Teacher internship, day 13

There wasn’t much to report from the teacher internship front last week due to it being the final week of that semester. We were busy wrapping up the semester and administering exams. The real excitement begins this week when new students file into the classroom Tuesday for the first day of the fresh semester. I get to see how my host teacher establishes her procedures and rules. This week will be focused primarily on getting students set up with science binders and lab folders, issuing textbooks and teaching about lab safety.

On Wednesday I will face my first observation. This is when a person from my college sits in during a class period to see I how I handle things, and then he completes an evaluation. For this one I am merely teaching something my host teacher has planned, so I’m not worried.

The following week, though, I am teaching a few lessons where I’ve done all of the planning. I already put together the plans and showed them to my host teacher. She really liked what I had! Now comes the hard part of actually fleshing out the plans, creating my presentation materials, gathering needed equipment and all of that stuff.

Here are a few of the ideas I will incorporate into my plans, which focus on “what is science” and “the scientific method”.

  • Here’s a neat puzzle that teaches students an important aspect of science: that ideas can change when new information is discovered.
  • Here’s a Richard Wiseman video that will be useful in teaching about natural explanations for seemingly unnatural phenomenon. Unfortunately, the school blocks all access to YouTube, so I have to find some way to get a copy of the video.
  • Here’s a great idea from Richard Dawkins: a card game (pdf file) that uses the scientific method (see page 7 of the pdf)!
  • And we will do an icebreaker activity based on the Forer effect (variations used before by James Randi and Derren Brown).

Of course, there will be plenty of other lectures and discussions (such as lecturing on Redi, Needham, Pasteur, and their spontaneous generation experiments), but I’m really trying to break away from passive listening and striving for active engagement. Wouldn’t you love to be in my classroom?

About Brandon Haught

Communications Director for Florida Citizens for Science.
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3 Responses to Teacher internship, day 13

  1. Joe Meert says:

    Looks good. I always tell students (in college) that what changes science is not “Eureka I found it!!!”, but “Oh shit, what just happened?”. You may have to change the verbiage, but the sentiment is good.

  2. cope says:

    There are several online converters that let you drop the URL of a particular YouTube video into a field and they will convert it to one of many possible video format types. You can then save it to your computer to use as you wish (e-mail to yourself, online hosting, CD or DVD, etc.).

    What I did with the Mythbusters episodes about the alleged Moon hoax was convert them to MPEG4 files, save them on my computer and then put them on my iPod Touch. I bought the necessary cables to run my iPod into my VCD/DVD player as an external source and showed them to my class that way.

    Anyway, good luck, it looks like you are off to a good start and giving the kids some worthwhile lessons.

  3. Brandon Haught says:

    Thanks, cope. I did do quite a bit of research and came up with one of those YouTube converting sites. I downloaded it and thought all would be well, but when I tried to play it on a school computer I kept getting error messages. It turned out that their version of Quicktime was too old. Tonight I’ve done some more converting work and I hope that the version I have now will work on the school computers. Good thing I’m planning ahead, let me tell ya!

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