Category: College teaching
-
Transformative Teaching
Today I had occasion to remember one of the best adult teaching experiences of my career. I was working as an adjunct at Cal State Northridge while I was ABD. I taught a combined math and science methods class for prospective bilingual teachers. My experience teaching elementary mathematics was using the Montessori method, pretty much…
-
reflection on today’s science and math pedagogy class
For the last 6 weeks I’ve been teaching a 6-hour face to face class on Saturdays to a group of pre-service teachers in an MAT program and in-service teachers getting advanced degrees. This has been brutal for everyone concerned, to say the least. I’ve had to pare down my expectations because after about 4 hours…
-
learning through discussion. what does it mean?
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a week or so. I had occasion recently to visit a student teacher in a 7th grade life science class. The topic for the day was sexual and asexual reproduction. The lesson started out with a Brain Pop video. The plan was for a “class discussion” and…
-
What is teaching? What is online teaching?
The other day someone asked me to provide an example of my “online teaching.” I explained some of the online assignments I’ve given, but the person continued, “No, I mean teaching.” It took me a few seconds to comprehend the question, that she was asking if I put my lectures online, or annotated videos. I…
-
Teaching about classroom management
This has always been puzzling to me. There are many “systems” and methods, but I’ve never been able to get to the heart of the matter in a way that satisfied me and helped my students. Then this semester I was observing a student teacher in his first placement. I’ll call him Mike. Mike had…
-
balancing equations: algebra v. chemistry
Yesterday in our content pedagogy class, we were talking about key ways of thinking in the disciplines, which we called signature pedagogies. A proposal for a signature pedagogy brought up by a chemistry teacher included balancing equations. One of the high school math teachers suggested that balancing equations is a concept in algebra also. The…
-
Teaching research methodology
This is a blog post I made after class, which started out as an email to a student who had to be absent. Like most successful students, she views the purpose of class as imparting information and asked me what information she had missed. Part of my role as an instructor is to pry students’…
-
Science Education for All. I Mean it: Each and All
I’m reading Larry Cuban’s new book, Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice, which has a chapter on the history of science education reform. (Note the subtitle, Change without Reform in American Education.) He quotes Jonathan Osborne, who points out that the goals of science education appear to be contradictory. Are we aiming to produce…
-
Co-Teaching Physical Science for Teachers
Last night Rosalie facilitated a lecture-discussion on heat, developing students’ ideas about energy transfer and how to do problems. I noticed a couple of times students gave the "right" answer, but when Rosalie probed further, the students didn’t really understand what they were talking about. It would have been easy to accept the correct answer…