Right now I would love to say that I feel that I have a great deal of influence outside of my classroom. I feel that I have some influence but not as much as I strive to possess. I am one who juggles many things daily as I am sure most people do. I am not only a teacher I am a mother, wife, coach and graduate student. That is a lot to juggle. I feel that I do a good job on all accounts but would love to spend more time in each aspect of my life. I do not feel that any part of my responsibilities has fallen to the wayside but I could do more if there were only more time.
I collaborate on a weekly basis with the other science teachers in my department. With that being said it may be just sharing what we are planning on for the week. other times we sit down to come up with lab activities. This is when I feel that we are really making strides in the collaboration department.
One area that I would like to focus on in the near future is being able to talk with the elementary teachers and high school teachers. We could sit down and discuss what we felt the students needed to know and be able to when they enter our classrooms. This would help out the students and it would make it easier on each teacher. We could focus more on inquiry and not just the basics. There are often times that students walk into my room and they do not have the basic skills in order to be involved in the lab activities. I spend the first 6-9 weeks going over what they should already have an understanding of so we can work effectively in the lab. I have been in the elementary setting and I know that they are pushed to focus more on reading and math. If we could spend more time in the other subject areas then the students would have the potential to more motivated and willing to expand on their previous experiences.
Shannon,
ReplyDeleteWe are pretty busy women! Like you, juggling everything at the moment is not necessarily allowing me to do the things that I would like to focus more on. TIME... I just need more time... but the sun rotates less than 24 hours and no more. That's all we have so what do we do?
One thing that you mentioned made me think of what I am doing with the Elementary and High School teachers at my school. I am the secondary schools head of department for sciences, so my professional goal this year is to attend curriculum meetings with grade level teachers at the Elementary levels before they begin their science units throughout the school year. I help them with assessments and the grade level appropriate understandings the students need.
Being on the Science Curriculum team, I developed a document which may also be helpful for you. It was a scientific skills list by grade level science units. Each of the Elementary teachers, middle school (me) and high school science teachers filled in this chart so that we could see what skills were being taught at each grade level.
One thing that we have discussed is the importance of these skills in learning the content needed to be successful. For example the Pre-Kindergarten students can collect weather data on a weather chart with guidance from the teacher, but by middle school they will already know what kind of data they should collect when designing their own labs and by high school students begin to discuss uncertainties and standard deviation in their data sets. So the progression of skills will help them throughout the years. We have also created a curriculum map based on strands of science which has helped us to see that we really need to build up on our Earth sciences which I will try to put more in the middle school curriculum and physical sciences more in the Elementary level. If you would like to see any of this information we have gathered, just let me know.
Janice