OCT. 17, 2010

The following paper is a reflection on a lesson plan that was designed and implemented this past week in my science class.  Due to rigid pacing guide and curriculum requirements, I was not able to deviate to far from my lesson – but am extremely happy with the results.  The lesson plan deals with scale drawing, a key skill for STEM learners.  I am working hard on following up this plan in tying it into the world of nature, and how scientists use scale and proportion in many of their researches, designs, and observations.

Implementing and Reflecting on a Structured Inquiry Lesson

As my Walden experience evolves, it’s becoming much clearer to me in the science field that it is my goal to become a developer of scientifically literate citizens.  My goal is to mold students to become adults’, who can understand key concepts and ideas in the natural world, and be able to explain and critically think about the scientific world – and ultimately make informed decisions.  It is imperative that students learn to ask questions about what is known to actively find out more information on their studies.  I am working hard in developing this practice in all lessons in my classroom.   Science education should help prepare students for this complex inquiry practice where students seek and provide evidence and reasons for ideas and claims (Driver, Newton, and Osborne 2000).  My students are slowly and gradually learning that their knowledge truly increases with the words why, how, where, when, and who are used more in the class.

This assignment is to focus on a current lesson plan that was written last week, and implemented into this week’s classes.  My assignment was on scale drawing.  It is important to point out that my curriculum this year has a lot of mathematics infused into it due to startling low standardized math scores in my district.  The latest numbers in University Middle School are only 26.7% of students are proficient in math standardized testing in the year 2008-09 (NJDOE, 2010).  The scores went down apparently in significant numbers – preliminary reports have been as low as 17% proficient from last NJASK testing in May of 2010.  We are deeply committed to working with these children in developing and nurturing strong STEM students.  My assignment was to introduce the idea of scale drawing – and how it applies in both the real world, and how it applies to the scientific world.  Just like many of my lessons, I explained to my students that to understand and evaluate explanations and occurrences – they must have the ability and skill to comprehend.  Many times in science we discuss size when comparing and contrasting – and it is important that they can focus on these differences.  For example, when talking about sizes of planets or the size of a leaf cell – they must be able to focus on what they are investigating.  Discussion of the Gulf oil spill was talked about, and by using a map of the oil spill area – and how that area’s size was compared to land mass made the children start understanding the widespread damage.  The key goal of my assignment was to be able to visually and logistically compare things that the students are unaware of, and to relate that to an object or thing they do know.  My assignment had several elements to it when exploring scale drawing.  The students worked in small groups to investigate and create appropriate scale drawings or blueprints on objects within the class, as well as using data from the internet to design replicas of New York City buildings. Proposing and explain scale ratios was challenging due to very low math foundation, but by using understanding scale numbers, I was quite pleased with student comprehension.  I found that slowly working on the math aspect was time well-spent.  At first there was apprehension, but by the end of the lesson many of the students were challenging me to come up with different scales and objects, along with alternative ideas about drawings.   Throughout the lesson I asked more and more questions about why scale drawing is so important, and who would design and use these plans.  The class actively engaged in different tasks in creating the drawings, and examining posters and maps (Solar system, Oil Spill, Human and Animal anatomy) – understanding that scientist must create visuals that are drawn to scale to provide information and details to gain understanding.  I am enclosing several drawings from the assignment of varied levels.  The assignments are of objects in the classroom, objects found outside the classroom on school grounds, and scale drawings of New York City buildings. 

As, stated in the beginning of the paper, I am making a strong move in my teaching to supply lessons that will open questioning and inquiry from my students.  It was an extremely successful week in my class with this scale drawing lesson – it is to be used next chapter when they investigate and explore the solar system.  The first assignment is to investigate the size differences of the planets – and will create real size scaled planets.  There is already a considerable anticipation for this assignment from my students.  I believe that this excitement is an excellent assessment of my lesson.  I learned that my students can absolutely do any assignment or task asked of, if it is carefully thought out – and many different strategies or alternative assessments are given.  This was a lesson that clearly makes me remember why I chose this profession; it is a glorious feeling when introducing an assignment to resistance – and ending with excitement and pride of conquering a skill.  I see children that are realizing the fact that they can succeed – no matter what past situation or performance has told them.  We as educators must strive for this belief; we must stimulate followers to think about problems in new ways and, simultaneously, help them question old assumptions and beliefs that may be no longer valid (Rhoten and Bowers 2001).  I have enclosed student work in Appendix A.