Skip to main content

Teaching Reflection 1


I am trying to more pastoral this year. I have always had a short fuse for some behavior, or at least, “I do not suffer fools gladly” as a good friend told me once. Maybe not the best character trait in this profession, but I am working on it. One other thing that may make me less empathetic than is required, is that I think people need to learn many things for themselves, often through mistakes. I tend to let students make their own decisions and see if they do learn, but the Consequences Reflection is for another day.

I have a student who raised his hand the first day when I asked – half in jest – who was going to cause me trouble over the course of the year. He proudly announced there would be times when his fidgeting got him in trouble. His charming admission had an effect on me, but now we are getting serious. His grades are poor and I have had to speak to him many times, not about disruption but a lack of focus and resulting poor grades. I returned a test today which was again poor and was quite quickly disappointed by his childish sulky behavior. I took a few, required, breaths before engaging with him. I told him I was here to help, and would do so, but current wallowing behavior like this was not going to do ANYONE any favors. I suppose baby steps are required for me, just as they are with him.

So how am I designing my instruction to meet the needs of my students? Well honestly, not any differently to how I was last year, when it may not have been at the fore front of my mind. Time is at a premium this year like never before, with both of us teaching, both in Masters Programs, and little Tommy approaching 7 months but I hope to be more aware of it and work harder at it in future.

In the current Bio classes I am working on enzymes and have the students playing games and quizzes in a simple app, we extracted the key words from the app ‘blurb’ which students wrote up, and one enterprising student even put them into a quizlet which we played as a class as quizlet live. (If you have not used quizlet live in your class yet, get on it!) I will have an experiment or two with food stuffs and how enzymes work and the factors required for optimal function soon also. All of this will be in conjunction with my usual Powerpoint and some use of the eBook. Now that I write this, it feels to cover the multi modal engagement and presentation quite well. I do think my use of many ways of having student express knowledge needs some work though.

But will it be enough for Student X whom I spoke about up top?
We will wait and see…

Thanks

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Framing Reading; Semantic Maps

Framing our Reading – Vocab Mod 6 Liam Breathnach The three words I chose were endocrinologist, genome and variant. They were all included in an article on how genetics influences height.   The article linked here, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170201131513.htm details how genes are linked to height and how we may learn from, and influence this in future. There are many reasons I chose the word endocrinologist. Its length goes against it initially but it is a great example to show how we can break up words in to sections to get to the meaning. Teaching the word we can expand biological vocabulary and talk about prefixes such as hemo_, and group words like pulmonary, renal, cardiac which pertain to body parts. There is also an opportunity to teach about the various specialized medical professionals you may encounter such as oncologists. The lesson could even stretch to scientists in other fields, such as ecologist or botanists.     ...
7 comments
Read more

Teaching the Genetics of Height and its Implications

Teaching the Genetics of Height and its Implications This week Yetunde and I stayed with the area of genetics. We chose this article https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170201131513.htm from the website Science Daily.   We chose this article as it is cutting edge and can be used to serve as a template for future studies of polygenic traits. The topic of height is also likely to be at the forefront of the minds of many of our students and will therefore have added relevance. We decided to stay with genetics for a number of reasons. It is a large part of the Biology course. We can show our students that Biology is always learning and changing, and I have found that students are fascinated by the power and influence of genetics. I was immediately interested by the article. I have always liked to know facts and dimensions and always wanted to be tall. That I am a centimeter taller than anyone else in my family is still a source of some (childish) pride! Any reflectio...
3 comments
Read more

Teaching a reading lesson on Mutations...

Ed 620 Framing Our Reading Mod 5 Yetunde and I stayed with genetics this week choosing an article linked here https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170419091616.htm from the website www.sciencedaily.com . The article is very interesting. The headline is an attention grabber, certainly in the all-boys school I am in. The word mutant is going to grab their attention. The overall concept throughout the article is good too. On initial reading, students might just get stuck on the idea that we can manipulate DNA in wasps, but there is the underlying idea which can be drawn from them - If this works there are endless possibilities with the CRISPR technology. There are many attractive things about the article. It does give the teacher an opportunity to review or teach about the life cycle of insects to some extent. An easy conversation would be why lots of these type of experiments are done on insects. You would expect to hear about cost and accessibility, but you could hav...
1 comment
Read more