First Month Reflections

This week I was not at Wickiup because I was on my honeymoon in Hawaii.  However, I had a couple long plane flights to reflect on the summer externship experience thus far, and I was able to think of a couple ways that this experience might result in changes to my classroom and my teaching style that could benefit my students.  

While I admit that seismic changes in my classroom may not result from this experience, there are a number of unique experiences this summer that will cause me to re-evaluate practices in my classroom.  I think that if anything, the need for work and learning outside the classroom has been brought into focus during my experience at Wickiup Hill this summer.  It seems to me that students just learn better and retain information in a more reliable way when they can attach their learning to a discrete experience, rather than to a story they’ve read in a book or a dry description a teacher might read off of a powerpoint presentation. 

I will certainly put more emphasis on out-of-classroom learning.  Last school year, I held class outside of the classroom only on one or two occasions.  This year, I plan to take students outside more often, especially during the ecology units of both my environmental science classes and pre-AP biology classes.  I believe it’s important for them to learn how water quality is studied, and what types of things can be learned by monitoring the water quality.  I’m hoping that they will be able to place themselves in the role of scientific detectives, gathering and analyzing the available evidence to make a claim about a water quality value, whether good or bad.

To address the second part of the blog post question, my students may not realize that anything has changed, because these students I have this fall won’t be the same that I had last year.  But to the spirit of the question, I imagine that the students will notice the amount of inquiry instruction will have increased when compared to my instruction last year.  I will have expanded latitude in developing lessons that utilize inquiry at their cores, especially as I pick up several sections of environmental science skills classes.

Through my experience this summer at Wickiup, I believe I’ve been inspired to try new methods of differentiation in my classroom.  Real world experiences allow students to reach the same concept from different angles.  By combing inquiry instruction with various mediums used in direct instruction, more students may eventually understand the important underlying concepts.  

Since I teach a good number of students living in a fairly urban area, getting outside for things like water testing may give these students a better sense of context when learning about environmental issues.  If the “environment” or “nature” is not an experience you’ve had, it might be easier to dismiss practices like recycling and other environmentally conscious practices.  However, if you’ve spent time in nature, experienced it in a positive way, you might be more likely to pay attention to classroom discussions of environmental protection, etc.