Science Methods - Blog 4

      This week in science methods I have spent a lot of time working on my science unit, and I am definitely the most proud of my work on that assignment this month. I am planning a science unit on sound that integrates the literacy concept of cause and effect. This unit has taken a lot of planning and a lot of hard work, but I believe this work will certainly be worth it since I have now created a unit that I can use during student teaching. The aspect of the unit I struggled with the most was creating the big ideas. Often, I struggle with creating the big picture ideas for students because I am very detail oriented. My big ideas tended to be much more detailed and focused to the unit than they were supposed to be. On the other hand, creating the performance task brought me a lot of satisfaction because I created something that I know the students in my classroom will love participating in, and that made makes me very excited to teach this unit. Since I just turned in my unit, I do not have any action steps for this assignment this week. However, I want to complete my edTPA commentaries for science methods over the coming weekend.
     This month, I contributed to the overall class by simply being encouraging. This week has possibly been one of the most stressful weeks of the semester, and I have become incredibly grateful throughout this week for the wonderful people I get to learn alongside. We have all become each other's cheerleaders, and we support each other as much as possible. I think encouraging and supporting my peers is the best way for me to continue to contribute in the coming weeks.
     The outside learning I have found this week is a book that was introduced to us in class called "Science Formative Assessment" by Paige Keeley. This book is full of wonderful formative assessments that are not only great for science instruction, but all curricular areas. This research has been incredibly helpful because it has added quite a lot of strategies to my bank of ideas for formative assessments. Now I will be able to go into my classroom and have an abundance of assessments to use in order to find what works for each student. This relates directly to the North Carolina Teacher Candidate Standards, specifically standard 4h, which states that "Teachers use a variety of methods to assess what each student has learned." In order to truly know what our students have learned, we must not only assess them multiple times in different ways, but we must also find the ways that students excel at displaying their knowledge. Some assessments may create barriers for students that hinder them from showing what they have truly learned, and we must recognize this occurring and try other methods or make accommodations. During my student teaching experience, I plan to implement many of the assessments I have learned about in order to find what assessments truly show what my students have learned.
     The current event in science that I read about this month involved the planets! Specifically, there was a spacecraft that was sent to Mars that successfully landed on the planet. This spacecraft did not . land in the area that was desired by scientists, but the spacecraft luckily landed in a crater filled with soil, which made collecting data extremely easy. The spacecraft will be used to study the interior of the planet to help scientists learn more about the planet. (Link to research: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/top-stories-shocking-crispr-claim-mars-landing-and-geneticist-s-take-gene-editing)


Top Tweets of the Month:


I chose this as one of my top tweets of the week because it reminded me that coding is a scientific/mathematic idea that should be incorporated into our classrooms! Coding is something that our students will likely be exposed to in their futures, and we should embrace this idea.



I chose this as one of my top tweets of the week because I thought it was a wonderful graphic that showed the levels of learning that our students are able to experience. Clearly, good teachers would want their students to go through each level of learning and eventually come out at the extended abstract learning.



I chose this as one of my top tweets of the week because it shows exactly what our goal as teachers should be. We aren't teaching students facts and things to "know," we are teaching them how to be successful learners.