Summer's Over...Back To School...Back to Doing Science! But first this...

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It was a great summer! I was only able to do one Profession Development session and it was "Science in the Rockies-Steve Spangler's STEM Experience". What an amazing time. Steve Spangler is a science teacher, author and TV personality (you may have seen him on the Ellen Show). This program is targeted to educators, administrators and curriculum specialist in pre-K through 8th grade who are "Looking to provide best practices, instruction strategies and high-level engagement pedagogy, hoping to inspire students in STEM."


For three days, Steve shared his insight on teaching science and demonstrated cool experiment, to help teachers get their kids excited and engaged in science education. Here are some of my take-away thought:


"Choose to engage." Some teachers fall back on dittos or worksheets to teach science. Steve encouraged the attendees to teacher their students with hands-on science education: looking for ways to excite the students helping them to think about what happened, why it happened, can they make it happen again, can what happened be changed, etc. Along with this, Steve said that, as teachers "If you get to the dinner table you win," Meaning, if kids come home and when asked, "What did you do today?" they respond with something like, "Well, in science class we....." then you have made the connection.


Steve also said, "Connect kids with content." It's not just about showing the students science "tricks". Rather, connect with their interests, connect with the rest of the curriculum, connect the cool thing  teacher did" with what happened and why. The idea is to find the balance between engagement , experience and connections for "the best day ever". Steve also pointed out that as teachers, if you have a students attention, you better do something with it. Structure your instruction to include all parts and give your students enough time to experience everything  you are presenting to them.

One of my favorited quotes is from John Dewey, "Give the pupil something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking, or the intentional noting of connections, learning take space."

A big plus was coming home with 3 bags full of experiments and 3 of Steve's books. I highly recommend this to any Pre-K-8 grade teacher who is teaching science in their class.

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