Week B: Teacher as Model Builder-Team

Assessment Overview
Week B: Teacher as Model Builder—Team
ESS Model-Building Assignment & Rubric
Weeks 5, 8, 11, and 14

Assignment

Rubric

Goal: Using your team's original or revised problem statement, build an ESS model that includes the ESS relationship statements and evidence that support your conclusions (recommendations or solutions).

Background: Based on your collective knowledge and the answers to your questions in Week A, create an ESS model as a team. Discuss what you learned and what conclusions you can support with evidence from multiple sources including observation, expert opinion, analogy, or experimental results.

"Does that make sense?" you ask. Negotiated meaning is at the heart of developing meaning. We can memorize on our own, but we need to talk or write about our ideas to refine them.

So how does negotiated meaning work? Doesn't the loudest, oldest, or smartest voice usually dominate? Isn't there a right answer? Why should you entertain ideas you don't agree with? Consider these three reasons:

Some say truth has its own life - that we have only to discover it, so when the same idea emerges from different people's thinking for different reasons, it often points toward the truth.
Language gives life to thought and, in doing so, changes it. In a team, your job is to be sure that you are understood. Is what your teammates heard what you meant? Feedback from them about what they heard pushes you to be clearer in your communication and your thinking.
Seeing how ideas filter through other people's minds gives you a perspective you can only imagine on your own. What ideas do others find most compelling? Why? How do ideas fit together for them? What do they find to be problematic? What are they curious about? Tell them what you hear them saying and do your best to understand what they mean. If you can live inside their perspectives, they will expand your own.

Remember, a model satisfies a broader audience than your own mind. The evolution of private theories into models is the social learning phenomenon that Vygotsky identified and is the outcome of Problem-Based Learning. Building a model takes reflection and dialectic. The trick is to stay curious rather than to become judgmental and critical of others' ideas. When you become judgmental and critical, you are probably hanging on to those private theories a little too tenaciously.

Think like an investigator, trying to discover, rather than deciding what to think. Use your teammates to keep you honest about the quality of your ideas and to expand your sense of the possibilities.

Use the directions below to complete your model-building assignment.

Assignment (by midnight Sunday)

Posting Instructions for steps 1-3
Go to the Classroom. Click on the event name (Volcanoes, Coral Reefs, Tropical Forests, Ozone, Global Change) you are studying in this particular cycle to enter the appropriate event classroom. Then click on the Teacher as Model Builder graphic.

1. You and your team need to think in terms of an iterative, or evolving, process regarding the gathering of information as you move toward your findings (PBL Step 8). When ideas begin to emerge several times in different discussions, it is a sign that you are developing a shared understanding. The focus of this team assignment is to build an ESS model to support the problem statement you developed in Week A.

2. Continue gathering information to answer your teammates' questions from the Week A team assignment with evidence from experience, research, and reading to support or refute the team's ideas. You and your team will gather, organize, analyze, and interpret information from multiple sources. Exchange ideas; think about solutions; weigh alternatives; and consider the pros and cons of potential courses of action (PBL Step 7). As new information comes to light, analyze it for its reliability and usefulness and also for its impact on the direction that the problem is taking, as well as for its effect on the very nature of the problem. Therefore, you may need to revise or modify your problem statement (PBL Step 6).

3. The ESS model that you build with your team should include:

Your team's findings as they relate to the problem statement: a brief opening summary of supportable ideas and conclusions (recommendations, solutions, or alternatives) based on the information your team has collected, particularly for your ESS analysis, over Weeks A and B (PBL Step 8).
Statements about the relationships: detailed accounts of all the changes and impacts (revealing your understanding of interrelationships of the spheres and the event in the Earth System Diagram) that led your team to the conclusions put forth in your recommendations or solutions (findings). Make sure you include the systemic relationships, called causal chains, where multiple spheres and the event are involved in complex and interrelated changes. In a system, nothing occurs in isolation. Each causal chain should include S > S > S interactions.
Evidence: For evidence that your thinking is accurate, consider information, examples, and corroboration from readings, web sites, CD-ROMs, analogies, or experimental results and experts. Combine these to give credence to your relationship statements in the causal chains.

Rubric
Your team Week B: Teacher as Model Builder assignment corresponds to PBL Steps 7 and 8. The rubric below assesses how well you build a team model that supports your findings.

You can earn as many as five points for this assignment. You will automatically earn one point for submitting your assignment on time. See the Time Rubric. Use the criteria and indicators below to gauge your success in earning the remaining four points.

Rubric Criteria: Clarity and focus of supportable ideas and conclusions
4 Rating: Develop a comprehensive summary of supportable ideas and conclusions that go beyond the facts to show insight into the systemic relationships.	3 Rating: Develop an accurate summary of supportable ideas and conclusions with insight beyond the facts.	2 Rating: List some supportable ideas and conclusions beyond the facts that summarize the overall causes and effects.	1 Rating: List ideas and conclusions, but does not summarize the overall causes and effects or fails to go beyond the facts.
Rubric Criteria: Number, accuracy, and thoroughness of relationship statements (assertions) in casual chains
4 Rating: Reveal a thorough understanding of the Earth System Diagram through your analyses by asserting in full detail the impact of the event on the spheres, the interactions among spheres, and the return effect on the event itself in causal chains.	3 Rating: Reveal a satisfactory understanding of the Earth System Diagram through your analyses by detailing causal chains involving all the spheres (at least S>S>S).	2 Rating: Reveal some understanding of the Earth System Diagram through defining causal chains and supporting them.	1 Rating: Show some understanding of the Earth System Diagram through your analysis by describing causal relationships.
Rubric Criteria: Scope, detail and accuracy of the evidence supporting the relationship statements
4 Rating: Present comprehensive evidence or other corroborative data from multiple sources that are thoughtfully explained for each assertion.	3 Rating: Present evidence to support most, but not all, of your relationship statements, or present incomprehensive evidence to support each assertion.	2 Rating: Present some evidence to support most assertions.	1 Rating: Present little or no evidence to support assertions.
Rubric Criteria: Team members contribute insight used in the development of the model.
4 Rating: Each member of the team contributes insight beyond the facts for the development of the model.	3 Rating: Each member of the team contributes to the building of the model, some with insight beyond the facts.	2 Rating: Each member of the team contributes to the building of the model, but not beyond the facts.	1 Rating: Most members of the team contribute to the building of the model, but not beyond the facts.

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