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Looking Forward

As a science educator I am constantly learning about science, new discoveries, research, the impacts that science has in our everyday lives. As a science educator I am constantly teaching about science, the history, the importance and how science impacts students’ lives. As I continue my journey as a future learner I would like to set three goals for myself: 1. To consistently use scientific news in my classroom to bridge the gap between real-world science and classroom science. 2. To use inquiry-based science to teach students important skills needed in higher education and the work place. And 3. To teach students the importance of writing in a science class, and how the method of making a claim and supporting it with evidence and reasoning can be used across all disciplines. 

Real-World Science

As a high school science teacher I see it as my job not only to teach students chemistry and biology but also to help my students become informed citizens. I believe that it is very important to make science a relevant subject for students, and that in order to do this students need to see a connection between what they are learning in the classroom and what is going on in the world around them. In my classroom I have a bulletin board where I display graphics that depict how chemistry is involved in everyday things around us. I use the website Compound Interest for many of my graphics. The pictures I choose are always changing, sometimes they involve current events, for example I use a graphic entitled “The Flint Water Crisis” which details how the lead from the pipes is getting into the city’s water supply. Some of the graphics I choose are seasonal, for example in the fall there was a graphic explaining the chemistry behind autumn leaf colors, or the chemistry of snow globes and LED Christmas lights. My students have the opportunity to look at these graphics when they are getting supplies, sharpening their pencils etc. This bulletin board is a low stakes way of putting relevant science information in front of students. I would like to continue this idea and eventually start making my own graphics, and possibly have students create their own graphics using science knowledge they have learned. 

Skills for Success

Forbes magazine put out a list of the 12 most important skills needed to succeed in the work place, included in this list was collaboration, verbal communication, written communication, and problem solving. All of these skills are used when doing inquiry-based learning. My goal as an educator is to incorporate these skills in my classroom. This is very important because the majority of students will not become chemists, many of them will not use science in their future career at all, therefore I would like the skills they take away from high school chemistry to be skills that they use in their professional careers. By giving students a problem and then asking them to use their critical thinking to skills to develop a procedure and collect data to answer the question students are using all of the skills I listed above. As an educator I plan to move away from cook-book style lab experiments and toward inquiry-based activities, where students actually become the scientists. 

Evidence Based Writing

My third goal stems from my second goal. Students need to be able to communicate their ideas effectively. This skill is important across the disciplines as well as in the professional community. In the science classroom students are expected to make a claim that they can support with evidence and then provide reasoning as to how this evidence supports their claim. This idea of evidence based writing is a school-wide goal where I teach. I have been collecting data from my students this year to support our goal that “By the end of first semester 85% of 11th grade students will be able to support a claim with clear evidence and sound reasoning in a variety of content areas”. For each lab my students do they must write a Claim Evidence Reasoning (CER). I have created a rubric which students use when writing their CER’s, and then I use to score their CER’s. on a scale of 1 to 3 for each section. I will be collecting data for 100 11th grade students over the course of this year. 

As I look toward the future I see a world where science (and teaching) is constantly changing.  I want to incorporate these changes into my classroom and use them to help prepare students for what lies ahead of them. By creating a classroom where real-world science is incorporated, life skills are used on a daily basis and scientific literacy and communication are taught I believe that I can best prepare my students for what lies ahead of them. 

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