Ithaca College teaching professionals are able to plan and implement effective, developmentally appropriate lessons and curricula based upon sound principles of content knowledge and skill development.
Teachers should guide without dictating, and participate without dominating.
― C.B. Neblette
As I plan and implement instructional techniques, I strive to include four major aspects from educational research: Inquiry, Literacy, Backwards Planning, and Differentiation.
I firmly believe a teacher should be a guide on the side, not a sage on a stage. Teachers facilitate the understandings and meanings students create for themselves. In science education, much research suggests that inquiry is the best-practice for teaching and learning. In an inquiry classroom, the teacher designs and introduces the lesson, but students are the active creators of meaning. A properly planned inquiry activity will allow the teacher to step aside, letting the students discover their own understanding.
Inquiry allows students to engage with science and learn like scientists. To complement this, I attempt to incorporate literacy into each of my lessons, to encourage students to read and write like scientists. Shanahan and Shanahan have written extensively about the importance of incorporating literacy, specifically disciplinary literacy, into the classroom. In my planning, I try to incorporate an explicit literacy strategy into each unit.
In regards to planning for instruction, I am a firm believer in Backwards Planning (theorized by Wiggins & McTighe), in which the instructor starts the planning process by setting goals for student achievement, then creating the assessment they want their students to be successful in completing, and finally designing lessons and activities to help students reach the goal.
Finally, and most importantly, is the idea of differentiation (Tomlinson) and Universal Design (Gargillo & Metcalf). Students benefit from lessons and activities that are tailored to their prior knowledge, development, and skill-based ability. Especially when lessons involve teaching a new skill or process, allowing (and planning for) students to progress at their own pace is vital to classroom management and effective instruction.
For my artifacts, I have lesson plans and activities that demonstrate incorporating these practices into my planning and instruction.
1. Literacy as a way to learn Astronomy, Nature of Science, and the Scientific Method
In this activity, I have students break a reading up into paragraphs, an explicit comprehension strategy. I also have them underline key terms (and in class discuss the terms) as an explicit vocabulary strategy.
This activity served as a basis for scientific method understanding (and review for some students) as well as an introduction to the history of Astronomical research.
In class, students shared their sentences in small groups and compared what they found most important with their peers. As a class, we then synthesized the individual paragraphs in to meaning page by page and finally as a whole for the reading. This activity allowed students to draw meaning from the reading, not simply be told what the most important parts were.
2. Differentiated Black Hole Math Instructional Packet
In this packet (and accompanying lessons), I utilize backwards design and differentiation. I set the goal that all students would be able to use and understand the Black Hole Math equations, but knew that while all students could be successful on my designed assessments (both formative and summative), students would need different amounts of support to get there. One of my students is also in my Physics class and has very strong math skills. Another is a mathematically gifted 10th grader, who may not have been familiar with the mathematical processes, but would quickly pick them up. On the other hand, many students had previously struggled with all formative assessment questions that incorporated math skills.
To ensure all students were able to equitably engage in the lesson, I decided to let the students self-select when they were ready to begin their own independent practice. All students needed to complete the packet, but they were allowed to work alone as soon as they felt ready for independence. This method of instruction allowed me to incorporate student agency into gradual release direct instruction, improving student outcomes through differentiated engagement pathways.
3. Density Lesson Plan
[Densities of Different Substances]
In this lesson, designed for middle schoolers, incorporates disciplinary literacy with the “Claim and Evidence” Statements made by students as a way to synthesize the meaning they’ve created through the inquiry activity.