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.