A story of my learning about new science teaching approach.
When I first learned about Common Core standards, it is seemed to me that the most valuable skills in the schools are reading, writing and mathematics. And, unfortunately it is true, some schools pay more attention to these skills by skipping social studies and science sometimes.
The science subject was new to me in the elementary school context as in my school years, we had science classes in the middle school classes only. I appreciate how I learned that absence of science classes in the elementary grades leads to knowledge gap in the middle school grades. So, elementary teachers also have the responsibility to build science awareness too.
During science classes in the MAT program, I have learned a new approach to teach science in the school. It is called ambitious science teaching (Windschitl et el., 2018) and it was developed by the group of educators from UW university in Seattle. What I like about this approach is that a science unit plan is build based on anchoring phenomena. So, students will be able to learn about science while they are observing scientific phenomena and make their predictions about what happened in it.
“I appreciate how I learned that absence of science classes in the elementary grades leads to knowledge gap in the middle school grades. So, elementary teachers also have the responsibility to build science awareness.”
In my 5th grade lesson plan I would ask students to look at the picture of landslide that happened in Oso, Washington in 2014. As this landslide was in Washington state it connects young scientists to their local community and makes them even more curious. It also allows them to learn about Earth systems by making initial predictions and scientific assignments to test them.
I appreciate how our professor asked us to create a unit plan based on phenomena by scaffolding it in three lesson plans. This allowed me to think about importance of a unit planning and specific lessons in it. I was also asked to work on reflection after I taught my lesson plan to my classmates who pretended like they are 5th graders. Answering to reflection questions gave me the opportunity to work on my lesson plan sections by analyzing my teaching during the lesson.
I enjoyed this assignment as it reminded me about my father. I have never thought about his experiments before from science perspective. My father is a mechanic engineer and he used to show me and my younger sister interesting experiments with all his curiosity and knowledge. I loved these moments, as they created unique memories. Now, when even if my daughter is three years old only, I always try to explain her what happens and if I am not sure, I make my research and then tell her. This what I always do when I am observing or learning something new. Nowadays, the digital era gives an enormous amount of information about everything, but it is crucial to evaluate it critically. And critical thinking is one of the fundamental skills in science and other subjects that I want to teach my students.
Windschitl, M, Thompson, J and Braaten, M (2018) Ambitious science teaching, Cambridge, Harvard Education Press
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