Some wonder what a week looks like for me. Here’s an example of what a week from a full takeover looks like with all six sections of earth science and my 150 students:

On Monday and Tuesday I teach the same thing just to different sections and I had the students create a vocabulary exploration to words such as: telescope, reflecting telescope, refracting telescope, gravity, early astronomer, modern astronomer, KECK observatory, Ptolemaic Theory, and Copernican Revolution. The students folded two sheets of paper in order to have 8 squares and the point was on one side we took M/T where the students work independently and created their own definitions to these words. It was so great to see the kids create definitions on their own, without seeing the actual definition of pictures of the words. I wanted to see where the students were individually at and how deep their exposure to astronomy is. I loved watching the students go from “how can we do this we know nothing about it!” to “wait actually if I don’t know what a reflecting telescope is, I can break down the word and figure out it!” Their confidence was through the roof, and overall I was impressed with how well they did and how much they know (even if they were educated guesses). On Wednesday we reviewed the vocabulary terms and what the real definitions were. This allowed the students to compare their answers to the real answers and see how close or off they were and correct any mistakes/add to their definitions. On Thursday and Friday I had the students practice completing projects/presentations in groups. I want the classroom to be a student directed classroom where they are organizing information and collecting the information for answers they want to answer. I offered more guidance for this lesson as it was the first project they were completing in science. The students were in groups of 3-4 and were assigned an early or modern astronomer (Ptolemy, Copernicus, Brache, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Hubble) and were to create a poster presentation they will be presenting to the class on Monday/Tuesday. This allows the students to teach the class on their astronomer, as they are “experts” on their assigned astronomer. Each group was required to come up with a critical thinking question, which the class will be required to individually answer at the end of the presentation. This incorporated methods we have discussed in our methods courses from junior year. I allowed the students to decide how they wanted to organize the information on their presentation and asked they include the name, date of birth and death, whether he was an early or modern astronomer, what his biggest contribution was to science, 2-3 interesting facts, and a critical thinking question. The students collaborated in groups while I walked around and checked in on them, answered questions groups had, and overall was pleased and surprised with how well they did as this was their first time working in such large groups with me!

It seems chaotic, scary, and overwhelming at first. It took me a while to get so comfortable with being this flexible and interactive. Student teaching is totally the time to experiment with as many lessons, activities, units, and standards to get a feel for how you will want to implement things in your classroom.

Ms. P