The Art of Teaching

In my school system, there is much diversity along with students who have their own cultures and traditions that are done with their families. For my school currently, I honestly am uncertain of any culturally relevant teaching taking place in the science department. However, a colleague of mine in the social studies department has shard a book called making curriculum pop. This book primarily gives teachers a way of teaching the same content they always teach but doing so in a more engaging and interactive way to increase student’s motivation and participation. However, it is also helpful in giving ideas to determining how to bring up topics that relate to a difference in culture. In terms of school wide PD, we did talk about the difference between macro and micro aggressions as a school. What was neat about this experience is that three students got to share their own personal stories about the different micro and macro aggressions they have experienced as both young children and...

When it comes to the growth mindset, I first encountered it at the first residency for the MAT program. The conclusion that I came to is that while the growth mindset is meant to   allow for us to “thrive on challenge and sees failure not as evidence of unintelligence but as a heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities”, this mindset is a lot easier said than done (Dweck, 2015, p. 1 ). In life, we learn from our mistakes and are supposed to be better people because of it. However, I am also sure that if it feels as though nothing is going right at the time, it is easier for one to think that maybe things will always be this way. I am seeing that especially with students that it is increasingly difficult to keep students in that growth mindset when they may have experienced consistent failures on test because   the studying techniques they are using are simply not working. In times like these, it is extremely important that one establi...

In the school I am currently at, I have a mixture of different ethnic backgrounds, but overall I still do have Caucasian children in the majority of my six classes. In the total one hundred and thirty-five students I teach, there are nineteen African American, one Hispanic, and one hundred fifteen Caucasian students. The one Hispanic student I have in class does have English as a second language, but he is adapting well to his surroundings. However, I have found that even though the student understands and can speak the English language well, there seems to be a disconnect with taking tests. When I do talk with this student to determine where things might have went wrong, we came to the conclusion that the student just did not fully understand what the question was specifically asking or misread an answer to a question and ended up selecting the wrong response by mistake. In all honesty, we have all been there were at some point on a test we misread a question or answer and ended up ...

Out of all the educational theorist I have been exposed to, I would say that I look up to Dewey and Piaget. This is mainly due to the ideal that the main take home messages that these two theorists in my opinion truly go hand in hand. John Dewey places such a heavy emphasis on the ideal of hands-on learning. Being a science teacher, I think Life science is a subject in which one has many opportunities to engage students in activities that allow for students to learn the content being taught to them. When it comes to Piaget, he focused heavily on the ideal of having students be engaged in their own learning by utilizing their prior background knowledge to form connections to the new content that students are learning.              Due to me looking up to these theorists so much, I do my best to incorporate these principles into my instruction. For instance, in the first unit of the school year, I had students complete a project in which students...

As we are entering the last quarter of the year (unofficially), I have a few goals for myself. These are to continue building positive rapport, managing my classroom better, and determining how to use questioning better to aide in guiding instruction. During my experiences, I would probably say that the high points are being in the classroom every day. Even if the class was not perfect, it still supplies me with information that a particular component or activity within a lesson does not work. This means for me that there is something out there or a different technique that can be used to relay the same information while also keeping students engaged the entire time. While this has been my first year, there have been many highs and lows for this year. Out of all of my experiences, I would say that would be when I had one student goofing off when getting their goldfish out of the tank for a lab. This resulted in the lid to separate from the container and goldfish were EVERYWHERE. At ...

For my time as a new teacher, we are into the third quarter so I have seen that there has been a decline in the work ethic in my students. Particularly with my Biology kiddos, I sense their feeling of frustration because of the lack of snow days and the consistent five day school weeks. However, there was a day where six consistent students were not doing the right thing (school and classroom policy wise). Normally, I try to give students benefit of the doubt and if they correct their behavior after a warning, I do not always feel the need to call home. However, my students’ behavior persisted which in turn resulted in me calling six parents that day!             When I called each parent, they all were supportive and understood that I care about their child and just want them to be in an environment where they are able to learn in the best environment possible. One parent I called was about phone use, and I just read over th...

At the end of ED640, we were prompted to create goals for ourselves as educators to better serve the students we teach every day. My overall goal is to keep my students engaged in activity from bell to bell. One of the biggest battles I have had in classroom management is that my students were not always engaged in lesson activities. This would cause for my students to become bored and thus engage in off task behavior that usually consisted of side conversations that distracted the class from the tasks that they were supposed to be accomplishing at that time. To better alleviate these issues, I really took the time to get to know my students and I realized that they love to have any excuse to move around. Therefore, I made an effort to create jobs for my few students that love to move around. One of my newest classroom management strategies was to incorporate a sticker system for successful completion of the bell ringer/ drill prior to the timer going off after five minutes have elap...

        This will be my fourth reflective blog and it is amazing to see the growth and improvement I have had thus far. While at times it has been a difficult journey, I have learned that I take criticism well. My face might not look like it while I am processing what is being said to me but I internalize the feedback I am given to allow for me to better myself as a teacher. Over the past two weeks, I have learned that things will not always be perfect. In my forensics classes, my kiddos just started their unit on impressions and we started to look at how a cast is made of a shoeprint using dental stone, dirt, and some water.         With this being my first time working with these materials, I was not expecting perfect results from each lab group but I was hopeful that I would at least get some good results. My first class of students casts looked like a pile of mush. At first I was disappointed that things did not work out and felt like I faile...

This will be my third reflective blog that I have made for the school year thus far. As I have mentioned in my previous blog entries, it has been a rollercoaster. I have been preparing for an observation with School A and I have felt a great deal of stress given that I had to write my first observation for a student being unsafe in the science classroom. I was in a state of confusion and panic because I have never had to write one before within this scenario and was unsure of what to do. I came to my principal to figure out how to document this and then I found myself arguing back and forth about the phone policies in the school. While my principal was upset that a student in my class filmed what happened (misuse of flammable chemicals) I was thankful to the student who filmed because it validated everything I said within the behavioral referral. At the end of the conference, my principal was thankful that I came to clarify what to do so that I knew the correct procedures were being...

Over the past few weeks, I have gotten great feedback from my first observation with my principal and administration. Overall, they were proud of how the lesson went but had a few suggestions for improvement. One of these things was to be mindful for how I question probe my students to allow for them to be prepared to defend the answer that they gave for a response to the bell ringer (drill) exercise. In addition, I have gotten feedback to find ways to quickly get my students into their seats and ready to begin the lesson activities. Since receiving this feedback, there was a professional development day in Harford County on November 4 th . Due to the notes of improvement for question probing, note taking, etc., I attended three workshops where I got to learn about the new STEM cases that allow for students to be able to step into the role of a scientist to determine how the content learned in class relates to phenomena in the real world. The second workshop I attended allowed for ...

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 c...

Being a new teacher, I talked with my students about STEM Education as being a method in which I am learning how to foster young minds in Science while allowing my students to make sense of the world around them. The one thing I wondered is how come my students think the concepts I have taught them thus far is only applicable to the discipline of Science. Since the first day of school, my students have been learning about how everything we learn in class connects to the real world in some way, shape, or form. The most recent example I have is where my students are using cellular organelles and are relating the function of those organelles to their technical areas. For some of my students, this assignment came easy and were able to see for how the cell membrane functions in the cell to control what comes in and out of the cell and that relates to a fence of classroom door because all of those items also share the same function. However, when one of my students was unsure of how th...

Over the past four weeks, I have gotten to see how various STEM practices and techniques can influence education in research, instruction, and observation. For my professional development plan, I have joined a team with my department where we work with cross cutting concepts that are presented in the curriculum for Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The way that my department teaches with this technique is to provide students with a packet for each unit. This packet will be used as a one stop shop to have students’ notes, classwork, homework assignments all in one place. As students further their academics, they will receive a packet for chemistry, integrated physics and chemistry, or physics (depending on how students perform in Biology). In the packet, there is the list of objectives that will be covered during the class period. Next to that textbox is a blank text box where students will be required to fill out the cross-cutting concept. To complete this task, students wi...