End of Course Reflection

I just finished all the reading and course work for National University's course MAT670 Theory Best Practice Teaching.  Like all the courses at National University there is so much information given that it is hard to digest in the amount of time (four weeks) allocated.  But this course offered me something I was able to use the very same week in my science classroom, and if that is all I got out of the course I would count it as money well spent.  I'm talking about this video by Doug Fisher.  It was so useful to me that I consider it the most useful thing I read or heard or saw during the whole course. About 17 minutes into the video Doug Fisher, a professor at San Diego State University started talking about helping students read texts that contain unfamiliar vocabulary.  Well, that's all I do in my science class.  The vocabulary I make my students read is full of scientific jargon most of them do not hear outside my class.  His advice that teachers should model how to figure out the meaning of an unknown word was amazing!  I followed his advice and it worked.  It is so exciting to hear my Spanish-speaking ELLs tell each other "Stellar looks like estrella so it must mean star" or "all of this is about earthquakes so seismic is probably about earthquakes".  In just one week my class has turned into something different than it was the week before.  Most of my students now act like the difficult texts are clues in a detective story. and they are the detectives looking for the answer to the mystery of what the words mean.  It is the coolest thing to hear a 12 year old ELL student say, "that's a Latin root. I know what that means."

But the Doug Fisher video had so much more good stuff than strategies for comprehending new words.  The modeling and story-telling advice was amazing, too, and I've already used that in the classroom.  I show my students everything I do now.  I show them how I do science, I don't just give them instructions.  And I tell stories.  It takes a lot of time on my part; I'm spending several hours a day looking for stories that fit in with my lessons.  Sometimes, I can find a good story but sometimes I can't and have to do a lot of reading.  But it seems to be worth it, because my students are more engaged in the stories, and they are beginning to copy the problem-solving behavior I am modeling for them.

This lecture is so good it shouldn't be optional for the course.  I've watched all four hours of it twice and think the whole course could be built around it.