Changing How We Teach

I have just finished my second day at the museum and I have already learned so much!  There are a couple of thoughts that came to me yesterday during our orientation at the museum and official introduction to our projects that I want to share before they get clouded in my brain with all of the other awesome new things I am learning this summer.  I also want to use this post to jot down a few ideas about future science activities that occurred to me today during my first day actually working in the lab as a real life scientist (junior version).

During our orientation I heard the phrase “we are changing the way students learn” a couple of times.  This statement stuck with me because I think it misses the truth of what is really happening in this program.  We are not changing the way students learn.  Students already learn how they learn, which can’t be changed any more than I can change my genetic makeup.  Students, like adults (or any other sentient being for that matter), learn through exposure, experience, and reflection.  As a teacher, it is my job to meet students where they are and how they are, not change them or make them fit into a predetermined mold.  Through citizen science (inquiry with no set result that can be shared with the scientific community as a whole) and the lessons that come from it, we are changing the way that we teach.  We are moving away from the assembly line of modern education and bringing authentic real-world science to kids.  We are altering our teaching to match the way that students naturally learn in order to serve them better and that is a beautiful thing.

Well, that’s enough from atop the education soapbox (#committee for the use of thoughtful language). =)

I also want to use this post to list out some early ideas that are coming from my time in the Genomics lab at the museum.  Today, Julia (Dr. Stevens, the postdoc on our/really her project) taught use (Team Dirt) how to create Agar plates and how to plate microbes.  We made 3 types of plates (one for bacteria, one for fungi, and one specifically for super awesome fluorescent bacteria), and we plated bacteria and fungi for 2 different dandelions’ roots and soil around the roots.  I’ll talk more about the science of that in a later post (be prepared for lots of vocabulary and pictures of agar plates).  For right now I just want to talk for a minute about the act of creating agar plates.

1. Agar plates are really cheap if you create them on your own (important for teachers)
2. Microbes from anywhere can be grown on agar plates
3. Kids can see microbes when they are grown on agar plates
4. Kids need to see science in order to understand it
5. With the ability to grow cultures in the classroom, our students could ask AND ANSWER any number of questions about our world!
6. Science is all about answering questions
7. Science is awesome.

The only problem right now is that we used a ton of super expensive lab equipment to make our plates leading me to a new goal for my fellowship: find a way to make agar plates in the classroom with classroom supplies and write a detailed procedure so that other teachers can to do it too! I already have a few other goals in mind for my project that I will write about in more detail later this week, but I wanted to take a minute to write this one down while my excitement is fresh.

To summarize in one sentence: we are changing the way teachers teach in order to help students learn and I am invested in helping that process along in any way that I can!

Me with the agar plates I created!