Posts

Practicum Post #6

 I just wanted to give an overall reflection of my practicum. I am really happy I got to experience and community that is quite different from my own. By going to Mid-Prairie I got to experience what it is like to teach in a conservative and religious district. This is a district where my cooperating teacher has to have a conversation about evolution and fight back against the whole earth history unit. I know I don't want to work in a district where I have to worry about that, but I may have a few parents that force beliefs on their kids and it provided me with an educational opportunity and conversation about how to approach these topics. When talking with John about our lesson we got to discuss that the best way to approach teaching science in these communities is to come at it from the idea of you need to know this is what science believes and it is ok if you don't believe that, but you need to understand the perspective science take on these ideas. Thinking about it from th...

Practicum Post #5

 Mid-Prairie is a one to one school, this means that all student are provided with a laptop. One thing I have noticed is that there are a lot of students that forget to charge their laptops. My cooperating teacher has the garage extension chords on the ceiling, so students can pull them down to charge their laptops. There is roughly one above each table. One thing I would want to remember is to provide extension chords that reach student's desks, so they can charge their laptop while they work. Continuing on from that side rant, my team teacher has a virtual lab notebook for each of the students. It is a powerpoint slide like notebook that has all of the data tables and handouts from the FOSS kits, along with spaces to answer their "guiding" questions (the ones from FOSS). They use this notebook nearly every class period. It contains everything from experiments to vocabulary. The teacher uses the PowerPoints provided by the FOSS kits, even though they are long and not in ...

Practicum Post #4

 In general, equipment are stored in covers or bins that are explicitly labeled teachers only, and the students understand this. I have not seen one student approach these cabinet or bins. I believe this is a rule that is clearly established in the beginning of the year. The FOSS kits in general don't use many things that are a safety hazard. There was one unit where the students calculated calories by burning a Cheeto. For this one, the students were directed not to touch or approach the flames. The teacher and I lit the Cheetos for them. In general, she has a set rule where any messing around what so ever means you are not doing the experiment and the students do abide by this, this would be apart of setting classroom expectations. One thing I did notice that is not good is where the chemicals are stored. They are stored in a cabinet in a closet with a heater, because the original chemical closet had to be made into an office. This fire hazard is a result of not having enough roo...

Practicum Post #3

 We briefly went over IEPs. In general, all of the students with an IEP struggled with executive functioning. This resulted in some students needing extra time in Math or reading, or test adaptations. The IEPs were focused on math, reading and writing skills. These are underlying bases for science, so it is something to pay attention to. We spent a lot of time talking about a specific student, let's call them K, who has special needs accommodations, but by interacting with the student and their older sibling (who has similar/the same issues) our team teacher wonders if they really have these conditions. This student has been out of school almost all year to the point where courts are getting involved, because the parent says the school would not make accommodations for them, but at the same time not telling the school what accommodations this student needs. The sad bit was when I interacted with K they showed me they are so smart and have the capacity to think and excel. To be hone...

Practicum Post #2

 I ended up following two students. One, let's call them E, gives off the idea that they don't do anything in class, but actually got all of their work done. This student acts as a class clown in a way. They will make side comments and test how far they can go. E was quiet during instructions and did work on the assignment and complete the assignment. There were points where they got distracted by others in the room, but they did manage to get back on task and finish the in-class assignment. Observing them I got the vibe that they were a lot smarter than they let on, and they acted out more because they were board. I also may be seeing this because of the TAG lens I am developing. The main thing that I noticed was they finished the assignment quickly and then would sit there and distract others. This makes me want to push E more, to see if they really just need more challenge in the classroom. With this student's comments and jokes I would play along a little bit, but stop ...

Practicum Post #1

Across my practicum we had multiple conversations about curriculum and teaching methods used in the classroom at Mid-Prairie. At Mid-Prairie they use the FOSS kits that were created by the University of California, Berkeley. These kits were made for kids in California, so they relate the science concepts to places and experiences kids that live in California would see. This makes it so it is not as relatable to students in Iowa. This is one of the multiple complaints about the FOSS kits that our team teacher had. The other big complaint, is that it is supposed to be inquiry, but it it too structured to be considered true inquiry, or at least in my opinion. The students are not given the opportunity to explore what they are interested in or guide the questions or the route of thinking. Everything is very scripted and as a result it makes it stuck and takes the autonomy away from the students.  At Mid-Prairie the teachers do get to decide the curriculum, or at least they get some say...

Week 9: Backward Design

     The backwards design process makes me think back to learning about engineering design. When you are approaching an engineering problem you need to know all of the requirements and restraints you have. For example, if I am designing an artificial heart it needs to pump blood through the body. It also needs to be made of a material that works in the body and be affordable to make. There are many more design considerations, such as the forces on the material and how a heart pumps blood, but these are all acknowledged at the beginning of the process. I never really thought of applying engineering process to creating curriculum, but it make sense. How can you reach a desired outcome without knowing where you want to be in the beginning? The backwards design process really just seems like the logical way to approach writing curriculum to me. I am not sure if this is because it is just how I think about approaching situations or if it is because this is the only way I have ...

Week 5: Exploring Lesson Plans and Standardized Testing

  Part 1:   Exploring Lesson Plans I have had to write lesson plans for other education classes (Physics and Earth Science Apps courses). For these I had not gone over how to write a lesson plan. Looking at the samples on the ICON site mine looked more like the list one, but in general I think better in lists. I like the idea of having headings then including the bulleted list below of the second example that you provided. It is most similar to the lesson plan templates provided under google drive and a lot of the others. With using google drive/docs I could see that one being easier to navigate, due to the headings feature on google docs. As for the formal NGSS write up sample you provided I like how it shows the full NGSS standards and it is in a similar format to the way we look up the standards. The other component I really liked from that one is the assessment or review portion of that lesson. I feel that the bulleted list one did not have this component, but I feel that ...

Week 4: Reading Responce

While reading these articles my 5th and 6th grade teacher kept coming to my mind. Science in early elementary was definitely this Activitymania idea, where we would play with tinker toys, tape fingers together to see how important your thumb is, or the classic butterfly unit. These were all individual occurrences with little regularity in the curriculum. My 5th and 6th grade homeroom teacher, Mr. Motz, was the science teacher for the 5th and 6th grade. This meant that we got to spend every afternoon doing science, and I mean doing science. Reflecting upon it he used an inquiry based model, whether that is building the best straw structure or allowing us to create and develop our own experiment over flower growth (I used my family's compost instead of fertilizer and the plants actually produced more flowers and seeds). I remember almost every science inquiry we did in that class and it is almost a decade later. When I came to college I feel that I really saw an impact on how this ap...

Week 3: Exploring NGSS

 I am applying standard  MS-PS2-5  to the magnet lesson.  Part 1: Performance Expectations The performance expectation states that students that understand the material can "Conduct an investigation and evaluate the experimental design to provide evidence that fields exist between objects exerting forces on each other even through the objects are not in contact." I find that the expectations of the students are very clear. It is saying that students should be able to set up and perform an experiment that tests the force interaction as a result of magnet, electric and gravitational fields and be able to interpret the data to explain what happens in their experiment. Basically it is asking the teacher to set up a lesson where students can explore and test the concept of forces that act at a distance and see how they affect other objects.  I feel that the standards are very straight forward and the SEPs, DCIs and CCCs are set in stone with little room for interpret...

Week 2: Introduction into NGSS

 Part 1: Magnets In class we explored the world of magnets. We started by thinking about where magnets exist in our world. This could be in wind turbines, providing us with power,  in toys or even an MRI, which is just a giant magnet. In school I don't really remember covering anything about magnets directly until my second semester of college physics that went over electricity and magnetism. However, after conversations in class I made the connection that dipoles in a molecule is pretty much a magnet. I never thought about it in that way, but it makes sense. I am surprised that we don't talk more about magnetism in chemistry. Thinking about it farther, I think we covered the idea of free electrons in metals in my engineering material science course. My predictions were definitely off. I over complicated the experiment in my head thinking that the circuit board was going to produce an electromagnet to disrupt the magnetic field. Turns out it was Iron that actually caused the p...

Week 1: Private Universe

 Let's start by assessing my general understanding of our solar system.  How do the phases of the moon occur? As the moon orbits around the earth the sun will always light up half of the moon, the half that is facing the sun. The phases occur because when the moon orbits around the earth we see the shadow side of the moon. For example if we had a new moon the moon is located between the earth and the sun, so us on earth only see the moon's shadow. On the other hand a full moon is when the earth is between the moon and the sun allowing for us on earth to see the fully lit side of the moon.  What causes the seasons? This is simple, the tilt of the earth's axis. The earth's axis is not straight up and down it has a slight tilt of around 20 degrees. Due to the tilt in the winter the sun's rays hit the earth at an angle producing indirect light, where as in the summer the sun's rays hit the earth directly. This tilt also results in the sun in the sky for longer perio...

Week 1: Diffendoofer Day Book

 The Dr Seuss book "Diffendoofer Day" directly calls out our education system and what it values, memorization and conformity. It challenges this conformity by presenting Diffendoofer School, where children are challenged to think and form their own ideas and it allows these children to succeed. In my future classrooms I hope to challenge my students to think for themselves, but in order to achieve this I need to think deeper into "what does it it mean to be able to think?".  When I approach the idea of thinking my mind goes to critical thinking, but that still brings up the question of "what is thinking?". I believe thinking is the formation of ideas and opinions based off of your prior knowledge. Thinking is where people form their own ideas and question the world around them. In a classroom setting they don't need to memorize information to pass a test, but are able to comprehend, apply and think through a problem.  To create a classroom where my st...

Week 1: Learning

 As a teacher one of the most important things to understand is how people come to know something. This is where different learning theories come in, whether it is influenced by Skinner, Piaget or Vygotsky, we each develop our own theory of learning and this will affect how we approach teaching. My current belief is that learning occurs in an individual's brain. As you learn you are negotiating with your prior knowledge or schema related to what you are learning. This negotiation is the process of learning. Even-though I believe that learning occurs in each individual's brain what one is exposed to can effect that internal negotiation. This could be through negotiation with peers, reading something or hearing something from a teacher. In my experience in school and maybe even yours there was a perception that the teacher is in control of what you are learning, but this does not fit with my idea of how we learn. This brings up the question what is the teacher in control of, if a...