Observations

I have a few blogs to catch up on since I've been sick. So this is the first one. Two weeks ago I was observing some teachers around the school. First, I watched Duke teaching electron orbital notation. That was cool to see because it's something that is relatively abstract that he covered quite easily. He had them building a chart that had both ends of the periodic table. Then he had them fill in all of the electron orbitals, different notations for them, and the dot structure. This was so students could see patterns in the periodic table. Once they learned the pattern, it was a lot easier to memorize what was going on with the different elements.

The second teacher I observed is a very dynamic biology teacher. He was teaching chemistry for his bio students so they would have some idea of how chemical structures worked. It was really interesting to see how he put the information. He began telling a story about gangs, and the students got really into it. It was a really silly story, and I was trying to figure out why he was spending so much time on it. Eventually he revealed that as he was telling this story about a gang, he was actually drawing atomic structure and the student suddenly realized they'd been duped and the whole story was fake. However, it worked really well, and the students remembered what he was saying. Then he misbuttoned his lab coat, and the students had to describe what he did wrong. He had put the same button through two button holes. And he used that to describe that you can't mismatch the number of buttons and the number of button holes. So he drew "button holes" which were negative signs, and "buttons" which were plus signs, above the elements that had that particular charge. He showed how it matches across the periodic table, and that you have to balance your number of buttons with your number of button holes. I really liked the way he taught this since it was really easy to follow. So he had students balance a few equations, and they really seemed to get it. I don't know if this style of teaching would really work for anybody else, but it was amazing to watch how he led the students to their conclusions. They all got the answer on their own, even though he led them very carefully to it.

The second teacher I observed had a very non-dynamic style. She still interacted with the students and kept them engaged, but in a very different way. She showed them a demonstration that she had talked with them about the class before, and said she had been trying to figure out a way to show them in class. It was shining light from the projector through two pinholes in a piece of foil to show them the light spectrum. It worked really well and the students definitely thought it was cool. She was constantly asking them questions to keep them engaged, and she even threw styrofoam balls at them as emission products. A lot of teachers I've noticed put things in a historical perspective. They introduce ideas as a train of thought in history: this was how they discovered it. It makes it a bit of a mystery, with an unknown outcome, so the students are drawn along in the story.

So I got a little bit of material from each teacher that could be useful. I think it's hard to recreate a style like the first teacher, but it certainly got me thinking outside the box for how to describe something. I'll have to see what I can come up with when I talk to the students next Friday about my research.