Ithaca College teaching professionals demonstrate a rich, thorough understanding of the content and skill knowledge, theories, and issues comprising their disciplines.
There are three things to remember when teaching: know your stuff; know whom you are stuffing; and then stuff them elegantly.
― Lola May
I have degrees in Physics and Environmental Science. I studied for years learning all I could about the natural world, from subatomic particles to the outer reaches of our universe. I intend not only to communicate my knowledge with students, but to communicate my passion, my drive, and my thirst for deeper understanding.
As a teacher, each day I learn more about my discipline from my students. Their conceptions, their misconceptions, and the connections they make allow me to understand more. I learn more about the world when I find ways to connect my students’ prior knowledge with what they currently know. Eric Mazur’s work in misconceptions and assessment of student understandings greatly influences my practice. For example, I recently taught a lesson about density, and was able to reference that my students knew that changing a liquid’s temperature would change it’s volume. This provided scaffolding to support their upcoming experience of water having different densities at different temperatures.
I am part of the Oneonta Mentor Network Initiative teacher’s listserv for both Physics and Earth Science. From this professional correspondence, I continue to learn from my peers about current scientific developments, tools for learning and teaching, as well as advice and ideas for practicing inquiry. Collaborating with these teachers has allowed me to develop my content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge.
I am especially interested in interdisciplinary approaches to learning. This form of learning is researched and lauded by theorists such as John Dewey and Hilda Taba. In the past, I have tried specifically partnering science with math, english, technology, and foreign language. I have designed an interdisciplinary mini-unit about graphing and climate change (see Artifacts), I have solicited advice from English teachers for how to strengthen my students’ claims and justifications with evidence, I have partnered with technology classes to build tools my classroom needed to practice inquiry, and I have designed a lesson that blends the language, culture, and current scientific issues facing Latin America.
Artifacts
This is a three day unit I cowrote with a fellow teacher candidate, Ms. Hannah Oppenheim. This series of lessons introduces climate change, gives student meaningful data with which to understand graphing cyclical relationships, and provides students with a real world phenomena to practice claim and evidence statements.
2. Sample ListServ Email Thread
This email thread gave me wonderful advice for my future classroom, as I am very interested in incorporating fiction reading into my science classroom. There were many responses, some of which I have read and some which are now on my to-read list.
3. Transcript of lesson
This is a transcript of my discussion with students to introduce when density can change. I activated their prior knowledge as well as framed the learning in the method of inquiry. We had a hypothesis to test, we had to make sure our thinking was correct.