Teaching Science IRL

Last month I shared some of the best new labs I did last year, and this month I wanted to share a couple more new things I tried in my classroom last school year. These are non-lab activities or organizational things and most are non-grade specific and could be used in any classroom!

 

1. Investigate the Teacher: This is an activity that I did with a few of my classes on the first day of school and I got this idea from the wonderful Abby Gross on Instagram. You can find here account here. At my school, our classes are slightly shorter than normal on the first day and there isn’t enough time to go over the syllabus or do a long activity. For this activity you give your students a form and they walk around your classroom, look for “evidence” that says something about you, and they try to draw conclusions about who you are. This activity is easy, gets kids out of their chairs on the first day, and gives me a chance to observe them and get to know them a little. They also get to know me as a teacher and a person. I really loved this and I think it helps set the tone of what my classroom is like and starts the process of relationship building. Abby (who created this resource) is an English teacher but the concept of collecting evidence and drawing conclusions works so well for a science classroom too! You can find this activity on TPT here.

 

2. Get to Know Students RIGHT AWAY: I read two great books last summer:
   Shattering the Perfect Teacher Myth by Aaron Horgan and Better Than Sticks and Carrots by Dominique Smith, Douglas Fisher, and Nancy Frey. Both books really emphasized the importance of building relationships with students as the foundation of classroom management and in order to building a caring and safe classroom environment. However the books both went further in suggesting that teachers need to intentionally build those relationships right at the beginning of the year and gave some practical solutions for how to do this. I took a student survey out of Sticks and Carrots, adapted it slightly, and then gave it to all my freshmen at the beginning of they year. Then I read every single one and I do think this helped me learn who my students were quickly. I liked this survey better than most that I have used in the past because I thought the questions were somewhat different from the typical get-to-know-you questions. Additionally, I took some ideas out of Aaron Horgan’s book about having positive, everyday interactions with students to build relationships. You can read more about this on his blog post here. I have always tried to get to know my students at the beginning of the year, but I truly think that putting positive relationships at the forefront of my mind this school year really made a difference.

3. Quizizz: If you are not using Quizizz in your classroom, you need to! This website was a game changer and saved me a lot of time this last year. Quizizz is an educational game website similar to Kahoot, but I think it is much easier to use and has more useful features. You can create multiple choice question quizzes for students that they can take individually at their own pace or the whole class can complete together similar to what you do with Kahoot. Here is why Quizizz is better though: the quizzes are much easier to make than on Kahoot, you can also assign these quizzes as homework where students can take the quiz as many times as they want until they get the grade they want, Quizizz generates a report for each student that you could import into your gradebook AND you can email this report to parents (I love this feature!), and it’s FREE! I used this in all my classes this year from freshmen Biology to Anatomy which was composed of all juniors and seniors and it was successful with all of them. You can also use this in a middle school classroom. (Sidenote: I have also Gimkit in my classroom and my students love it, however I find that the free version is harder to use and I didn’t really want to pay for the upgraded version) If you are curious about this tool, check out this YouTube video that I watched before I started using Quizizz.

 

4. Starbucks Study Time: This is an idea I got from Megan Forbes’s Instagram page @toocoolformiddleschool but I know a lot of other teachers do this too. Student are allowed to study or work on something independently and quietly while listening to their own music and eating snacks (if they are allowed to) just like they are at Starbucks. It’s a way to hopefully teach students how to work on their own just like they would if they were in college. I did not do this with my freshmen or sophomore students as most of my classes this year had a hard time holding themselves accountable with independent work, but I know a lot of middle school teachers who do this for short, 15 minute segments with success. I mostly used this with my Anatomy class of juniors and seniors and it worked great. Anatomy is so content heavy, that a day of independent study is great for them and many of them will be in college next year doing something like this everyday on their own. Additionally I have all my students fill out a form (pictured below) that explains how they used this time to study, what topics they feel confident about, and which topics they need to study more and I have them turn this into me at the end of class. I love using this time not just for students to work and study, but also for them to reflect on what they know. You can find Megan’s instructions for “Starbucks Time” here.

5. Switching Up My Biology Units: This year I took a page out of Rebecca’s wonderful blog https://itsnotrocketscienceclassroom.com and switched up the order of some my biology units. I used to teach ecology during the first semester right before Christmas, but this year I taught it at the end of the year right before genetics and heredity. My students typically always like the ecology and genetics units more than others and in her blog Rebecca argues that putting “fun” and activity-heavy units toward the end of year helps keep your students engaged during those last weeks of school and I have to say I agree. I think teaching these units in April and May kept everyone engaged and interested during the time of year when everyone is usually jumping off the walls. You can read more about this from Rebecca’s blog post here. I know this is biology specific, but even if you don’t teach biology and find that the end of the year is a struggle in your classes, is there a unit or activity you could save for the end of the year that would keep your students engaged? It might be worth switching things around!

And finally:

6. I Gave Less Homework: Let me begin by saying that I am not a no-homework type of teacher. I do give my students assignments and projects that we start in class and they are expected to finish on their own, but this year I gave fewer assignments than I have in previous years. This last year was my fifth year of teaching, and honestly, I was just tired and hitting the point of burn out. Additionally, I had four different classes to prep for and all that planning and grading really builds up. And I mean really, really builds up. I was tired of grading for hours on Sundays so I dropped a couple of the assignments I normally give and I do not regret it. A couple of years ago I NEVER WOULD HAVE DONE THIS. But as I get older I think it’s important to remember that as teachers we need to keep our teaching MANAGEABLE with the rest of our lives and what I was doing in previous years was not manageable. NEWSFLASH: it’s ok to give ourselves a break.

 

If you getting ready to go back to school or simply looking for new ideas for you classroom, I hope that you have found something here you can use and implement.

Have you recently tried a new activity in your classroom with success or have you tried one of things I listed above?  I would love to hear about it in the comments below!