Showcase
In my showcase you will find a sampling of projects, lessons, and reflections I have completed throughout my masters program at Michigan State University. Below you find the projects that have helped me to develop how I want to teach my students and lead as a teacher. For more information on each project, just click the title.
Lesson Planning:
This section of my showcase displays the lessons that I created during my master's program. The lessons incorporate technology, literacy, and inquiry based learning. They were developed for myself and other educators. In these lessons students work work through problems to apply science to their own lives.
In this lesson sequence students explore gas laws to explain why a tanker car spontaneously implodes. Students model this phenomenon using pop cans and particle diagrams. This project helped me to incorporate a real world science example into my curriculum.
In this project I worked with a struggling literacy learner in my classroom. I developed strategies and created lesson plans to help this student work on literacy in the science classroom and analyzed data to determine the effectiveness of my lesson.
In this lesson sequence students will explore the behavior of molecules at the microscopic level. For each part of the unit I analyzed how students were making connections to the real world and how this impacted their understanding.
In this lesson students make observations in order to identify the unknown mixture. Students demonstrate their understanding of the lab by supporting their claim with evidence from lab and reasoning that connects theories learned with their evidence.
In this activity students use puzzle pieces to build ionic compounds. Students can visually see how the charge and number of each ion is used to create a net charge of zero.
Technology:
This section of my showcase displays projects that I created during my master's program that allow me to incorporate technology into my science classroom. Some of these are lessons that I adapted to use new technology and others are new lessons that I created using technology.
In this project I developed a professional development session to show teachers how to incorporate a website or blog in their science classroom for students to share their ideas. This project allowed me to apply what I do in my classroom to a leadership role.
In this project I created an Honors Chemistry unit plan that incorporates a simulation. The simulation allows students to visualize something that they otherwise would not be able to see. This project helped me to see the power of visuals in understanding.
In this project I developed a vision to solve a problem that I see in my classroom: Not enough face-to-face instructional time with students. To solve this problem I address the idea of using a flipped classroom and analyzed the pros and cons.