Creating an environment where students feel comfortable making mistakes and asking questions is vital for any science classroom. I think I will struggle at first if I do not know how to guide students and if I don’t have clear answers to their issues. But, usually, the kids can help me find a solution and sometimes that encourages them more!
I strive to provide an atmosphere where students are engaged and have choice. With that comes the stress of managing it all. Students are so far advanced when it comes to utilizing technology that I worry that I may loose control of the classroom.
The culture that I would like to see in my classroom is communication. I would like to see the students work together in problem solving. My hope is that I am guiding them but they are able to slowly no longer need me to help them. I feel that an issue that I may have is students that are not familiar with computer and are afraid of breaking something and afraid of taking risks with coding.
Open ended scientific inquiry has been my goal for years. Students do react adversely to it at first. I may assign a topic as simple as, “Prove the following statement: Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of particles in a substance” Students are given water, a hot plate, food coloring, a timer, a thermometer and ice. From these materials, they must design an experiment that proves the statement. There is a lot of frustration at first, but nothing compares to the victory I see on their faces when they write a successful procedure and conduct an experiment they themselves wrote. I expect a lot of the same initial reluctance with the coding.
This is always a concern with group work. It takes a lot of teacher management to make sure that no one is just going along for the ride. What’s good about this curriculum is that students will have to work on their own code, while collaborating to find any mistakes in their coding.
I would like to have a classroom climate where a lot of the time my students are using inquiry science. I know this causes anxiety with some students because there is not an explicit set of directions, but I love to see the outcomes when they are able to explore and create with few limits.
Since I am changing to computer courses this year, everything is still in the planning stages in my mind. I really would love to create a classroom atmosphere of curiosity and independence where it is okay to collaborate when needed, but not forced. Students need to feel confident working on their own, but also confident in asking questions or “crowd-sourcing” information from their classmates.
I will have to change my teaching style even more and change my role more as a facilitator and coach. Allowing them to they take the lead,
I would like to have a classroom culture where students would know when to work alone and also be able to collaborate with each other. I would hope they could come to me for technical questions and guidance and be disciplined enough to stay on task. I fear some would not be developmentally able to do these things at such a young age, but at least they could start practicing them.
In my classroom I strive to create an atmosphere of mutual respect. An atmosphere of where everyone is learning from one another, its okay to make a mistake and where learning is fun.
Some barriers I anticipate is one where “everyone” is not working as a whole and more or less focused on the individual.
I would enjoy a classroom like that as well. I love to see the students engaged and in charge of their own learning. Not ashamed of embarrassment in making a mistake.
I’d like to see kids collaborating with each other and learning grit
I strive to create a culture where students are confident enough in their level of effort to try, even if it leads to failure. My biggest concern is getting students to attain a level of confidence to where they’ll try to resolve any problem they face.
The ideal environment is the teacher being a facilitator that encourages students to find the answers to questions that they have, even after several failures. I have found out that they do not know how to find answers on their own and that will be a challenge that they will need to overcome to be successful with computer science. One barrier that i foresee is that students may want to give up quickly because they failed once or twice.
Pullmann,
That is one of the challenges that I face in the classroom and would like to learn strategies to help my students also. They give up so easily and complain that its too hard.
I would like to promote a culture of community. Students need to know and understand that everyone is accepted and appreciated for the input that they give to the learning. Mistakes are okay and they are part of the learning process. I also want students to feel comfortable trying. Too often students try something 1 time and if they don’t get it, they shut down. They aren’t willing to try again for fear of “failing”. I try to make it a practice in my classroom that they are encouraged to fall one or two times before they get it.
I would like to have my students love the process of learning. It seems that today’s classrooms of students prepare for testing and when given an activity respond first with “Is this for a grade?”
I would like to see students figuring things out by helping one another… being curious to find an answer regardless if it is reflected in Pinnacle.
I always try to encourage a collaborative approach toward problem solving. I like to see my students work together to develop and implement labs. I do not see that changing.
I have seen that happen many times. I try to explain to the students that they need to collaborate. Of course some students do better than others.
I am sure I have as much or more difficulty with challenge-based/inquiry-based teaching and learning model as my students. I am impatient and want to dig deeper into content or move on to new content. Sometimes, when I do exercise a little more self-control, the classroom will often have a different “expert answerer” that will provide an answer that other student will adopt without arriving at an answer themselves.
In a perfect classroom, there are no shortcuts and my lesson is designed so challenges do not hinge on a single person providing answer.