Learning to Teach

For the first time that I can think of, I’m actually having a bit of trouble reflecting on my experiences in a course. I think this is for two reasons. One is that I am taking this course at the end of my Warner program while my classmates are, for the most part at the beginning of their program. So instead of this course serving as an introduction, it is more of a review and a refresher course. The second reason is that I am concurrently taking a course called Integrating English and Technology. Both involve the use of technology in teaching, the courses are very different, and when I consider my experiences in Sci & Tech, I cannot help but compare the courses. While I think both courses were rooted in practical applications, I feel like I had more room to explore technologies that are important to me in Eng & Tech while Sci & Tech was a bit more directed.

When I think back on my time in Sci & Tech, the GRS summer camp comes my mind, and, to be honest, I am having trouble thinking back past the camp experience. Even after re-reading my blog posts and my written work, camp stands out in my mind. There was an emphasis on using technology during the camp with the students, and there was indeed an emphasis on using technology throughout the course. But I felt that the use of technology was not particularly innovative. In part, this is probably because the technologies we explored in this class are technologies that I have had a chance to explore in previous science classes. So while these are, for the students we worked with and perhaps for many of us Warner students, new and innovative, they did not feel new and innovative for me.

I also felt that our exposure to technology was more about breadth than depth. In some ways, this is good. Exposure to lots of technologies is important, and, ideally, I would have looked more deeply into those technologies that I was most interested in outside of class. But, unfortunately, summer courses are rather compressed and intense, and taking three classes this semester did not help with that. I also felt that our exploration of technologies was mostly to prepare us for the summer camp. I realize that that fits with the goals and objectives of the course, but, based on where I am in my Warner program, I tend to have more interest in what technologies I would like to use in my classroom and how I would do so. As a result, there is a bit of a disconnect between the course goals and my own interests. This is compounded by the emphasis on biology and chemistry since my area is physics.

This is not to say that there were no great takeaways for me. With regards to technology, my greatest interest was blogging. I already dove into by blog a bit, and this course gave me a chance to explore a bit more about how I could incorporate my blog into my classroom. I also really appreciated the chance to refresh and renew my science teaching with an experience that fell outside the constraints of a classroom.

In closing, I arrive at a statement of my philosophy statement on the use of technology in science education. I believe that the use of new technologies is essential for students to perform authentic science that is engaging and relevant to their lives. My reasoning is multifaceted. Real scientists employ all sorts of technology in their work, and in order for students to work like scientists, they must too. Furthermore, technology is part of our students’ day to day life and students love using new technologies, so the implementation of technology in the science classroom will draw students in and show them the tools they will need as they continue their lives both in and outside of school.

When I think of inquiry, there are a few key elements that come to mind. One element is freedom – students should have as much freedom as possible in all elements of the investigation. Our camp was very successful in this regard, because our students had almost total freedom. They did have to work with in the general framework of “Why is Charlotte Beach closed and what can we do to change that?” but they were free create their own testable question.

Students were also free to carry out their investigation in any way they wanted. The only limitations were the equipment the students had available to them. But this was not much of a restriction, since the students had such a wide range of tools at their disposal. Indeed, the selection of tools they were provided served more as scaffolding than a restriction; given that the students had certain tools, the number of options for their investigation was narrowed to have them test variables that were most likely to be relevant to the overarching question. This type of scaffolding, restriction by limited tools, has been extremely effective for me in my student teaching, just as it was with the camp.

To help ensure that students remained productive on the beach, in the lab, and during data analysis, my team and I served as facilitators and resources to the students. Our goal was to allow the students to drive the investigation while we served as a traction and stability control system (excuse the cheesy analogy, it will continue). In much the same way that the best traction and stability control systems are unnoticeable and make the driver feel like Michael Schumacher, my team and I wanted our students to be as non-invasive as possible, leaving as much of the control as possible to the students.

So how did we do? I think quite well. Naturally, since we are all quite inexperienced, there are areas for improvement. Most notably, I think we could have done a better job of backwards planning the whole week to leave more time to develop and practice our presentation on Friday. We also could have done more to talk up the presentation on Saturday and been more proactive in contacting parents/guardians to be sure students would attend on Saturday. We also struggled a bit with scaffolding and questioning, but these are two areas that are extremely difficult and will always need improvement, no matter how much experience a teacher has.

I do think there were a number of successes as well. I think our overall and daily goals and objectives were quite good. And, with the exception of practicing our presentation on Friday, we met all of our objectives. I think we did a great job at forming relationships with our students and, as the week went on, we got better and better at differentiating our instruction to meet all our students’ needs.

I would also like to add that being able to take part in the GRS Summer Camp an the end of my time at Warner was a great experience. I had the opportunity to escape so many of the issues I had to wrestle with as a student teacher, like the school environment and curriculum, and just have fun with my kids. I also got to work closely with four of my peers who are newer to the program; this provided me with an insight into where I was a year ago, and hopefully I was able to help out these new guys a bit by providing some guidance and modeling some of what I’ve learned.

Saturday’s symposium was really a mixed bag.  We only had one student show up, and our arrow for that is to be more proactive in the future about calling and sending home notices earlier in the week.  Since we had not had a chance to run through the presentations on Friday, we did that before things kicked off on Saturday.  This worked well, as our student, who is typically quite shy and soft spoken, did quite well when presenting her work.  Unfortunately, after the teaser presentation, she was only by the poster long enough to show her mom.  After that, she disappeared and us Warner students were left to man the poster.  I found out later that our student had to leave early, so there was really not much that could have been done about that at that point.

I’m saving my other thoughts for my final reflection on the camp experience, so that will be it for now.

Today kicked off real well.  We’d planned a self reflection activity, but as soon as the kids heard we wanted to record them answering questions, they grabbed the cameras and recorders and started interviewing each other.  The people asking questions really got into the roles of interviewers, and the answers kids were giving were amazing.  I’m so glad we have it all on tape too.  That positive energy transitioned into the next two activities, where we reviewed our map/model of the beach, re-addressed our conclusions, and revised our hypothesis.  As we split up into groups to work on our teaser and presentation, all the kids were very excited about showing up tomorrow.

As always, a few things that we could have done better.  We underestimated how much time it would take to put together presentations, and as a result we didn’t have a chance to do a dry run.  We could have done a better job of scaffolding the construction of the presentations with the student’s journals and other artifacts from the previous days, but in part, the time crunch was the result of this being the last day of a week long project, and time always gets tight as the deadline approaches.  Another misc arrow that I picked up on was that throughout the week, we’d neglected to include transition times in our agendas.  It didn’t hit me until the final day (my day) because I was being extra careful in keeping an eye on the clock and prioritizing our activities.  I think this had slipped my mind for previous days because my last “teaching” experiences were in a classroom, and transitions rarely involved travelling between rooms, let alone across a campus.

Today marked the start of our in depth data analysis.  It was something of a mixed day, in terms of plusses and arrows.  We started off quite well, with some great activities on graphing to get things rolling.  This included an overview of trends and making predictions with graphs, and continued as we co-constructed a checklist of elements on graphs.  We transitioned into 1-on-1 work with the students and made graphs for our data.  The students were then able to share out their graphs with the rest of the group, with an emphasis on trends and the siginficance of their graphs.  As a result, the students not only made graphs that can be used for their presentations, but also had a chance to practice speaking about their research to an audience.

There are some areas for improvement, as well.  We had some problems with time management.  This does not necessairly mean that we were behind, but rather, once we did get behind schedule, we tried to get back on schedule as soon as possible instead of considering which of the day’s remaining activities could be shortened in order to maximize our progress towards our objectives.  We also ran into some problems when we looked at how all the graphs fit together to tell us about what factors affect bacteria growth and how our data relates to our hypothesis.  The questioning was not great, and there was some disagreement among us “teachers” as to what the data meant.  We now know that we should have discussed this more thoroughly among ourselves, and did indeed do so in preperation for tomorrow.

Today, the focus of our camp experience was spending time in the lab and beginning to organize data.  We started off with a great opening activity; everyone tied a balloon to their ankle and had to try to pop everyone else’s balloon without having their own popped.  I had just as much fun as the kids, even though I ended up turning into a sweaty mess.  From there we headed into the campus labs, where the students donned lab coats and gloves and, looking just like a team of scientists, got totally into examining their bacteria plates.  Later that afternoon, a recapturing activity involving Google Earth sucked the students right back into the science after having taken a break to scarf down some cupcakes in celebration of one of our student’s birthdays.

We’ve also got a few things to work on for the future.  When using SMART boards, we need to be more careful about how manys students have access to the computers’ “controls” at one time.  Unfortunately, the technology itself became something of a challenger and a barrier, which prevented a relatively large and important activity from running smoothly.  We also had some time management issues, and found that we were slightly underplanned.  In working to plan out tomorrow, I think we have solidy addressed the problem of being underplanned, and we also scripted in support/backup leaders for the activities that could prove to be more challenging to lead.

Today was day two of the GRS camp, and the highlight was getting our kids into the water to take data.  All in all, the day went quite well for our group.  The kids were all totally engaged while taking data; everyone had their own job and they all loved it.  Once all our water samples were collected, everyone shared in plating, and I was especially proud that the students co-constructed a complete and thorough labling system for the plates.  Also, as the day went along, it was clear that the students were making connections between large amounts of algae and their expectation for high bacteria counts.  This is the hypothesis that they are testing, and it really seems to click for all of them.

There were some arrows as well.  Early on in the day, time management wasn’t so great, and we were quite far behind.  Fortunately, we were able to shift things around and get back on track by the time our data collection started.  Part of the time issues were because we were having trouble with questioning and our students were, as a result, having trouble co-constructing a procedure.  There was also some distraction and fragmentation, especilly when one of our students got hold of a camera…

That has been the theme for today.  I still cannot get that terrible smell of rotting… whatever is in the lake out of my head, and it’s nauseating.

Today was day one of our summer camp on the beach.  I, along with a team of four of my cohorts, began a week long investigation of the beach with five middle school students.  The kids were great; totally engaged, very bright, and quite inquisitive.  I would have to say that the day, as a whole went extremely well.  Some of the big plussus were that the kids were very engaged, our beach orientation and familiarization activity was awesome, and the kids were totally into getting hands on with the equipment.  Our arrows were par for the course – there were pockets of fragmented discussion, some of the questioning was not quite up to snuff, and we hadn’t planned a strong re-capturing activity for after our snack break.  Naturally, there were a bunch of other plusses and arrows as well, but these are the ones that really stand out.

As I alluded to at the start of the post, what really stands out is the smell.  There was a huge algae mat and lots of other sorts of pollution in the water.  Every time the breeze came in off the lake, which was more than half of our time on the beach, it smelled of raw sewage.  I left feeling nauseous and haven’t been feeling much better through the afternoon and evening.  The smell just keeps coming back to me.  I honestly comtemplated trying to track down a gas mask for tomorrow.  I’m thinking I might bring a bandana (or several), dip it in bay rum aftershave, and wrap that around my head.

I posted this up on the class page for my English and Technology page, but since it draws off the grant writing assignment as well as two professional development workshops (one by a classmate on distance learning and one by me on gaming in the classroom), I thought I would post it here too.

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This post is sort of in relation to this week’s class, but also draws off of an assignment from my Science & Tech class. We have an assignment to write a grant for a classroom, and my group is trying to focus around integrating some sort of technology. We’ve been thinking hard and working hard to figure out what sort of an innovative unit we would like to work on. After tossing around a few ideas, we found that we had lots of ideas about what topics could make awesome units. What was even harder was trying to figure out what we would want to use the money we were supposed to be asking for for.

I found myself always slipping into the habit of trying to take my ideas and fit them into the typical constraints of a classroom (mostly the budget constraints). For example, one of our ideas was to build a functional model of the human body systems; here, asking for money to purchase materials seemed to make sense. But then, when we tried to think of what materials we would buy, I kept thinking of the usual cheap but creative materials I’ve used in the past.

The same has always been true when I’ve thought about using video games in the classroom. The first place I look for good games is online for free games. After that, I look through games I already have or older games that would be inexpensive. I also consider constraints such as non-top of the line computers and standard interfaces (keyboard and mouse/touchpad). While all of this thinking is creative and inexpensive, I’m now seeing that maybe thinking like this is something of a downside. I actually don’t know what I would do with a budget, and I find it hard to justify the extra expenditures.

But now that I’ve given more and more thought to how technologies can be brought into the classroom, I’m seeing more and more justification for the spending. With gaming, for example, a driving simulator can be brought into pretty much every part of the physics curriculum that addresses mechanics, from vectors to forces and friction to work and power. And for software like DabbleBoard or the Adobe applications LB demonstrated, those licenses probably totally worth the money since the technology can be integrated throughout the entire year.

So while it is a challenge to rethink budget constraints, being exposed to new technology has helped me start to think in different directions with regards to how powerful the learning tools can be and how just a little bit (more money) can go a long, long way.

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I’m so looking forward to summer camp.  I anticipate that it’s going to be a lot of work, both in planning and execution.  I also know that I probably won’t get to do much, if any, physics.  I also realize that week is going to be full of long days.  But I’m still totally psyched!

Taking classes is all fine and good, but the highlight – by far – of my Warner experience was student teaching.  In the week or two after my second placement ended, I was pretty down.  I missed my kids, I missed teaching, and, like Jimmy says, nothing can give a teacher the ego boost that the kids do.  It’s been so long since I’ve been doing any teaching, and I’m really looking forward to it.

The concept interviews should provide a pretty good re-introduction to teaching and an introduction to the kids.  I’m curious to see what the dynamic will be like with such a high “adult” to kid ratio, and I’m also a bit nervous about being a “teacher” again.  I do have to say, though, that receiving positive feedback on my questioning was a huge confidence boost.