Unit Planning Astronomy

Astronomy @ RHS: Semester long, standards/proficiency based class on the space science targeting non-university bound population of 11th and 12 graders.

My only formal education in Astronomy was a two semester college course. It was dual listed as both a 100 level physics class and a 300 level general science class (science class for non majors). This lead to a stark bi-modal distribution of students -- those who could integrate equations in their sleep and were use to the content-memorization paradigm of university science education, and those who did not. The class was taught by a physics professor who had a hard time with this*. Later on I was a TA for the class, the first semester was taught by a different physics professor who talked down to those who couldn't compute Kepler orbital parameters. The second semester was taught by a graduate student who was use to and enjoyed general education students.

*Interesting enough he differentiated by using separate curves for the exams based on if a student was taking it as physics or general ed.

When my Astronomy course proposal was accepted for the course cataloged at the high school I teach at (I was shocked), and especially when 150 students forecasted for it (even more shocked!), I began to research curriculum and lesson ideas. Almost all that I found taught the same curriculum that I had at university. Here is the general flow:

• The introduction is historical views on the night sky (heliocentric vs geocentric).
• A unit on the celestial sphere and the constellations.
• A unit on the planets, from Mercury on out. Students memorize facts about the planets and regurgitate them for a scantron quiz.
• A unit on stars and how to read the HR diagram.
• A unit on stellar evoltuion.
• A unit on galaxies.
• A unit on cosmology.

I only have a semester and my target population doesn't jive with rote memorization. Processes and hands on activities will be where I need to put my focus. Processing time is also needed to. I'm not a fan of word searches or (most) crossword puzzles, but those kinds of activities give students time to assimilate and accommodate information they recently learned. There will be a few small artsy projects for this.  I want to keep it contemporary. I want to focus on the humanity of space exploration: the stories of the missions be it robotic or manned. What is it like to live on the ISS as what engineering is needed to make it possible. What would traveling to the Moon or Mars be like and the challenges we face to get there.

Unit planning thus far

Here is my plan:

• Introduction is on the nuts and bolts of the celestial sphere and work on the constellations. In the first class students will be discovering the power of stars influencing their lives -- none at all! This is in blue and I'm struggling to extend it longer than a week. Map reading will be the skill I want to work on in this unit.
• Instead of fact-memorization of planets the second unit (green) will be on processes: volcanoes, impacting, plate tectonics, atmospheres, the sun and sunspot cycles and space weather, and magnetospheres. Students will learn about the planets and moons based on the processes they are associated with, not the heliocentric order.  With the length right now if feels a bit ADD, but with the sheltered instruction training I'll be able to expand this out a little more and avoid the lecture-lab format. Upperclasspersons need processing time too.
• Unit three will have students using the microobservatory network to collect information on an exosolar planet using the Other Worlds curriculum and the updated ExoLab tools. I'm going to fold in a field trip to the planetarium at a nearby community college.
• Here I have a two month cap of time that will hopefully shrink to one as I fill in the planetary process and constellation unit.
• My 5th grade teacher had us play Discovery as part of our unit of colonial America. It is a simulation/game that the class plays in teams of 6 over the period of 2-3 weeks. There is reading and other literacy components as well. I loved it. I'm going to mod this paper and pen game to be about research teams or colonizing mars in the near future. I'm going to replace a number of readings with excerpts from Andy Weir's The Martian as well as some more technical readings from NASA, JPL, and ESA. This is on top of the game play modifications as well.