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Draw a Scientist!
How do you portray a scientist? How would you describe a scientist?
Check out everything in this short article!
This is a dedicated page.
Getting Ready to be Wrong
A common sociology standpoint and view, applying this to modern education.
Sometimes students will veer off the right track, or get lost and not want to continue because they are discouraged. However, getting attached to these mistakes is not the way to go.
Instead, try to focus on more of how to overcome these challenges by first not punishing mistakes, but encouraging them, saying it's part of the learning process.
From there, keep pushing the students forward with what they are learning and then encourage them when they get discouraged.
It seems easy but it's hard balancing the difficulty between no effort needed and "this is insanely hard." The thing to keep in mind is that you're not the most important subject. You need to share time with other subjects that have been perpetuated more important, like English and Math.
Practical Applications for coursework in the sciences
The biggest question that a lot of educators can face are the "So why is this important"
The book Improving Urban Science Education by Kenneth Tobin, Rowhea Elmesky, and Gale Seiler, tackles this by asking students and shaping certain lab activities around practical activities for all daily lives.
From here, they also tackle one of my main monteras, that scientists just like playing a lot, and discovering new things.
Instead of doing the bulk standard laboratories, like "Drop a ball from a certain height" or "lets build a circuit" I might cut a little deeper and say "so lets think about how plungers work" or "Here's a tesla autodriving. How does it know where to go?"
Because these are more practical applications to what the students already know, they are naturally more invested in what they want to learn and by virtue are going to be more motivated in class, seeing these obscure topics coming together.
TCNJ PTAG and Inquiry Based labs based on Natural Phenomena
As an extension from above, some work done in one of my professional development segments was about Inquiry Based Learning, and specifically how it applies to natural phenomena.
This segment used the aforementioned tesla example, about what sensors are needed in order to observe the road, oncoming traffic, and where to go.
The main takeaways for this topic, is it helps engage kids on real-world applications of natural phenomenons, and it helps kids stay engaged by letting them take control of what discussions we have in class.
As a teacher, I plan to implement these activities by doing an intro to the topic, with some examples, but instead of an intro "discovery" lab, I hold an inquiry based lab, where students put all their ideas together and we analyze what different things in our life we can apply to these things we just learned. Then practice, then another lab (prove these laws exist, a more traditional lab) and then exam.
The Absolute Bare Minimum
The Absolute Bare Minimum
While not the best source as far as academically, creating a safe space and being lenient is a key to good education practices overall.
It's not something to dismiss. While it may seem simple to just putting up a sticker, it means more than that. You can add and grant extensions, be there after school to offer extra help, or let students talk. Even though humanities is not part of science or math, being there for students is always welcome, due to the possibly undue stress for being the top student, or required grades.
Like with Draw A Scientist, one of my goals is anyone can be anything they choose to be, which may be brushed off as too holistic, but it's important that it's remembered regardless of what is expected or desired.
In the future, I don't necessarily care what grade my students receive, as long as they learn something new or put in the time, and getting to know them as people, not just another kid that needs to learn. If we aren't learning, then what are we doing?
As far as accommodations go for grading, I might try a different approach for grading certain things, like for tests, instead of directly saying "tests are all 50% of your grade", I break it up into "your lowest test is half what it was worth, your better tests are now 1.5 times its worth" (the math does work out that way, you will not get hurt by this curve). or alternatively I manually edit grades.
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