What is Exemplary Science Teaching?
Every future educator pursues the field wanting to make a difference in their students, their school, and maybe even the world. How do they do it? What do they need? To find out, lets explore the world of exemplary science teaching, and how to teach beyond just the four walls of your classroom. Exemplary science teachers don’t just teach the topics decided by the state standards, they use the topics to fuel their student’s curiosity and learning.
How-To:
Being an exemplary science teacher isn’t impossible. In reality, it’s actually fairly easy if you can put your mind and heart into it. Below, I’d like to share a few key points and ideas from Ann E. Haley-Oliphant’s The Voices of Exemplary Science Teachers, an excellent source of motivation, inspiration, and authentic examples of exemplary science teaching.
- Use the environment around your school or neighborhood to integrate real-life science into your lessons
- Encourage parent or guardian participation in science
- When students ask questions about concepts, ideas, and experiments out of curiosity, they become invested in the answer and are more open to learning
- Get companies involved in the classroom! When students know that their work and learning is part of a greater purpose, it allows them to participate in authentic science research and they’re more invested in turning in quality work, not because they’re being graded on it, but because they WANT to.
- “You must give power back to the children” -Georgia Brown
- When students are in charge of their own learning, they take responsibility for it without even knowing it
Humans are innately curious and, as teachers, we need to use that to our advantage and teach in a way that grabs our student’s attention.
https://twitter.com/ClaireCreight10/status/1040053597780762624
Creating Lessons With Students In Mind
Lesson planning can be a daunting task, especially when you want to be an exemplary science teacher but don’t know where to start. Below is a few ideas to help you get started on the right track.
- Student-led lessons or activities
- Find topics in pop-culture or other places that interest your students and ask them to relate the topic to science concepts and explain them
- Let students pick out an article in a science magazine that interests them and have them summarize the article and explain the key words and concepts to you or the class
- Use lessons to help the environment
- HAVE FUN
TED Talk- Every Kid Needs a Champion
In her TED Talk “Every Kid Needs a Champion,” Rita F. Pierson truly shows her passion for teaching and her passion for her students. Though she is not specifically science, she embodies exemplary teaching by the way she cares for her students and their authentic learning, not just their grades. She reminds us that with a little human connection and a good relationship, we can really get through to students no matter what we teach. After 40 years of teaching, you can still see the excitement for learning Rita F. Pierson has. She is an example of exemplary teaching.
“+2 says ‘I ain’t all bad!'” I love this TED talk because it shows just how far positivity and outlook on education can actually achieve. An exemplary teacher should be definitely be fostering a student’s creativity, but I love her tips on how to go about keeping that spark alive with students who may not have the creativity or may be more likely to not feel connections. I agree with you that real-world examples, companies, and student-led activities will help with that creativity. They help all the material connect.
Great post! I LOVE that Ted Talk. It really helps to show how powerful a passionate teacher can be. I think your “How-to” section is really helpful as well. Getting parents involved in the learning can be a really good tool. Kids love doing what their parents are doing so I could see that would be a really good way to motivate them to learn. Do you have any plans as to how to include parents in the classroom?
Keeping parents involved in the classroom gets harder as children get older, in my opinion. Whenever I asked my mom for help in science she always looked at it, handed it back to me, and said something along the lines of “that looks like foreign language” so I never really got much help. I think a great idea would be to have students go home over the weekend with a little assignment or topic and have them teach their parents what they learned in class that week. This way, the parents or guardians are learning about what their student is learning, and the student actually gets practice reviewing and teaching the material!
Two quotes left me in awe: “[teachers] use the topics to fuel their student’s curiosity and learning.” THIS IS SO TRUE!!! Teachers shouldn’t just teach for the test. Teachers should teach for student’s curiosity!
The next quote that had me shocked was from your tweet: “When you teach a child how to learn based on curiosity, they become a scientist.” Our goals as teachers isn’t just to mold our students into exceptional people, but we want to create scientists!
I think your blog post is ON POINT! Keep up this good work.
How do you want to make your students scientists? How will you accomplish this?
Thank you! I want to make my students scientists in the way that they start to take their learning into their own hands. Instead of me guiding discussions and activities, I slowly want them to be so curious and excited that they start to ask more questions and explore ideas and topics with each other. I really want my classroom to be filled with my student’s voices more than my own voice. I think a huge difference between a student in science class and a scientist is that a scientist WANTS to be there. To do this I have to relate topics to what my students like whether thats sports, cars, food, or animals!
I really like your tweet! It’s very creative. I also like how you had headings for all of your different sections. That definitely made this easier to read. I am also a big fan of how you referenced Dr. Ann’s chapter. The TED talk was also inspirational, I had never seen this one before! I really like your ideas for creating lessons with students in mind, but what do you mean by using lessons to help the environment? (Like physically? Teaching kids about the environment?) If I were to give you a suggestion, it would be to maybe add a visual aid to the “Creating lessons with students in mind” section. I really like the ideas you have there, but a visual aid might add to it! Good blog!!
Thank you so much! When I talk about using lessons to help the environment I do mean physically! So many of the exemplary teachers in the article talked about how they used the stream or pond behind their school or in their neighborhood to teach lessons to the students and in the process, helped clean up the area around it. I think it’s really important to protect the environment and if you can teach that to your students while also using the water or soil around it to conduct experiments or research with them too, is amazing!