Progressively Presenting

Being a part of a jigsaw group helped me realize how positive of a tool it can be in a classroom. By setting up groups in such a way, students learn both individual accountability, but also how to work with a partner and in a larger group. It also ensures that no one single person becomes accountable for all the work. Furthermore, I've noticed in our social studies methods class that these groups serve as a median point for presenting. We first presented to the class about ourselves, a topic we already knew very well and were comfortable with, and then presented to our smaller jigsaw groups on a topic we were not previously familiar with. This sort of build up of presentations can help ease the nerves of students who are not comfortable speaking in front of the class by slowly challenging them and increasing their confidence. Presenting should be something students become comfortable with as they will likely be faced with the task of presenting many times in their academic career, as well as professionally later on in life. 

Creating Mystery

The "Mystery Bag" experiment was definitely an interesting way to introduce the scientific process. Not only did it give us a chance as a class to reintroduce ourselves to science, but it could be used for a variety of topics in and out of a science lesson. The mystery bag lesson could be used to introduce students to the process of observing, hypothesizing, predicting, and carrying out an experiment. It could also be used to introduce a new topic in science by including items relevant to the topic and having students hypothesize and predict both what items are in the bag, but what they will be learning next. The activity could also be adapted to use as an activity for students to get to know each other. Each student could place items in the bag they thought represented themselves, and exchange bags with another person, who then had to decide what those items said about their classmate. Overall the mystery bag activity was insightful both in the context of science, as well as how else it could be used in the classroom.

Teaching to Question

The first chapter of our textbook brought up a point I had never thought about before. The text spoke about creating scientifically literate citizens, not just students. Teaching young students, it almost feels strange to realize that what they learn in class will be carried with them throughout their life, even after their academic career has ended. Although, as I though about the idea of what it means to be a "scientifically literate" citizen, I realized that much of what I learned as a young student still influenced everything from my current viewpoints and even my college major. For example, were it not for my first grade teacher, I may have never fully realized how incredible of a tool my writing can be in my life; if it weren't for my sixth grade social studies teacher, I may not be as aware of my impact on my environment as I am today; and if it weren't for my eighth grade Spanish teacher, I would not be so inspired to have the opportunity to teach students. 

The idea of being scientifically literate as a citizen made me think about the issue of global warming. While global warming is an accepted fact by many people, it is important that students and citizens learn not to take everything they hear as fact. By encouraging students to think, question, and research or experiment as scientists do, they can carry that into their lives outside of the classroom. This means that they will learn to question information presented to them as either fact or fiction, do their research, and make their own informed decision on the topic. 

The word cloud I included at the top of this post included many of the words that I thought should be associated with science, in and out of the classroom. "Informed" and "knowledge" are two of the words that seemed to associate themselves with the idea of a scientifically literate citizen as was described earlier. As citizens, students should keep themselves informed and be knowledgeable about the world and whats going on around them.