Exemplary Teaching in the Mind of a Physics Teacher

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.

https://www.tesol.org/blog/posts/pd-highlight-the-6-principles-for-exemplary-teaching-of-english-learners-grades-k-12-second-edition

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. 

1. 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
2. Create conditions for learning: giving students the opportunity to respond and allowing those guided questions.
3. Design high-quality lessons: allowing students to explore and go to the margins. No cookie cutter labs
4. Adapt the lesson: sometimes a lesson might not go as planned, but being flexible will help the lesson go smooth
5. Monitor and assess the students: tracking the students progress so you know they are hitting the content. 
6. 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.

Check out my findings on Exemplary Teaching@edutopia @NSTA #edt431 #scienceteachinghttps://t.co/b8jIiqlZAF

— Caleb Grammel (@CalebGramm96318) September 19, 2024