Module 1: Week 3: The Teacher as Mediator and Facilitator of Student Learning - January 31, 2011 - February 6, 2011

Week 3: The Teacher as Mediator and Facilitator of Student Learning: January 31, 2011- February 6, 2011 includes: going over NSES & NETS Themes, on Wednesday had class online and went through a powerpoint called Week 1 PPT, went through Bloom's Taxonomy, Submit for Grading as of now: By now you have to:

1. Have started your science blog
2. Completed observation activity+ summary
3. 4th Gr.Test (individually) and its analysis (in groups)
4. A1 (Scientific Me), A2 (blog)
5. Posted Forum reflections on the read Week 1 & 2 chapters.
6. Created an e-folio pbworks space.

Weekend assignments: A3 and Week 3 reflections 

Virtual Conference for Education 

I was glad to read about teacher as a mediator and facilitator. It is something that I never thought of before reading this. It is a good idea to know Bloom's taxonomy. Using what you learn from Bloom's taxonomy will make you better at what you do and will help you as a teacher advance your students and challenge your students. 

Week 3. The Teacher as Mediator and Facilitator of Student Learning
During this week you will:

  Mediator: A teaching role in which the teacher helps students to learn by reflecting their own ideas back to them and guiding them in sorting out the inconsistencies. As a mediator, the teacher helps students delve deeply into their thoughts and expand their own thinking about an idea.
  Facilitator: a person who helps watch over the students in the room and guide the students through an activity. 

1. Explore the phenomenon of how students can make meaning from a concrete science experience. How Bloom's Taxonomy can help you plan these concrete science experiences?


  Bloom's Taxonomy is very important. Bloom's Taxonomy is based on taxonomy of cognitive objectives. It has six levels and provides a way to organize thinking skills. It starts at the most basic to the higher order levels of thinking. Original terms: evaluation, synthesis, analysis, application, comprehension,and  knowledge. New terms: creating, evaluating, analyzing, applying, understanding, and remembering. The names of the six major categories were changed from noun to verb forms. As the taxonomy reflects different forms of thinking and thinking is an active process verbs were more accurate. The Bloom's Taxonomy can help plan these concrete science experiences with using these new verbs in the objectives and goals to make the science lessons more important and more specific.


  The active process of knowledge construction is part of family of theories called constructivism. Contemporary constructivism reflects what we now know about how people learn. 


  Valuing the students' ideas is a way of communicating to them that they are important members of the class. Only as knowers can they construct new meanings by building on their prior beliefs and ideas. Science activities and experiments need to provide students with the freedom to say exactly what they think-- even if that is the freedom to be wrong. 
  
2.Increase understanding of what it means for a teacher to be amediator and facilitator.


   Mediator helps students to bridge the gap between their initial understanding and the deeper knowledge they can build as a result of the lesson. The teacher can do this in a variety of ways, but the process usually begins by exposing students to new experiences and helping them to probe their own thinking.

  3. Read Ch.3 stories and analyze the classroom situations where teachers teach science concepts and develop science skills - p. 63 Ms. Hudson, p.72 Mr. Willson, p.82 Mrs. Parker. Be ready to discuss your ideas in class.


  I really enjoyed reading all of the Science Stories in Chapter three. I liked the Bottle and the Balloon and Jcicles. I really liked how Ms.Hudson explained the Bottle and Balloon story. That seems easy to do in the classroom. I really enjoyed the Jcicles story to and it also seems easy to do and Mr. Wilson did a great job explaining the story. The teachers of all three Science Stories explained them really well and how they would use the experiments featured in the stories in the classroom. I would look to their guidance before doing the experiment in my classroom.  

4. Interview a science teacher/or a scientist (Project of 2)


   I thought that the interview of a science teacher or scientist was a great idea. It is always nice to work in pairs of two because if you forget something your partner can remember. My partner Catharine and I interview Dr. Larrousse. Dr. Larrousse teaches MST at the Mount. It was a nice interview.

5. Analyze how scientists are pictured in the science magazines. (Group project of 4)
I did not really enjoy this project don't think it should be offered again. 


Chapter three notes: 
Students as Knowers: 


  Teaching science requires both information and guidance from the teacher in order to help students learn. One of our goals is to help students become autonomous learners- to take charge of their own learning by performing tasks and making meaning of those experiences. We also know that there is a profound difference between acquiring information and gaining true understanding. Understanding how students learn, science provokes us to find teaching strategies that honor student's ideas and create safe, open spaces in which they can create their own meanings. To do so, the teacher must provide an appropriate context for learning and a setting in which students' own questions and ideas emerge. The teacher's role includes: engaging students in concrete experiences, encouraging them to express their ideas about what they observe, listening seriously to those ideas and considering how they are based on the students' prior knowledge, asking probing questions about the students' thinking- an important technique because students usually have alternative conceptions (mistakes) that ought to be modified, encouraging the students themselves to reflect on their ideas, and scaffolding students' learning.  




 As  a teacher I would mediate/ facilitate during science experiments. I would walk around the room and make sure that all the students are on task. I would ask the students questions and go over to each group and make sure that the students are answering the questions and understanding the experiment. I would facilitate a discussion with having the students become involved in participating in the topic we are talking about. I could facilitate by asking questions to start a discuss and to have the students answer the question so that I the teacher are not doing all the talking and this way the students are involved in the discussion and learning about the topic. This is what I would do as a mediator/ facilitator.