Student Teaching: Week 3!

This week I discovered by biggest pet peeve!

SNOW DAYS!

I was off school Monday and Wednesday for snow cancellations, Tuesday and Thursday were both two hour delays and finally Friday I was able to teach for a full period!

I did a Problem Based activity with my students on Friday. The activity is called “Slurb.” It’s used to demonstrate the spread of disease. I filled plastic cups with flour and in 5 of the 24 cups I placed about 2 tablespoons of baking soda. I explained that this is a “slurb” they are highly social animals and interact by mixing their contents. The students we’re then instructed to mix their contents with 2 other students. As the students did this the baking soda spread throughout the class.

Then I told them that there has been an outbreak of “slurbitis” and all animals must be tested! I squirted vinegar in the cups and the cups that foamed were infected. After determining who was infected the students had to solve figure out who was originally infected, I only told them that 5 started with the infection.

This activity was very student centered. At one point I even told them that I would not answer questions for two minutes! I had students off their seats and excited about figuring out what happened.

My major mistake as a teacher, that I continue to make, is not bringing the learning full circle, I fail to create the need to know and then wrap up with a great conclusion! With this activity I could have had a great conclusion but I missed it.

Later that day for Mrs. Morgan’s large animal science class she said we could do this activity again. This class Mrs. Morgan is still teaching, we started co teaching this activity and in trying to work the kinks out of the activity we ended up making it more teacher centered and structured and there was a great difference between participation in the first class as opposed to the last class! The students were engaged but not excited, they wanted to know but they just wanted us to tell them. They lacked the ambition to get out of their seats and solve the problem.

It was great to see the same activity on different spectrum of the scale as far as student centered and then teacher centered. What I learned most was that controlled chaos is a great thing!