In my previous posts I have talked about how we as teachers can motivate students in the science classroom. Some key points to motivating students into liking and enjoying science is to use concrete examples, close to the "real thing" to help students explore their ideas. You also need to find student's schema in order to know where to start with your science content to make sure it's age appropriate. It is also important to understand that engagement and mental engagement are not the same thing. Students can be having fun doing an activity without learning anything, they could be engaged in the wrong way. It is important as a teacher to get your students to be mentally engaged while they explore, you can do this by asking extend-answer questions.
My next question is how do we get students motivated in the science classroom when we have administrators telling us to teach a certain way and teach to the content in a certain way. As a teacher this can be very difficult because you have to do what your administrators say but you also need to interest and motivate your studetns. By doing step by step experiments and reading out of a textbook, students will not be motivated becasue they aren't interested in the textbook, especially for younger studetns. They ned to be able to explore the topic and do hands on experiements. As a teacher you also need to respect the district and teach the content that your administrators tell you to. So how do you find a balance in between?
We talked in class about how some administrators can teach non effectively. Which is why sometimes they are administrators and not teachers, I am not saying this is for all administrators. As an administrator however, they may want you to teach noneffective things. One way to avoid this is to have them observe your classroom. Before they come to observe you, you can ask the administrator to look for something that you've been working on. That way you get the administrator to look for something that you've been working on with your students instead of the administrator looking for something that they wanted. This way you can still teach the content but in a way that motivates and engages you're students.
I liked your post a lot Alissa! You touched on some very good points about motivation. I like the idea of teaching content that the students like and can get their hands on the content. Motivation is one of our class goals, to motivate to learn. Sometimes our hands are tied because of a certain expected curriculum. But still we need to focus on motivation and find ways to teach more creative when the subject may not interest the students. motivation.
ReplyDeleteGood job connecting what we learn in class to what you have seen in the classroom, Alisa! I think that a lot of your questions are great ones to research further. One topic that I have thought of too with motivation is how to reach students who don't like science or science isn't their best subject. Hopefully when we do cross-curricular activities, students can get more interested in science if they see it involved with reading, math, social studies, etc.
ReplyDeleteLike you mentioned in your post, I hadn't really thought of the role of administrators in the classroom. I think we got some good ideas in class about how to successfully work with administrators.