For the first two quarters of the school year, I teach secondary science methods. I have learned more about teaching and learning from this class than I have from any other educational experience. In this class we emphasize teaching for understanding and what that means for developing lesson objectives, for classroom discourse, for meaningful activity, and for connections to the discipline of science.
One of the central features of the fall quarter is doing an independent
inquiry project, in which students 1) take a “cookbook” exercise
from a text that has an interesting underlying phenomenon 2) do sufficient
background reading to create a tentative causal model for this phenomenon
3) reframe the question if necessary to make this not a cookbook exercise
but a full independent inquiry 4) design and carry out an original study
5) present evidence to peers and construct an argument that supports or
refutes their original model
