True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their
own.
― Nikos Kazantzakis
I believe all students are capable of being scientists. To engage in science means to practice inquiry, to ask questions, and to seek out the answers. This field is not limited to those with doctoral degrees or those of certain races or genders, but available to everyone and should be accessible to everyone.
I want to get my students as excited about science as I am. I want them to see that science is beautiful, mysterious, pertinent, and most importantly, vital to their development as adolescents. To do this, I bring my enthusiasm into the classroom, modeling that science is interesting, exciting, and fun.
I prefer teach predominantly by inquiry, allowing students to find their way into the answers such that they are more likely to remember it as well as provide them the agency they need to know that they can be scientists. By practicing disciplinary literacy and encouraging my students to learn science the way scientists do, I work to forge a deeper respect, understanding, and passion for science. Examples of this include carefully designed “exploriments,” in which students are given a focus question and materials from which they must discover a pattern or relationship. Recently, my students were asked “How does mass effect the speed of falling objects?” and were provided with DotCars, ramps, and masses. They collected data, created graphs using Excel, and discovered that added mass does not make cars faster or slower. This type of learning provides students experiences they can remember and build off of.
I am most excited to teach because I love learning and students offer a fresh perspective giving them a unique insight. I learn more from students every day and hope to continue that for the rest of my career.
I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.
― Albert Einstein
After extensive literature review of educational psychology, I will briefly review my theory-based practices I adopt in my classroom. Operant conditioning, based off of Pavlov’s stimulus studies with dogs, pairs events with voluntary stimuli. This is be very important for my classroom management, as it allows me to set norms and expectations for my students behavior. I am much more interested in positive reinforcement than in punishments or negative reinforcements, but I can understand the necessity of reacting to bad behavior. I also implement a contingency contract; this is a collaborative contract that outlines goals and expectations. As a science teacher, I already have a laboratory safety contract, so having a classroom safety/behavior contract can go along with that. Specifically, I start every day the same way, asking students “What is due today? What are we doing today? What is due tomorrow?” This acts as a set and allows my students to begin class with an expected routine. Students know to find the answers to my questions on the board, and serves as a reminder to hand in assignments and write down the homework.
In regards to information processing, I am most interested in schema theory. This asserts that students learn and remember best when what they are learning fits in with what they already know of the world (their existing schema). This theory supports the use of prior knowledge learning and scaffolding of abstract concepts, two things that are very important in all sciences but especially physics, where much of what students learn can be difficult to visualize. Allowing students to build off what they know and combine what they have observed with what they are learning reinforces meaning. In my classroom, I link content with students cultural and community perspectives. In my unit on density, I have framed the unit around the real world phenomena of boats. Many of my students fish, sail, or otherwise engage in boating. By asking students to puzzle over how boats can float when the metal they are made from cannot provides students with a developmentally appropriate hook to interest them. The unit concludes with a student project, where they create an aluminum foil boat and must calculate the density of it.
The idea of metacognition becomes very interesting in the science classroom. Metacognition is the reflective process of thinking about how you think, learning about how you learn, and studying how you study. In physics, particularly, students will have many conceptions of how the world works, but these may be false-beliefs and lead to confusion. It is important to reflect on why students hold these false beliefs, especially when they are shown to be untrue. That way, the reflective and introspective practice allows students to view their false belief as a learning step, not as a mistake and they don’t feel stupid. To do this, I often incorporate activities based on “What do you think? What do you think now?” such that students can challenge their own misconceptions or incompletely developed conceptions.
If you are interested in something, you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it. Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them.
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow: The Psychology Of Engagement With Everyday Life
I need my students to be effective at information transfer and applying old skills/understandings to new concepts. To do this, I will follow Bohlin, Durwin, & Reese-Weber’s (2012) guidelines of developing automaticity, promoting meaningful learning, teaching metacognitive strategies, and motivating my students to value their own learning. I am particularly interested in automaticity and the process of overlearning, to ensure mastery is maintained long after the skill is learned. Science incorporates many skills, such as graphing, rounding, scientific notation, and writing. By practicing these skills and making them routines, students can gain confidence and competence while learning content. Specially, most data gathering activities involve graphing and predictions, a routine that will prepare students for the future.
I am also interested in Needs theory (Maslow, Deci, McClelland, Csikszentmihalyi), by which “individuals strive to satisfy needs such as self-fulfillment, self-determination, achievement, affiliate, and influence.” Having a needs-fulfilling classroom involves knowing your students. When students have their needs fulfilled, they are free to learn, unburdened by social, emotional, or physical turmoil so often associated with adolescence. Students need to feel valued and safe, and creating a classroom that does both is one of my most important tasks as a teacher.
The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves.
― Joseph Campbell
Weiner’s Attribution theory is “based on the proposition that the ways individuals come to perceive and to interpret the causes of their successes or failures are the major determinants of their motivation, rather than innate needs or fixed earlier experiences.” I am interested in combining attribution theory with growth mindset, challenging students to constantly redefine themselves and challenge labels that others put on them. This is done through the normalization of mistakes, specifically encouraging students to allow for mistakes, providing the learn from them. When a student’s graph looks off, it is not a bad thing, provided the teacher encourages them to discover why.
People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities.
― Albert Bandura
This relates to Bandura’s Social-cognitive theory, in which “individuals’ actions are influenced by the value particular goals hold for them and their expectations for success.” Students must feel that what they are learning is interesting, relevant, and of an appropriate challenge. In order to do this, teachers must work with their students to find personal, cultural, historical, and social connections with the curriculum, deepening student-subject connection.
Finally, I am interested in Gardner’s ideas of multiple intelligences, such that students connect and learn from material in different ways. I hope to incorporate multiple ways of knowing into each of my lessons in order to make my class accessible to people who have strengths in different types of intelligences. Many students have the notion that they only learn in certain ways, which has been scientifically disproven for the vast majority of students. Instead, students learn best when they are taught in varied modalities, allowing them to learn in ways that are comfortable and challenging. I want to meld kinesthetic learning with mathematical learning or interpersonal learning so everyone can engage in the material in a meaningful way.
In the end, after synthesizing all of these theories, I have four rules for teaching:
a. Teach well – when you have high expectations for your students you should also have high expectations for your own practice.
b. Attend to individual needs – every student deserves to feel like a scientist
c. Build a supportive, inclusive classroom culture – the classroom is not a place for the teacher, it is a place for the students.
d. Allow students to learn like scientists – students will, given the space and tools, create meaning for themselves. It is better to allow them to learn than to tell them what to know.
“A teacher who cannot explain any abstract subject to a child does not himself thoroughly understand his subject; if he does not attempt to break down his knowledge to fit the child’s mind, he does not understand teaching.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Life Is Worth Living