Week 4 of the School Year

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Describe something that you’ve learned as a result of your fellowship that will change how you teach this year.

  • How did this experience change your outlook as an educator?
  • Did it open you up to new possibilities? Please list some of those possibilities.
  • What will you do differently as an educator?
  • Did it affirm any ideals that you may have already had? If so, how so?

Well it’s already here. This is Friday, the end of my fourth week of school. Already the year is flying by, which sounds cheesy but is in this case at least is so true. I love my year round schedule but the fact that my Kenan schedule ran directly into my school year meant I’ve spent the past couple weeks running at full speed. What’s really incredible is how different this first four weeks has been than last year. Last year I began with the engineering design process as a replacement for the scientific method then spent about a week learning to measure using the metric system and then went into our chemistry unit. This year my amazing new PLT partner and I spent the whole first week of school talking about growth mindset and famous failures. Our students built marshmallow spaghetti towers and penny boats (one of my student groups build a boat so strong I ran out of pennies and had to switch to weights, it still held 125 grams with all the pennies). We talked about how failure is a starting point not an ending point. We all learned with Ormie the Pig as we discussed grit (if you haven’t watched Ormie I HIGHLY suggest you do so now- http://bit.ly/1q0WYFv).

Our second week we learned all about the engineering design process and I taught my students about Arduino coding and CAD drawing as a part of this. When I announced that we would be coding and CAD drawing it was met with cheers and tentative celebrations. Our third week we talked about water quality and began preparing for our massive PBL that we started this week (more on that in a later post). This week we started our PBL by investigating different citizen science projects.

What’s been truly amazing isn’t just how different the lessons are but how different I am as a educator, and yes a lot of that has to do with the fact that this is not my first year of teaching. There’s something more though. This year I truly feel like I’m not just teaching my students content but science. We’re learning to be scientists: we’re learning to fail and try again, we’re learning how and why to participate in research.

It’s been a great start to the year I can’t wait to see where it takes me.