When I was in my physics classes, I saw several students that would just give up and not explore. I feel that is because that instructor was not an exemplary teacher. The teacher would usually sit on the computer and work on other assignments that he had to do for the class rather than us exploring. He would create a website for us to look at and just copy and paste with a google form. With google forms and questions, you can see the correct answer by pulling up the code for the website and it would tell you everything right. Therefore, there was no learning and no exploration, just you absorbed on your computer and playing games.
What is Exemplary Teaching?
It is the construct between how students learn and how the teacher interacts within the classroom. The teacher’s role is to help students learn effectively and create an open floor plan for the individual student.
The real question is what makes a teacher exemplary. Those teachers who plan around their lessons to make their teaching memorable are the first couple of things that come to mind. They take what the students know and then elaborate and expand on it. As Esplin stated on their blog, exemplars help students grow on particular skills, content, or knowledge and elaborate on curriculum (Esplin). Thus, an exemplar helps students develop. These situations will grow and come and will help elaborate those students to have those ideas and flourish from it.
https://www.uvu.edu/otl/blog/exemplarsintheclassroom.html
6 Principle of Exemplary Teaching
Before a lesson plan is set up, there are several steps that will need to be followed in order to be exemplary teaching.
When following these 6 principles, students can be active and consume knowledge. Therefore, we will follow these principles when we make our lesson plan an opportunity to learn while still being interactive. Even if this is for English learners, it is still applicable to science.
- Know your learners: science is all about exploring. Giving the students those guided questions needed to help them apply what they find in the class
- Create conditions for learning: giving students the opportunity to respond and allowing those guided questions.
- Design high-quality lessons: allowing students to explore and go to the margins. No cookie cutter labs
- Adapt the lesson: sometimes a lesson might not go as planned, but being flexible will help the lesson go smooth
- Monitor and assess the students: tracking the students progress so you know they are hitting the content.
- Engage and collaborate: Engage students and find out what their interests are
Application to the Classroom
Therefore when making my class structure, I would have it based on the students exploring Physics. While lecturing is a good way to teach the students, memories are made more when the students are utilizing different perspectives into their learning. Students may not have the motivation to do assignments using other methods. Using exemplary teaching, we can motivate students and make them want to learn more. To allow that, I would provide resources for the content and explain what the ultimate end goal is and connect with the student (Principle 6). Then they can collaborate with themselves or with a peer to work on the assignment. With teamwork, you can be more engaging by gamifying your lesson. In the Edutopia Classroom Management lecture, they posed about making a game out of different relevant content from Tik Tok or Youtube. Using terms like “Aura” and other ways to connect your students. Exploring science creates memorable experiences within my school career. In 12th grade, we explored the design process through an egg drop competition. The process was about how to design something effective and using the properties of STEAM in the application. Therefore, we had to make our design function and still look presentable and professional.
When applying it to my content, having students experience the design process and failure is apart of the engagement to the community. An example that I could do for a lesson is throwing a ball up in the air and seeing how long it takes to come back to Earth. Then you can use Kinematics to calculate how high you threw the ball. Have a team of two to record a time for your throw and vice versa. It is an entry level question to one dimensional mechanics that demonstrates how acceleration in a one dimensional y-direction is ( g = -9.8 m/s2 ).Thus, given acceleration, and recorded time, the speed and the distance of the ball can be found using the equations provided. Then you can do a similar thing, but throwing the ball in 2 dimensions. Additionally when teaching AP physics, you can utilize vectors to apply it to a 3 dimensional setting.
Therefore, those memorable experiences that students have usually come from those teachers being an exemplar. Having the 6 principles reinforces those students to want to learn the science and have a drive for science. Our goal as teachers is to spark that passion rather than diminish it with lectures.
The major thing that stood out for me here was the idea of memorable experiences from teaching. I never had to do an egg drop in class, but we once had to make a rocket that would launch across the field, and that is definitely a science class that stands out among the the other classes that didn’t have such an event. As another physics teacher, what do you think would be a solid memorable experience fitting of a more high end physics class room.
As someone who didn’t have a great physics teacher in high school, if any of these things were used I would’ve loved the class more! Whenever I think of physics class, I think of an egg drop and I think that would be a great lesson and challenge for your students! How do you try to use slang but not make it forced or “cringy”?
I think being relevant in the content would really help. Especially because social media comes and goes in waves and its hard to predict. Listening in on student conversations would also help as you can hear how they talk to each other to pick slang up.
I’m sorry, google form will give you the right answer if you pull up the code?!? I wonder what other online tools teachers use that works for, would totally change which resources teachers can/should use.
I like the six steps you brought up! While the infographic you used is specific to English learners, I agree that they are applicable to all learners. I like how you modified them to be more closely related to science.
I like the activities you describe, especially the egg drop competition. I love egg drop competitions, I think they are a really great way to engage your students (or anyone, really) in utilizing the scientific method. I am curious about your reference to the Edutopia lecture about using more relatable words such as “aura”. I am always nervous to use gen alpha slang because I have no idea how to use it correctly and when I do use it, I am usually corrected. I feel like students would feel like we did when our millenial teachers tried to use slang words, which I’m not sure is a positive thing. Does that encourage connection with your students, or reinforce that you’re way too old to be using those words? Just something that got me curious!
Yeah… if you do [option][cmd][I] on mac or [ctrl][alt][I] on windows you can access the webpage and see the contents inside of it and the code behind it.
I feel that slang is a funny thing, there are videos of old zookeepers using Gen Z terms and its really funny. I think the students would get a kick out of it while showing that I am vulnerable. It’ll allow a better connection with them even if I use it wrong.
I love this hands-on approach to a classroom. With your “gamified” technique, how do you plan on maintaining an educational and professional manner within the season? do you think the meaning of the science will get lost if you try to be too relatable?
I feel like the idea of having that personal connection ignites the flame for a lot of students. There are teachers at my school that I loved their class and was a lot more engaged because they made that personal connection with me. I mean that is the reason I went into education is those teachers.
I do this a lot at work and balance whether I am being too lax or too professional and it boils down to respect. Do the students/coworkers have the respect for you to do what is right or will you just get blown by and nobody listens to you. I feel like that where the line needs to be drawn and it will vary from class to class just due to who people are.