Final Internship Blog Post #5

In the month and a half that I have been interning in this classroom, one of the biggest adjustments for me has been learning how to best teach so many students with exceptionalities. The issues students are facing in this classroom run the gamut from Tourette’s to cerebral palsy to dyslexia. Most of the students in the class have ADD/ADHD and several students in the class have IEPs with behavior goals. This classroom also contains all of the ELL students in the grade, who are at various stages of language acquisition. Last week, for example, we got two new students from Saudi Arabia who do not speak any English. The ability grouping has resulted in a classroom in which students have such varied reasons for producing on the level that resulted in their placement in this classroom. There are children who have difficulty with focus and children whose behavior gets in the way of them learning effectively in a classroom environment. Then there are ELL students who are still in the process of acquiring the language of instruction. Still then is the student with cerebral palsy, who along with another student in the class is being recommended by the classroom teacher to test for gifted. Overwhelmingly as a whole, however, the biggest difficulty is keeping the entire class focused and on-task. Following basic directions is also a struggle. I have been incorporating strategies along the way to address these issues, especially in the areas of behavior management, pacing, and accountability for directions. Moving forward though, I would like to work more on differentiating as much as possible in an attempt to enrich those students who may be feeling held back by their classmates and support those students who may feel things are moving too fast. While this is my main goal for the class, I do grow exceedingly worried about the pace through which we are required to go through the material in preparation for testing compared to the pace that would be necessary for most of the students in the class to achieve a level of mastery. My original frustration with this has been met with the reminder that as teachers, we are meant to be advocates for our students. Most of these students are already receiving accommodations for testing and interventions in the classroom on a daily basis, but as my collaborating teacher reminded me, it is our job to make sure they are receiving any accommodations that are available to them if they aren’t already. I want to maintain high expectations for all of my students, but in the case of students with exceptionalities beyond their control, I also want to ensure that my expectations are reasonable and that I am doing all I can to support these students in reaching their full potential. For me at the moment, my biggest goal is determining what exactly that support should be for each student.

Final Internship Blog Post #4

This week I had the opportunity to be a judge at the STEM Fair! In the category I judged, there were only 11 projects, so I really got an opportunity to interview all of the students in the category and see what their projects were about. The projects covered a range of topics from math to engineering. In an earlier course in our MAT program, we learned about science education and how to engage students in inquiry as we teach them how to be scientists, rather than simply memorizing content from a textbook. Part of this education includes debunking some myths that are pervasive worldwide among children and adults. As William McComas outlined in his 1996 article, Ten Myths of Science: Reexamining What We Think We Know, there are many misconceptions people have about science that teachers need to address in their instruction. The ten myths McComas identified are:

“Myth 1: Hypotheses Become Theories Which Become Laws”

“Myth 2: A Hypothesis is an Educated Guess”

“Myth 3: A General and Universal Scientific Method Exists”

“Myth 4: Evidence Accumulated Carefully Will Result in Sure Knowledge”

“Myth 5: Science and its Methods Provide Absolute Proof”

“Myth 6: Science Is Procedural More Than Creative”

“Myth 7: Science and its Methods Can Answer All Questions”

“Myth 8: Scientists are Particularly Objective”

“Myth 9: Experiments are the Principle Route to Scientific Knowledge”

“Myth 10: All Work in Science is Reviewed to Keep the Process Honest”

Through the conversations I had with students during the STEM Fair as they explained their projects, it appears that some of these myths have been debunked for the students by engaging in these projects while others were slightly perpetuated. Requiring students to support their hypotheses with an explanation based on their research relates to Myth 2, for example, that a hypothesis is an educated guess. McComas suggests that the term “hypothesis” is so vague in the way it has been used historically in the scientific community that it be eliminated from the lingo associated with the experiments students typically conduct and instead be replaced with the more accurate term, “prediction.” It isn’t as clear if Myth 3 is being perpetuated, but the judging requirements students have to meet for things such as their logs and data collection (i.e. number of trials) could possibly perpetuate the idea that a general and universal scientific method exists if they are not exposed to other significant ways of collecting data and presenting results. Having students explain their results and what they might have done differently though definitely addresses Myths 5, 6, and 7. In conversations with the students about how their results might have been different if they had changed certain factors or how they might have designed the project differently or how they still have more questions from their results to research, it became clear they are developing an understanding that science and its methods do not provide absolute proof, science is not more procedural than creative, and science and its methods cannot answer all questions.