Line of Learning

1/19/12

It is of course necessary to have some teacher-directed lectures to help students learn facts, but overall, I think that elementary students learn science best through discovery. A lot of experiments are important because this makes the lesson more hands-on and interesting. When students make their own discoveries, the learning experience is much more meaningful.

The environment that best facilitates elementary students’ science learning is very interactive, as I mentioned already. It also should be an environment where questions are greatly encouraged. No one should ever feel dumb for asking a question. Instead, students should know that this is what good scientists do.

I think teachers should know how to capture the students’ attention by designing experiments that will peak their interest and make them want to ask questions. I think that teachers should also know how to implement a science notebook because this is a good place for students to express those questions, along with other observations.



1/31/12

Another thing that I would like to add is that elementary students learn through talking about their learning. Social collaboration, as Vygotsky points out, is what helps students develop. Class discussions and dialogue between student and teacher are really important because they allow for more explanation of what students think. Teachers need to watch out for students' misconceptions through the use of probing questions along the way instead of just using summative assessment at the end of a unit. Through discussions and the use of journaling, misconceptions come out more clearly. Then, through experimentation in a constructivist environment and scaffolding in the students' zones of proximal development, the students are better able to break these misconceptions. It's important also that the experiences in science are authentic tasks so that students feel like school isn't completely isolated from the real world.



2/7/12

This week, I've added even more understanding about how hard it is for students to let go of their misconceptions. The Sweater Article showed that the best way for students to work towards breaking their misconceptions is through constructing their own learning. Also, it's a good idea for teachers to use probes so they can identify these misconceptions early on. It's important for students to explain their reasoning behind the answers given during these pretests so that their preconceived notions are clear. The environment that best facilitates science learning might be one that goes deeper into fewer topics so that misconceptions are less likely to stick in kids' minds. One other thing I learned in class this week is that it's always important to make learning fun. Teachers can do this through funny stories that relate to science.



2/14/12

This week, I've added more understanding about objectives. Instead of thinking about objectives, it's important for science teachers to consider "learning performances" so that the students' specific learning will be shown. They must be able to perform in some way, not just have a general "understanding." These descriptive goals should be written AFTER formative assessment because then teachers can understand where students are at the beginning of the lesson. We also talked about standards this week. Standards are important because they set up a system of accountability in our schools, but if there aren't good standards established, this can be detrimental to students' science learning. Newer standards are potentially on the way in Iowa which will measure creativity and higher order thinking skills more than rote memorization. There will possibly be less content that needs to be covered so topics can be dug into more deeply. I like the idea of incorporating science with all the subjects to create a very cross curricular school system, and I've learned that students would benefit from this. Science is everywhere, so it should be related to the rest of the curriculum so that students can see its relevance.



2/21/12

One very useful thing to include in an engaging science classroom is coupled inquiry. This is an experiment which gets the students intrigued about a topic they might not have been interested in before. That way, students don't always have to generate their own questions but they are still engaged in the task at hand. Subject matter is important as well because students can't learn everything they need to through inquiry. Through more direct teacher instruction, they can gain a foundation before they start experimenting. Along with this, students need both "guided" and "open" inquiry. "Guided" inquiry helps them better understand particular concepts, and "open" inquiry helps them with their scientific reasoning. I think as the year goes on, more and more open inquiry can be included as kids get the hang of the process.

Another important concept we learned this week is the 5 steps of inquiry--learners are engaged, collect evidence, explain evidence, evaluate the evidence, and communicate their learning in a way that justifies what they learned. A lot of times, teachers leave one or more of these ideas out, especially the evaluation stage (which involves looking to other sources after an experiment to see if their conclusions are supported). Communicating the learning is also very important because it makes the learning have a purpose. If students are going to show their learning to someone a more public audience, this can really increase the quality of work. If teachers make their instruction meet all of these requirements, students will have a much more meaningful learning experience.



2/28/12

This week, we learned that there is a continuum for inquiry learning. On one end, the classroom is very structured around the teacher's ideas. The teacher will provide the scientific question for students and even possibly provide them with the data and tell them how to analyze it. On the other end, the classroom is very student-centered. Students come up with their own questions and are working towards analysis on their own with only scaffolding by the teacher. It's beneficial to consider your specific teaching situation in order to decide which part of the continuum you should strive for. Some students may not be able to handle completely inquiry based learning because it takes a lot of higher order thinking skills. It's necessary to work up to a true inquiry situation. Students will need modeling and guidance about how to ask their own questions and design their own experiments in the beginning of the year. Overall, though, the more inquiry you can include, the more deeply students will learn. They will be more engaged and committed to the process of science learning. As we've mentioned in class, they will be less likely to cause classroom management problems because of this higher level of engagement. We've also talked about the importance of specifying learning performances so we can actually see evidence of students' science learning.



3/26/12 (Discussing the weeks of 2/28-3/6 and 3/6-3/13; skipping 3/13-3/20 b/c was spring break)

One thing I learned from the week of 2/28-3/6 is how powerful it can be when you integrate science with other subjects. We discussed pendulums and tied Galileo into the lesson because he made a pendulum-based clock. Then, we discussed how this clock did not work as well on a ship because the ship was always moving. In this way, we were able to tie our study of pendulums into a study of colonization since the colonizers used the pendulum-based clocks.

We also discussed assessment this week. The most important idea is that you must ALWAYS be assessing. Assessment should be formative and measure the students' progress. Even summative assessments at the end of the unit should actually have a formative element to them so that students will be given the chance to grow. It is unproductive when teachers simply move on after a test without re-teaching concepts that students still don't understand. Assessment can take many different forms, and it's important to include a variety so that all students can demonstrate what they know in the way that best suits them. Another element of assessment which I considered more this week was grading based on improvement and effort. If a student receives the same high score at the end of the year as he did at the beginning, without any improvement, this should be taken into account in his grade.

During the week of 3/6-3/13, we were focused on our midterm test. Even though we didn't have our normal class discussions, I did learn some important ideas that could transfer to my future classroom. Since we were focused on our exam, these ideas relate to the prior week's ideas about assessment. I think that allowing as much time as needed on some assessments is a good way to help students truly show everything they have learned. Sometimes there are concepts which need to be tested based on time because being able to complete them quickly is integral to their mastery. However, respecting students' different test-taking styles is a good way to have a student-centered, individualized science classroom.



3/27/12

This past week, we were focused on our LTI presentations, but I still learned some ideas which can be applied to my future classroom. In my group, we didn't focus on our data enough in the explanation of our experiment. For a science classroom to represent real science, students should be encouraged to look only at their data before they search for their evaluation using other sources. That way, they can see the legitimacy of their own experiment. Also, as I saw with several of the other presentations, more learning can come about when students try harder to discover why they didn't come up with the scientifically accepted explanation. Another important idea is that students should be encouraged to investigate topics further even if they don't align with their original question. One of the groups became interested in several other ideas related to mold as they did their research, and I thought that was a great example of scientific inquiry breaking away from stagnant and boring investigations.



5/5/12

Over the last month of this class, I've learned a lot which I'd like to address. First of all, we had a very interesting discussion about creativity in schools after watching a Sir Education video. This video highlighted how the history of education has resulted in schools that are like factories. Our students are trained to listen to bells to tell them what to do, and they take standardized tests that lack any kind of excitement. There isn't any life in the schooling process, and we're telling our students that there is only one right answer. But divergent thinking--creativity--is what is most important to solve the problems of our current world. Students start off with amazing creativity skills in Kindergarten, but those skills are just stripped away as they progress through the grades. Also, schools should move away from compartmentalizing students into "academic" and "non-academic" groups so they feel less distant from each other and more able to collaborate. Through more inquiry-based science classrooms, we can help our children achieve divergent, collaborative thinking.

After this, we focused on technology. We watched a video about Khan Academy which made me think about teaching in an entirely different way. This program is a combination of thousands of instructional videos focusing on all different school subjects at different levels. Some students have actually said they enjoy learning more through this program than through a regular teacher because they are able to learn at their own pace, in private. They can pause and replay the video until they reach mastery--whereas, with a normal teacher, they might get embarrassed or feel like a burden if they ask a lot of questions. The video also mentioned a "flipped" classroom, and this was very intriguing. The students watch the Khan Academy videos at home to learn the lessons, and then they do their "homework" and other more enriching activities at school. This makes a lot of sense because the teacher is there to help them as they practice. A flipped classroom could also allow for a lot more inquiry-oriented learning at school because teachers wouldn't be taking the time to formally teach the hard factual information. One problem I could foresee is that children wouldn't have a teacher there for asking questions while they learned the material. But these questions could be addressed the next day on a more personal level. This would make the class much more individualized so that some students don't get held back and others don't get lost. It's a very interesting idea that I would like to try in my future classroom in order to make in school science learning more meaningful.

We also discussed several other technology ideas that our class researched. One of my classmates told us about a program called CyberScience 3D. This program allows you to manipulate plants, animals, machines, etc. in 3D for a very hands-on experience when it wouldn't otherwise be possible. Another classmate discussed the NASA website. There are several inquiry-based lesson plans available for educators' use. Another really exciting aspect of this website is that classes can send in a suggestion for an experiment, and the NASA scientists pick one to actually perform. This would be a great way to connect learning from the classroom to the real world. It could be part of the "communicate" stage of inquiry, and this would be a great justification for the importance and relevance of their topic of study. The technology that I researched was GPS and the activity of geocaching. This can make learning about the coordinate system and the environment much more engaging for students. It's very important for teachers to look into new technologies because these tools can make learning more meaningful, and technology can make the teacher's job more efficient as well.

From group work on the SLPE project, I learned that often the best ideas for a science lesson come from collaboration. Our group needed to think of a way to compare other life cycles to the butterfly's life cycle, so we decided we would all come with ideas to our next class. I thought it would be good to talk about the human's life cycle because we could make it very relevant for the kids. They could bring in baby photos, measure each other's heights, and even go to other classrooms in the upper grades to measure their heights. As I explained this idea to my group, they liked it, but they pointed out something important--these were second graders, and we wouldn't want to risk having a discussion about human reproduction with them. In the end, we decided that each of us would focus on a different non-human organism and relate it back to humans on occasion to make it relevant. This worked out very well. We were able to make the kids' learning very personalized and possibly more in-depth because we each had a small group.

From peer teaching and watching other groups peer teach, I learned that collaboration in the education profession is also very important because of the constructive feedback you can receive. Teachers can improve their teaching to better serve their students in this way. Practicing the lesson was very important because it helped my group get much more prepared. Even if teachers have a great, inquiry-based lesson idea, knowing how to handle the details is what makes that lesson actually work out in the classroom. While peer teaching, and even more so while actually teaching in the 2nd grade classroom, I learned that even though students learn best through inquiry, sometimes a little direct teaching is required to guide the students--especially when the children are younger. It requires a great deal of teacher preparation to scaffold the students effectively. Teachers also need to be prepared by knowing that anything can happen while they are teaching, so teacher flexibility is a great asset to the students' learning. Sometimes, your lesson is going to be too short (which happened to one of the groups), so you need to improvise. In an inquiry-based classroom, it's very likely that this would happen since it isn't completely teacher-directed. One extra activity that sounds like a good learning tool for students is the "5 Minute Mystery" because this helps students to think critically even if they are finished with their science learning for the day. Great science classrooms are guided by a very prepared teacher who is able to adjust to his or her students' learning needs and create a atmosphere where science is a relevant and justified inquiry process.