We have been at school now for a little over a month and although I’m managing to keep\u00a0my head above water, I’m in a perpetual state of near drowning most of the time. \u00a0This year I’ve been working so hard on modifying my lessons to make them more inquiry based and real-world relevant that I haven’t had time to do any grading, calling parents, or the myriad of other teacher-tasks I need to accomplish. \u00a0This is my fifth year of teaching so I do have backup plans from last year – pretty good ones, if I do say so myself – but I just don’t want to use them anymore because I’ve been loving the new ones too much (and I think my students have too).<\/p>\n
I’ve spent my career thus far working towards the goal of inquiry based instruction. \u00a0My first year I thought I did a pretty good job, but looking back I realize that a lot of my activities weren’t true inquiry. \u00a0Just because it’s a lab doesn’t mean it’s inquiry. \u00a0I’ve been working in subsequent years – and this year in particular – to get my students generating more of their own questions to start\u00a0our investigations. \u00a0For example, I\u00a0put the finishing touches on my macromolecule PBL lesson. \u00a0I generated a small inquiry investigation for enzymes. \u00a0I also have been using padlet to spark class discussions and as a formative assessment tool. I’ve been surveying my students to collect their perception data and have been using it to inform my instruction.<\/p>\n
All of these things have made me more excited about teaching and my students excited about learning. \u00a0And based on the perception surveys as well as my formative\/summative assessment data, my students have been growing in their scientific skills (microscope skills, graphing, problem solving) and learning what I intended them to learn.<\/p>\n
Although I may be as organized, accomplished or prepared so far this year as I would like, I’m loving my job and I know I’m improving as an educator everyday. \u00a0Here’s to gearing up to implement my internship lesson plans!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We have been at school now for a little over a month and although I’m managing to keep\u00a0my head above water, I’m in a perpetual state of near drowning most of the time. \u00a0This year I’ve been working so hard<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":460,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2017-acrowell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2017-acrowell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2017-acrowell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2017-acrowell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/460"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2017-acrowell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2017-acrowell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65,"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2017-acrowell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions\/65"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2017-acrowell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2017-acrowell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2017-acrowell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}