Introduction
In Robert Zemeckis’ famous movie, Forrest Gump, Forrest says “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.” In light of this portfolio, I would like to modify that quote. Instead of “life,” insert “teaching,” and that basically summarizes my student teaching experience from the very beginning.
I began teaching the way most teachers do: by teaching what they know. In my case, the majority of my science education had been in lecture format, so that is how I set out to teach. The only problem was that I got bored really quickly. And if I was bored, my students must have been nearly falling out of their seats. Furthermore, judging by their glazed over faces, I did not think that many of them were “absorbing” the material that I was teaching.
Retention, or the ability to remember material at some later time, is one of the ultimate goals a teacher has for his or her students. In fact, Herbert & Bert (2004) did a study on how students learn content material, and found that at first, the students remember information specifically, however over time, this knowledge is schematized, and the knowledge shifts from being sheer fact to being more conceptual, general knowledge. Therefore, if I can get students to retain information more when it is delivered, they will more likely be able to transfer this information and apply it to their everyday lives.
Yet it seemed that by lecturing, I was not helping the students reach this goal (Mayer, 2002). I realized I needed another strategy.
I then thought back to my own science education and realized that all of the information that I learned in lectures is far gone; that space in my mind that should have been reserved for mitosis and covalent bonding instead contains high-caliber doodling skills. The memories that do stick, however, are the ones in which we were learning the material through different activities. For example, images of my classmates and I walking around the classroom in our molecule personas to demonstrate equilibrium stick to this day, and I still remember when my biology class made paper bunnies and mated them to show how Mendelian Genetics worked. Not only do I remember these activities, but I also remember the content material behind them. Maybe that was the key—in order to help my students retain the material, I had to deliver it in a manner that made sense to them and that they would remember years afterwards.
I began teaching the way most teachers do: by teaching what they know. In my case, the majority of my science education had been in lecture format, so that is how I set out to teach. The only problem was that I got bored really quickly. And if I was bored, my students must have been nearly falling out of their seats. Furthermore, judging by their glazed over faces, I did not think that many of them were “absorbing” the material that I was teaching.
Retention, or the ability to remember material at some later time, is one of the ultimate goals a teacher has for his or her students. In fact, Herbert & Bert (2004) did a study on how students learn content material, and found that at first, the students remember information specifically, however over time, this knowledge is schematized, and the knowledge shifts from being sheer fact to being more conceptual, general knowledge. Therefore, if I can get students to retain information more when it is delivered, they will more likely be able to transfer this information and apply it to their everyday lives.
Yet it seemed that by lecturing, I was not helping the students reach this goal (Mayer, 2002). I realized I needed another strategy.
I then thought back to my own science education and realized that all of the information that I learned in lectures is far gone; that space in my mind that should have been reserved for mitosis and covalent bonding instead contains high-caliber doodling skills. The memories that do stick, however, are the ones in which we were learning the material through different activities. For example, images of my classmates and I walking around the classroom in our molecule personas to demonstrate equilibrium stick to this day, and I still remember when my biology class made paper bunnies and mated them to show how Mendelian Genetics worked. Not only do I remember these activities, but I also remember the content material behind them. Maybe that was the key—in order to help my students retain the material, I had to deliver it in a manner that made sense to them and that they would remember years afterwards.