Final Exam

1. Personal vision for schooling in 21st century
In schools, I would like to see: student activities that are engaging and meaningful, and learning that is connected with real life; students feeling part of a community, with respectful and strong social relationships among them; students who feel their time in school in valuable to them; their learning gives them skills in problem-solving, social interactions, literacy and numeracy, and ability to critique and reason.

2. One action to implement this semester...
To frequently connect the science content with students' lives and the real world, and to make the subject matter up to date by highlighting recent discoveries and technologies. This can be done right away, by doing discrepant event demonstrations, and using simulations and online resources to engage students.

3. One action to implement during first two years...
I will aim to make much of science learning inquiry-based, not just in the context of labs but in the instructional classroom setting too. In chem labs, tasks are often too 'cook book' - a given procedure on a given unit topic. I hope to be able to shake things up, and blend content areas in more open ended questions and investigations. To develop inquiry-based approach across the whole of the chemistry syllabus is a longer term development process, because it will require collaborations with other teachers, agreement from administrators, etc.

4. Action later in career...
Looking longer term, I will become an advocate for change in school structure. I would like to see a shake up in the school system in all areas (schedule, classroom set-up, relationships between teachers in different content areas, assessment procedures, teaching methods) so that student experiences of school - their activities, relationships with other students and staff, and their learning - are not separated and remote from the outside world, but which enhance it. As bell hooks states "an attempt to create conditions for young people for becoming active participants in a changing society".

5. Each of these three timelines are connected with a desire to see change in schools, or 'reform in secondary education', away from the traditional, separated- subject approach commonly practiced. The idea of 'powerful teaching' is the link between all three. The short timeline (this semester) is a change that incorporates more powerful teaching (student-centered, inquiry-based learning, linking across content areas), this connects with the mid range timeline (two years) that develops powerful teaching by making a large component of the curriculum inquiry-based and connecting content areas in interdisciplinary thematic units, and finally the longer timeline of making these approached dominant in the school, this requires restructuring of the school as a whole.

Reading Reflection 6 - Michael Noble: Change Agent

When I am observing in a high-school, I often have thoughts that many of the activities going on there are irrelevant and boring. Content is approached with a eye to the standardized test, to get through the standards, chapter by chapter, unit by unit, disconnection and awful tedium. Occasionally, I see an activity that students get excited about, but only occasionally. Another feature I see is no continuity - units come and go, students worry about the grade for that unit assessment and then move onto the next.

The biggest positive that I have seen was students getting excited in an inquiry-based activity - when you do these activities you see that students want to use their prior knowledge and figure things out for themselves. They don't just want to be told stuff and write it down to regurgitate it later on. I want to try to make science learning for students inquiry-based as often as possible. Even if the activity is just class discussion or teacher-led lecture - it is possible to put in discrepant events, other demonstrations, or computer simulations to continually ask students questions which make them think. It is also important to keep up to date - connect content with new discovery, real world observation or phenomena, or in-the-news-science stories.

Connected with this is a need to highlight media bias and distortion on science and other issues. A generally poor understanding of important issues in society favors a status quo situation which is to the detriment of the environment, world economies, and quality of life for a lot of people, and the media is largely to blame for this.

I also think that students need to become more aware of the world outside the USA - what are the cultures and systems of other countries, what are their viewpoints and ideas - and to lose the 'our system is best' mentality. There needs to be a wide appreciation of diversity, of languages and culture, and of nature.