Today I was able to go and observe a morning at the Calgary Science School. Calgary Science School is a charter school with a mandate to present education in a way that is new and research based. Spending the morning at the school really showed me how my philosophy could be applied in a school setting.
Here are some of the things I observed (sorry the video is so long, I tried to shorten it, there were just so many exciting things going on):
So I’ve completed my internship at Estevan Comprehensive High School and man was that a blast! Internship was such a challenging, rewarding, revealing process and I was able to grow so much in such a short time. This semester I’m sticking around Estevan and subbing while finishing up my final class for my Education degree.
It was thinking about project ideas for my final class that I started thinking back to the different units I taught in Physics and Chemistry this last semester. I was trying to think hard about what types of learning opportunities worked the best…did some work better than others?…is there one type of approach that works best? I came to the conclusion that there is more than one way to teach something however what I found for myself is that when I really focused on student engagement at the beginning of the concept they seemed to have a better handle on it in the end.
The engaging activities I used usually took the form of something that at first looked like it had nothing to do with science (I think that was part of the reason my students seemed so engaged). There was no better example of this seemingly unrelated engagement than our unit on chemical kinetics…
I began by showing the first couple minutes of this video:
We didn’t watch this video all the way through. We stopped when the narrator pulled out his construction hat and was about to redesign the school. I wanted my students to understand their purpose (getting students to collide) and how they could accomplish this thinking for themselves.
We branched out into groups, students were contractors for an hour, and they designed floor plans for schools where there would be a high likelihood to get a date to a dance. It gave me goosebumps seeing the different ideas that groups had…and the things they were coming up with were synonymous with the different ways we could speed chemical reactions.
When we watched the rest of the video at the end, and tied what we did to chemistry, students were already confident with the idea and we had a good place to start for our study of chemical kinetics. The rest of the unit was never boring as we were constantly making reference, in some form or another, to relationships both in the real world and in chemistry. We came out of chemical kinetics with a good understanding of the important concepts…and I don’t think anyone in the class ended up going to the next dance without a date.
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