Working Theory of Practice Page 1
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Being so close in age with your students is challenging for many beginning teachers, yet I have found that this fact about me is beneficial to my own teaching, for I have been able to put myself in the place of the student as I’m lesson planning and even as I’m delivering my lesson. In the very beginning, I found that when I reflected on my own teaching and put myself in the mind of one of my own students, I was bored. I was following a lecture-classwork formula mainly because that’s what I was used to doing and seeing at the time. However, if I’m bored just thinking about myself teaching, the students must be nearly falling out of their seats with boredom during my lessons. This defeated one of my main purposes in teaching, because above all, I want students to see that science can be more than just facts to memorize or data tables to label. Science can be fun, and interesting, while still being based in content. Therefore, I decided to try to switch things up a bit.
At the same point and time, in my Science methods class, we were talking a lot about student-centered as opposed to teacher-centered learning in the form of inquiry. Llewellyn (2005) states that a traditional classroom is very teacher-centered: it is very lecture based, and students answer the teacher’s questions, who then deems whether the answers are right or not. On the other hand, inquiry-based classrooms are much more student-centered: students create their own projects and figure out answers on their own or in groups, instead of having the teacher directly deliver the content (Llewellyn, 2005, Strange, 2012). Therefore, to try to fix my boredom problem, I wanted to try to incorporate more student-based learning into my classroom to take more of the focus off of me, and to give students a chance to grapple with the material on their own.
Being so close in age with your students is challenging for many beginning teachers, yet I have found that this fact about me is beneficial to my own teaching, for I have been able to put myself in the place of the student as I’m lesson planning and even as I’m delivering my lesson. In the very beginning, I found that when I reflected on my own teaching and put myself in the mind of one of my own students, I was bored. I was following a lecture-classwork formula mainly because that’s what I was used to doing and seeing at the time. However, if I’m bored just thinking about myself teaching, the students must be nearly falling out of their seats with boredom during my lessons. This defeated one of my main purposes in teaching, because above all, I want students to see that science can be more than just facts to memorize or data tables to label. Science can be fun, and interesting, while still being based in content. Therefore, I decided to try to switch things up a bit.
At the same point and time, in my Science methods class, we were talking a lot about student-centered as opposed to teacher-centered learning in the form of inquiry. Llewellyn (2005) states that a traditional classroom is very teacher-centered: it is very lecture based, and students answer the teacher’s questions, who then deems whether the answers are right or not. On the other hand, inquiry-based classrooms are much more student-centered: students create their own projects and figure out answers on their own or in groups, instead of having the teacher directly deliver the content (Llewellyn, 2005, Strange, 2012). Therefore, to try to fix my boredom problem, I wanted to try to incorporate more student-based learning into my classroom to take more of the focus off of me, and to give students a chance to grapple with the material on their own.