Things to Improve: Teaching Science

At the moment, I'm taking a bit of time to reflect on where I want to improve and what I'm doing well. You can find the master list of reflections here.


Teaching Science

Science. Test tubes and explosions and carefully drawn tables of results. Fully equipped science laboratories. Any kind of science equipment?

I actually like science quite a lot. I learned it for the 5 years of high school, achieving the highest marks in the grade in grade 9. I like the system of predicting, testing and analysing. But, I still feel that I'm not teaching science in a way which makes it engaging and ensures that the students really learn.

Part of it is in setting up experiments. We have some equipment at school, but no system to tell us what we have or how we can use it. Similarly, there are some great books - but they never seem to fit into our 'unit'. There's also the problem of finding an experiment which can be done safely in the classroom.

I know some of it also comes down to me. When I find easy to do experiments which meet all the requirements of our theme etc, I need to get organised enough to buy the materials I need to complete the experiment. The lack of organisation I talked about before affects science (and strangely, phys ed) more than most other subjects.

So, how to improve. I know I need to look for more information. We have the books there at school, I need to use them. We have begun approaching science more than ever before this term - I need to keep building on that. I need to plan science experiements with enough time to collect materials - and really plan them so I know what materials are needed. I need to balance experimenting with good explainations and thought. And we need to begin looking at observations and realise that science isn't always blowing stuff up.

I think this is one area where I really can improve. I'm looking forward to doing more science.

Any tips on how you approach science?


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