What is exemplary teaching and why is it important?
When we think of exemplary teaching I’m sure we all have certain teacher in mind. We think of a teacher who can transform a classroom, no matter what the situation is. we also think of someone who invites questions and promotes the voices of their students, when it comes to solving challenging problems and working through labs. What makes a teacher exemplary is really in the eyes of their students. each student has a different meaning of what it means to be exemplary in their eyes for many it could be…
- Hands on activities
- Helping overcome difficult concepts
- Science fairs
- Making the content related to them
- Taking Field trips
- asking/engaging with the class
- etc… (there are many ways to be exemplary)
How can I incorporate this into my classroom?
I plan on implementing exemplary teaching in my classroom by methods discussed a lot in the article “ExemplarySciTeaching” by Ann E. Haley-Oliphant in particular the teachers. All of the teachers mentioned in the article are unique in their own way. One in particular Georgia Brown she uses her environment around her in her everyday use at school through her conceptual lessons and labs. Like that I can utilize the above topics in my classroom each day to better my students learning.
How Would I do it?
coming up with exemplary teaching methods is easy but putting it into act is hard to manage a lot of times. I would go about this in an inclusive way, along with a thorough lesson plan, a clear end goal is needed too. We want to set high expectations for the students as well, we don’t want low expectations because it can cause students to fly through it and not be challenged at all, or if it is too hard, they may give up hope too easily. So we need to find the happy-medium for our students. We also want them to be able to showcase their handwork and knowledge, this not only is beneficial end goal for the students presenting but for the students listening they may get new ideas/sparks of creativity. Setting up multimodal ways of learning to aid the students who may struggle or fall behind in the content. The execution of this is the biggest part, the instructions have to be given in a clear and concise way along with allowing room for creativity on the students hands.
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Link to the official NSTA Instagram’s page
https://www.facebook.com/NSTA.FB
Link to the official NSTA facebook page
Thank you for your thoughtful comment! more specifically I would implement a lot of field experiences type of work/assignments where they go out and explore, not just necessarily the average “cookbook” experiment.
Hey Quinten. I really liked your post! It was very thoughtful yet digestible. The way you acknowledge that it can be difficult to actually implement exemplary teaching was very insightful especially because of how easy it is to take exemplary teaching for granted when you just get to read about it or experience it secondhand. You give some good strategies for how to think about putting good science teaching into action but also leave a lot of room for readers to think which is nice. One question I did have for you is if you had to get more specific about how you would become an exemplary teacher what would you say? Are there any assignments or experiences you would include that you’ve already thought of?