. I liked seeing their delight and pleasure as they realized what number of items they may put collectively!
Gallery stroll
One of the lovely issues about hexagonal pondering is the variety of the ultimate merchandise. It was essential that we let different teams do a gallery stroll to see the connections their classmates had constructed. Nonetheless, asking center schoolers to judge each other’s work will be dicey with out the correct scaffolds.
To keep away from college students providing suggestions like “your paper is neat!” we supplied a sheet of open-ended prompts. Every group left the sheet with their chart paper in the course of the gallery stroll. When a bunch of scholars arrived on the mannequin, that they had two minutes to overview the mannequin. Then, the group selected a immediate and responded on the paper. Asking college students to offer particular examples of similarities and variations to their very own group’s work or questions that they had in regards to the paper they had been viewing in the end produced significant suggestions for his or her friends.
Scholar ideas
Following the exercise, my instructing companion and I supplied our courses with a survey. We every train 5 sections of seventh grade science and received a mixed 153 responses. Of these 153, 113 (74%) mirrored that the hexagon exercise helped them higher perceive connections between the unit ideas. Extra impressively, 149 college students (97%) shared that the exercise “always” or “at times” inspired them to suppose deeply. However numbers solely inform a part of the story.
Studying college students’ descriptions of their experiences finishing this exercise introduced the info to life. One wrote, “I think we should do hexagon activities more often. They are really fun and get you thinking about the topic.” One other shared, “It was a great way to show how everything we learned this unit is connected.” It was great to get affirmation from college students that they felt the engagement we witnessed of their teams!
Greater than your typical overview
By integrating vocabulary, investigations, and associated phenomena, hexagonal pondering was extra than simply an end-of-unit overview. All through the exercise, my instructing companion and I witnessed true collaboration, teamwork, and high-level pondering from college students. Should you’re enthusiastic about attempting hexagonal pondering in your science classroom, I hope this testimonial is the push it is advisable make it occur!