Exhibit Activity Resources for Teachers

Information:

Informal education experiences provide important opportunities to support, extend and challenge learners. Most exhibit activities use differentiated instructional strategies, are designed to be flexible and can be used in a variety of ways depending on the time available, your learning goals, the abilities and needs of students, the skills of chaperones, and comfort level with content and differentiated instruction. Differentiated activities were created for use on site at the KU Natural History Museum; a few could be modified for use in the classroom. Two activities are connected to NGSS crosscutting concepts.

Rubrics/Assessments: 

Rubrics (where provided) intentionally reflect a broad framework for thinking about student experiences to help identify particular learning needs of students (e.g. need additional support, might benefit from additional experiences or independent projects); although, they could be used for more formal assessment. Assessments are primarily structured around content and product related aspects of activities, these explorations can also be assessed through the lens of more affective factors of process such as personal growth, responsibility and interest.

Things to Consider: 

Questions/concerns about using these activities include: (1) varying facilitation skills and knowledge of chaperones; (2) distractions due to the novelty factor and independence; (3) students’ ability to apply their skills and knowledge outside of a classroom setting; (4) the flexibility and choice of some tasks; and (5) familiarity/comfort level with content and instructional strategies. Approaches to help address these issues include: using more structured options such as our Museum Discovery Guides or exhibit activities differentiated by learning modalities; using variable grouping structures to encourage and facilitate student independence; and providing choice for which tasks are selected and/or how individuals students or groups record/present their tasks to connect with student interest, foster independence and to help them stay on task.