Reflections on a year of teaching and learning.

This past year has been the most challenging time of my life. It’s also been a time of, by far, the highest growth. When I started my apprenticeship program at Penn’s Graduate School of Education (GSE), I’d already developed some nascent ideas on schools and science education. I knew that I loved learning about science; I loved practicing science; and I loved sharing my passion around scientific endeavors. I knew that I hated science classes; I was dissatisfied with the way science was taught when I myself was a student, and I knew wanted do something different. I wanted to fight against facts-driven, knowledge-driven, shallow, transient ways of learning science as I had experienced it. And I wondered—what if students worked through real problems through inquiry, modeling, and experimentation, just as actual scientists would? What if we steered away from a culture of memorizing textbooks and bubbling in scantrons to a culture of asking questions and investigating real issues in the world?

So, starting off as a student teacher, I had a broad vision for how I wanted to teach science: actually making it engaging for students, making it relevant to their lives, and developing scientific practices in addition to knowledge.

Again, this was a broad vision—and an unfocused one. But after a year of experiences learning about and practicing education, I was able to develop this vision further. My coursework here at Penn GSE has been critical for this development, as well as my student teaching apprenticeship at Science Leadership Academy (SLA) in the School District of Philadelphia. Moving forward into my career as a science educator, I have three main goals:
​

1. Achieving scientific literacy and deep learning experiences for my students: thinking critically about the nature of science, how to critically evaluate scientific information, and how to apply scientific practices to real-world problems in students' lives.
2. Understanding teaching and learning--not as a one-way delivery of information, but as a dynamic process of theorizing, engineering, and optimizing learning environments.
3. Building networks and supports to continue advancing as a teacher and contributing to teacher development at all levels of scale.

It’s been a long year. Here’s my path:

Read More