Low Tech Isn't All Bad

When I started my practicum, I decided that I didn't want to be a chalk-and-talk teacher. I made powerpoint presentations for each of my lessons and used the technology at hand.

However, towards the end of my practicum, I realized that chalk isn't my enemy.  I learned to pull the projection screen up during the powerpoint, switch to chalk, and then go back the the powerpoint.

I have always fancied myself a bit of an artist, and as we've heard a picture is worth a thousand words. I used the chalkboard with increasing frequency to illustrate my thoughts and the students were really engaged by it.

I'm not saying you need to be an artist to be a good teacher, but sometimes a few lines on the board can make a concept go from muddy to clear.

The Flipped Classroom

What do you do with your apple stickers?

This is a clip from my favourite YouTube Channel, Scishow. If you want to keep getting smarter through the flipped classroom style, subscribe to their channel to learn about interesting science facts and current events.

The flipped classroom is a modern style of teach that delivers the instruction online and outside of the classroom and moving the "homework" or activities to the classroom.

I will likely not be able to apply this theory in my next practicum (depending on my associate teacher)  but I really like this idea. It is beneficial to students to really experience science rather than just learn it.

This teaching style allows more class time to be freed up for activities.

How Science Works

Holistic Education

This week I attended a PD session led by my peers on holistic education.

A leader in holistic education is Ron Miller; he's written a lot of books and even founded a journal on the subject. I went to find out what his definition of holistic education is, and he says it's essentially democratic education. In previous discussions democratic education has come up, but I didn't realize it was interconnected with holistic. 

The PD session consisted of a community circle, sitting on the floor with no pencils or books. We had various activities relating to communication (one of these was called telephone pictionary, I highly recommend it). 

It made me recall hearing about the democratic learning style used at A. S. Neil's Summerhill School. This schooling system is interesting to me, but I don't really know how well it can work on a larger scale. 

Continuing with Ron Miller's definition, he says it is concerned with individual freedom and social responsibility. In our session we had a lengthy discussion about the teacher's responsibility for helping the student develop their sense of self and building the classroom community. I noticed on my practicum that most students didn't even know their classmate's names and I think that's not a very nice environment at all. I think that more enjoyable a classroom is for a student, the better they will succeed at the course. Perhaps they might not be getting the validation from high grades, but they can get the validation from coming to the class every day and feeling welcomed. 

However, my favourite part of holistic education is Miller's final statement, "It is education for a culture of peace, for sustainability, and ecological literacym and for the development of humanity's inherent morality and spirituality. 

Just like the medicine wheel in Aboriginal culture, schools need to cater to the physical, emotional, spiritual and mental needs of the students. 

Too often we are too grade driven and we need to take a step back to see how these youths under our care will become adults in the future. 

Maybe they don't need a perfect GPA to be a perfect person. 

What Teachers Make

The Wheable Frame of Mind

I was placed into the adult education program at Wheable. I got put into this slot because my traditional high school placement backed out, and I was initially worried that these would be the stereotypical students that the system rejected because of behaviour and I was pleasantly surprised by how wrong I was. Do I regret being placed there? No. Would I have chosen it? No. However, I think I really benefited from this experience in adult education instead of a traditional placement.

Honestly, I'm not complaining. I seriously loved it. I've learned a lot about different teaching styles, how to teach to a varied group, and certain things to be sensitive about with new immigrants and ESL students (such as an innocent remark, "I'm sure you've all been to the optometrist, so let's talk about lenses" could possibly offend some students if they have never had that opportunity).

The teachers at Wheable are all really nice, but because of the limited schedule of the courses, they have to really compress some units. In addition, they have to teach certain pieces of courses in different ways. For instance, because they don't have a grade 9 science course, in the grade 10 science they teach the grade 9 ecology instead of teaching the grade 10 climate change unit. They really have to focus on material that will be covered in the next grade in order to prepare them, and some of the course content gets cut. For instance, the physics unit in grade 10 is typically cut short because optics and light isn't mentioned again until university. Whether or not this is an advantage to the students remains to be seen. The other things that gets cut in Wheable is trying new teaching techniques. They simply don't have time to learn science through inquiry, which is disappointing to me since I've had it mentioned in several of my classes at Althouse.

So yes, Wheable has some good things. The people are great, it's interesting to see the different audience and learning how to cater to a very diverse spread of students is a unique challenge. The fact that the students are adults can either be good, or teachers can use it as a crutch saying, "They're adults, they can do what they want". 

Wheable opened my eyes up a lot, and that shock factor was really valuable. I got both of my teachables (which is a blessing and a curse) but honestly it's more of a realistic job experience. It's going to be tough, you get little to no prep time, and you don't find out which courses you'll be teaching until a week ahead so stay on your toes!

My Typical Lesson Plan

I realize that my lesson plans became quite monotonous, but it was my first try and I realize now that I can really use some differentiation.

This is the general way that my classes at Wheable went;

-Catch class's attention
-Ask questions about yesterday's lesson
-Start new powerpoint

Each student had a fill-in the blanks sheet based on the slides that they could fill in.

I found that this was really handy so you can move through a lot of content quickly, but sometimes I changed the order of my slides shortly before the lesson and then the sheets wouldn't match up. It caused a lot of undue stress and confusion.

-Ask questions during powerpoint (some slider were exact repeats from previous lessons in order to drill in important vocabulary)
-Introduce activity (i.e microscope lab, computer lab, or cut and paste activity)
-Walk around the class as students work on the activity

In the SBIO3U class we had a lot of labs because the plants unit is the only time they get to use the microscopes in the course so they needed practice. I really enjoyed these labs because I taught them how to take photos using their smart phones, and I thought it was a really cool integration of a technology that most teachers don’t allow in the classroom.

-Write vocabulary words on the board (the students get these every day and had a book to write the words and definitions in)
-Assign homework activities
-Announcements and clean up

If you have any tips or suggestions on how to make my classes more differentiated, please feel free to comment!