Next 5 Years
One of my short terms goals is to have more open communication between my colleagues. Currently one teacher does the math lessons and I contribute with a couple of the weekly worksheets while I am solely responsible with the science plans. I want to have weekly meeting with the other two math and science teachers so that we can plan both math and science together so that it is not just one person’s responsibility and so that we have a mixture of ideas for our students. Part of this goal is to also have once a week block integrating math and science with a project that the students have the full math and science time in class to work on. I believe the 6th grade team will be more solid next school year (one teacher left in October and there wasn’t a replacement until February) which will make planning easier. We now all have a better grasp of the math and science content and standards so next year planning can be devoted to coming up with projects. We can spend less time just trying to understand what content we need to teach and more time on how the students can show mastery of the content through high order culminating projects that integrates more than one subject.
I am going to the NGSS network meetings at Loyola and learning about the NGSS standards which is helping me change how I teach science. My goal is to help my 6th grade colleagues change over to the NGSS standards and teach science outside of the book with more experiments, demonstrations, and more of having the students talk about what they are observing and learning. The other 6th grade teachers were fearful of giving up their textbooks, but I think by seeing the evidence of my classes’ experiments from pictures and drawings it was easier for them to follow along. I see the evidence that the other teachers in 6th grade are doing more experiments and demonstrations and less of textbook readings. The other NGSS lead teacher is a 5th grade teacher and is helping her team change their ideas about how science should look like (again less textbook). Our administration is supportive of having us provide professional development during our teacher institute days on NGSS and science. This will benefit my goal of having the rest of our school implement NGSS into their science lessons and move more towards demonstrations and experiments. My school and current network is not purchasing new curriculum or materials for science, which will make teachers fearful of moving away from our textbooks but I think that if my colleagues see that if we share resources and ask students to bring items it will be worth the money we do spend. Teachers have peeked into my class during experiments (sometimes it was because I was burning school down) but they always had positive comments about what they saw and mentioned how they wanted to do those things in their class as well. I hope that I can help show them as I learn more about teaching this way.
This year has been difficult. New grade level, new science standards, unstable team, more paperwork and micromanaging, but it all helped me be more easygoing in my science lessons. I realize that it is okay for lessons to fail because I am the one making up the units. I can spend more time on something that I want to make sure the students grasp instead of spending the time covering as many concepts as I can. I accept that I may not cover everything, but what I cover I want to make sure the students understand and I can test the students on their understanding however I want- a project, a design, written… I am ready to abandon the fear of what administration will think or what the students’ tests will look like. If the students are learning and happy and I am learning and happy then all is great.
I am going to the NGSS network meetings at Loyola and learning about the NGSS standards which is helping me change how I teach science. My goal is to help my 6th grade colleagues change over to the NGSS standards and teach science outside of the book with more experiments, demonstrations, and more of having the students talk about what they are observing and learning. The other 6th grade teachers were fearful of giving up their textbooks, but I think by seeing the evidence of my classes’ experiments from pictures and drawings it was easier for them to follow along. I see the evidence that the other teachers in 6th grade are doing more experiments and demonstrations and less of textbook readings. The other NGSS lead teacher is a 5th grade teacher and is helping her team change their ideas about how science should look like (again less textbook). Our administration is supportive of having us provide professional development during our teacher institute days on NGSS and science. This will benefit my goal of having the rest of our school implement NGSS into their science lessons and move more towards demonstrations and experiments. My school and current network is not purchasing new curriculum or materials for science, which will make teachers fearful of moving away from our textbooks but I think that if my colleagues see that if we share resources and ask students to bring items it will be worth the money we do spend. Teachers have peeked into my class during experiments (sometimes it was because I was burning school down) but they always had positive comments about what they saw and mentioned how they wanted to do those things in their class as well. I hope that I can help show them as I learn more about teaching this way.
This year has been difficult. New grade level, new science standards, unstable team, more paperwork and micromanaging, but it all helped me be more easygoing in my science lessons. I realize that it is okay for lessons to fail because I am the one making up the units. I can spend more time on something that I want to make sure the students grasp instead of spending the time covering as many concepts as I can. I accept that I may not cover everything, but what I cover I want to make sure the students understand and I can test the students on their understanding however I want- a project, a design, written… I am ready to abandon the fear of what administration will think or what the students’ tests will look like. If the students are learning and happy and I am learning and happy then all is great.