Reflective Teaching Blog: On the Journey of Teaching

With me being a new teacher and especially to younger high school students, I find myself in a position where that emphasis of building relationships with my students is crucial. Due to me teaching two sections of biology, I find myself needing to take longer than expected to truly get to know my students in regard to how they learn, what motivates them to learn, and how do they process information. To gain insight regarding this information, I had my students complete a student survey at the beginning of the school year where they got to rank themselves on their skills in reading, comprehension, math, and writing. While I am aware that my students could merely tell me whatever it is, they want me to read, I encouraged my students to please be honest as I will need this information to determine the nature in which class will be ran.  As the first quarter comes to a close, I have found that the following routine I have established has been helpful in determining the pace of the classroom. For instance, when I taught my students about the scientific method, I use the fortune telling fish lab to introduce my students to the topic. Towards the end of class, I had my students respond to the following question on a post- it note: what about the scientific method still confuses you? When students were done completing their responses, they brought their post it notes to the front of the classroom on the white board that I renamed the parking lot. This allowed for me to see what specifically gave my students are hard time and what students needed additional enrichment in order to solidify their comprehension.

Since completing this, students mainly had concerns with the writing portion since each component of the scientific method would result in the completion of a lab report. In addition to the full summary students would need to write, students also said they had concerns with the written summary of results versus the completion of results in the form of a graph or table. Students in this case were reminded that they will need to be able to explain their results in both formats in order to aide them in their unit one CER. In response to the needs of my students, I have provided them with additional resources where they will receive vocabulary for scientific method (independent variable, dependent variable, control group , and experimental group), how to apply these variables to three different scenarios, and identifying discrepancies in an experimental design to help students be successful in designing their own experiments in response to a question or topic.

In addition to the example outlined above, I have also noticed a pattern I can establish with my students that facilitates their learning the best. For instance, last unit I focused on homeostasis where students were given notes to familiarize themselves with the terminology and apply these concepts to explain what was going on in a gizmo activity. From there, students were able to then observe homeostasis in the ectothermic animals (goldfish). Prior to completing this activity with class, A, student A was acting silly with the tank of twelve fish that I had for each lab group and this resulted in the bottom portion of the tank to separate from the tank and the fish were everywhere. In the midst of the chaos, the remainder of the students form class A helped their classmate clean up the mess and all the fish survived and were still able to be used for the experiment (thank goodness). What that experience has taught me is to always be prepared because it is always possible for something to go wrong when you are working with live animals. Despite the rollercoaster this quarter has been, I still love my job and am happy to be a teacher!