Planning for science: Lesson Plans and Instructional Strategies

It is important to "let go" of your lesson plan in order to benefit the students. "Letting Go" means giving the students responsibility of the lesson in their own hands, while still continuing to guide them and lead them to successfully complete the lesson or experiment. As we saw back in chapter 8 in Mrs. Drescher's class; the students were supposed to be exploring all about liquids but instead they ended up turning what they discovered about liquids into a lesson about density. It is important to make an original lesson plan to begin with, but then the students shouldn't just complete the lesson because it was something they read on the paper. It is so important for the students to use their own techniques and explore what is around them and make new discoveries. Science is all about making discoveries and it is important that the student's start making discoveries at a young age because any discovery they can make about science while they are younger can help them so much year after year while they're in school, no matter what kind of science class they are taking. 


Allowing for the students to ask questions is a key element for students to successfully explore and "let go" on their own. Open ended questions are great kinds of questions to introduce to kids because it allows them to think critically and in a different way besides 'true false' or 'yes no.' (which are like questions for understanding) which don't inspire students to use their full potential in the classroom. These kinds of questions are also important because they can activate the prior knowledge of the student's and if they know something like that, then they are more likely to be interested in the topic because they are going to enjoy doing something they already know about. I have a teacher today, in my college biology class, who uses this technique of making me think. She teaches the material beyond the book and reading directly off the slides. She encourages us to participate in real class discussions that allow us to expand our mind and look at the material from many different perspectives. This has really helped me to understand how important it is for students to be introduced to this at a very early age. 


Regarding cooperative learning groups benefits students in many ways because it allows them to gain many social and educational situations. It also leads to constructivism so students can encourage other students opinions and ideas and they can defend or altar their thinking so that they can encourage each other to make new discoveries. Cultural diversity is also very important for teachers to understand because it allows the culturally diverse students to interact with the other students in the classroom and feel more welcome. Most importantly is that they can even share stories from their cultures to expand everyone else's knowledge in the group and allow for them to further investigate new questions about so many different topics that are around them. Assigning them group roles keeps them on tract to promote group efficiency and make sure everyone is participating in the group. In my classroom, I will definitely use all of these ideas to successfully complete group activities and promote unity in my classroom and make sure that everyone works successfully together! :)