Session 1 Reflection

Hi there,
I have decided to also keep a journal that keeps track of my experiences as a teacher educator working in this unit with you. You can read my thoughts about how i teach and my responses to the sessions as well as how i use these thoughts to inform my teaching. It is a way of 'thinking aloud' with you that is not always possible to do in class. Often too, I find that I come to understand more about my teaching AFTER a session and so through a blog like this i can consider some issues in more detail, and in a less hurried way than in a class - and learn from them. I invite you to share your thoughts with me - post a response to what i have written - i am very interested to know about your thoughts about your experiences of the unit. Maybe you can create your own blog (and use it for your journal assessment task) and link it to this one. Up to you.

Anyway. TODAY. So many things to introduce: the unit, us, a teaching approach (POE), some science content (how things fall), the camp, each other. The plan was to give you an opportunity to start to think about teaching and learning science by having a chance to participate in an experience of learning science, together. Rather than tell you about a POE, we chose to put you in the learner's seat of experiencing one!

The whole session felt very fast to me. In fact, quite amazingly fast for 3 hours. (I wonder whether that will be the same for you at camp on friday with year 8's?) However, I am also conscious that how the teacher experiences the class is not necessarily the same as how the students experience the class...So, how did the time feel for you today? Were you feeling like the time went quickly, or not?

Afterwards, I also felt a little concerned that perhaps some people might have left without a sense of 'closure'. Perhaps you might have wanted to spend more time talking about the science of the ball drop (could you explain the science of what happened in those 2 events today? really??) or about how a POE works (for instance what's important about each of the bits of a P-O-E, if you want it to work well?). Something I can do in the next sessions is to 'check in with' class members to see how they are going - what they need more/less of in order to feel like they are making progress with their learning. As a teacher, it is easy to forget what it is like when things are new for students and how you need time to process what is going on.

Teaching is complex work that requires a great deal of decision making. Today we had to make some decisions about getting started with you- that engaged you with the ideas of the unit straight away. What we/I did may or may not have been helpful for your learning. How you experienced the class is very important in thinking about how your students will experience your classes. Sharing experiences is one way to start to learn a little more about the learning that is going on.

mandi