Matthew's EDUC 450 Inquiry I Blog

Inquiry project progress update: We've made a list of about 25 sources that we could potentially use for our annotated bibliography and now we're just working on sorting through all of them. About half of the sources on the list are academic papers and the rest are a mix of web pages and videos. We need 12 sources for the annotated bibliography, so we will be using half the sources we have on our list. I will also be talking to my SA as well as some students about their thoughts on using a flipped classroom model at my next school visit.

 The Alfie Kohn video we watched in class presents a relatively extreme view of the role of competition in children's lives, and while I agree with some of his points, I disagree with his characterization of competition as entirely negative. I agree that adults often encourage children to take competition too far and push it to the point where it creates unhealthy social dynamics. When children learn that winning is always the most important thing, they will definitely struggle to work with others and develop intrinsic motivation, but I think it is possible to engage in healthy competition when kids can think of winning as one of many goals to strive for during an activity. When students are solely focused on winning, they are likely to get very upset when they don't get the result they want out of a competition, but when they are also focused on learning and social connection and other benefits they can get out of competitive activities, they can have a healthy relationship wi...

 1. Define your question: How does a flipped classroom style affect student retention of concepts taught in high school physics classes? 2. Analyse your topic into concepts. Concept 1: Active learning Concept 2: Problem-solving skills Concept 3: Student retention of classroom material I am interested in learning about the effectiveness of using a flipped classroom style because it is something that has been very helpful for my learning in university, so I would like to implement it into my teaching, but i only want to do so if I think it will be effective for my students. One advantage of a flipped classroom style is that students spend more time engaging with material than they would in a traditional classroom because they are expected to come to class having already acquired some knowledge of the topic that is being covered, so most of the class time is spent working on problems. I think that this increased engagement with material would lead to greater retention, i.e. students w...

I read Braiding Sweetgrass over the summer on canoe trips I was guiding, and I remember reading this chapter around a fire with a group of teenagers on a trip I was guiding. The language we use is instrumental in shaping the way we see the world, and in  Dr. Kimmerer is right that scientific language often teaches us to break things down into their component parts without looking at how they interact with each other to form a living being. I also agree with her observation that scientific language only describes the things we understand, stopping short of describing processes we cannot explain. However, I don't think that this is a shortcoming of scientific language. Its purpose is to describe what we understand and to break living things down into components whose function we can accurately explain. Scientific language can be limiting in its inability to describe processes beyond human understanding, but I think that this limitation is necessary. Much of scientific language is ve...

I think the importance of representation in the sciences is definitely underestimated among the scientific community. It's obvious that showcasing people from minority groups who have been successful in the sciences tells other people from these groups that a career in the sciences is possible for them, which is important in its own right, but I think it also has other benefits that people don't really think about as much. Showing that success in the sciences is not limited to people who look a certain way can help show students that they can pursue any field they want. If anyone can be successful in the sciences, there's no reason to think this isn't true for other career paths as well. For many years, science was a discipline that was mostly practiced by white men, or at least that's what people were led to believe, and letting people see that anyone can pursue science shows people that they don't have to fit the stereotypes of a scientist in order to become o...

Having grown up with very traditional teaching methods, I can see myself potentially struggling to be as flexible as I would like to be in my own teaching. However, I also know that sticking to a rigid picture of what teaching is will prevent me from growing as an educator. I really enjoy spending time outdoors and I know from personal experience on top of research that's been done on this topic how beneficial it is for students to see nature as a teacher rather than just a different setting for a classroom. I liked the idea that instead of aiming to move as far away from grids as possible, your goal should be to use them where they're actually useful but be able to abandon the comfort of grids at times when it would make sense to do so. I appreciated this framework because too often theories about education are completely abandoned when newer ones are developed even if some aspects of them are still useful and I can imagine that this pattern often makes it difficult for teache...