H3- Honor the classroom/school community as a milieu for learning.

H3.- Honor the classroom/school community as a milieu for learning. Teacher-candidates implement calssroom/school centered instruction, including sheltered instruction that is connected to communities within the classrom and the school, and includes knowledge and skills for working with others. For students to really learn, the classroom must be a place where students are encouraged to work together. When students work together grappling with a difficult concept, a classroom community is formed. The job of the teacher is to foster that community in a healthy way. During the unit I taught on cells, I had students present their cell analogy projects to the class. They were allowed to work in groups, but each person had to be part of the presentation. While presenting, I made notes about both the presenters and the audience. I was likely the most excited audience member. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the creative ways my students talked about cells. The next day, I came to class with individualized comments for each student. They were celebratory in nature, but a few of them did have suggestions for increasing their success at presentations. by offering students compliments on their work as presentors, my goal was to enhance the learning environment and encourage students to share in their learning together. Typically there are papers strewn everywhere when my biology students leave for the day, however no comments were left in the room, indicating that the comments were important to the students. I learned through this experience that students appreciate praise for the learning they do in class. They respond to a learning community when the community is accepting of various opinions. Student learning will increase due to the positive nature of the classroom, alongside the high-level thinking that occurs. In the future, I could have students write comments to each other as a way to show that students have the power to make a difference on their peers and their learning environment as well.

Fifth Period Cell Analogy Evals- no names

E2- Exemplify collaboration within the school.

E2.- Exemplify collaboration within the school. Teacher-candidates participate collaboratively and professionally in school activities using appropriate and respectful verbal and written communication. Teaching can often be a solitary task.  However, collaboration among teachers can give insight into new and innovative ideas as well as create a space to share in the joys and sorrows of teaching.  At my placement school, there are days where students only attend half-day to allow teachers to participate in professional development. This may look like training sessions on various topics or collaborating with other teachers. I have attached a sheet of notes I took during a department meeting where the focus was on what students should be introduced to during Freshman year that will be helpful in advanced Science classes.  From this meeting,  I saw  several themes that can be taught through every year of high school science. From this conversation, it became clear that collaboration as a department can only lead to students maintaining consistency throughout high school science. I learned through meeting with other teachers that state standards are vague enough for teachers to be creative, but too vague to easily go from year to year and prevent repeating information. However, repeating information is not necessarily a problem for high school age students. Hence, the collaboration within a department can alleviate some of the ambiguity. Students may benefit from some repetition, but collaborating with other teachers in an effort to minimize repeating information can only serve students better in broadening their breadth of of knowledge about science. In the future, I plan on giving a beginning of the year pre-test covering various topics in science to gauge where students are at. Doing so would give me as a teacher a better idea of what information students are coming into class with to help determine where the class is going to go throughout the year.

[caption id="attachment_417" align="alignleft" width="225"] Notes from Science department meeting[/caption]

In addition, I think it would be interesting to administer a similar test to students every year to see how they progress through four years of high school science and see how much repeat, etc. there is.