She Blinded Me With Science!

I am a science teacher. I think I am actually a pretty good science teacher. So, it came to me as a surprise as how much I was baffled by the new SEED AskTheScienceBlogger question:

What makes a good science teacher?...

The answer, I guess, depends on the precise definitions of the words "makes", "good", "science" and "teacher".
[read the rest under the fold]

Is this the question about inherent talents shared by the good science teachers, or the methods one may use to turn a lousy or mediocre teacher into a good one?

Being extroverted helps. Being a natural performer helps. Loving your job helps.

Knowing your material inside and out, at least a hundred times better than the students or the textbook - that certainly helps, not just in answering potential questions, but also in the degree of self-confidence one brings to teaching.

On the other hand, knowing the material so well lures some teachers into trying to do too much - going over the heads of the students, trying to cover too much in too much detail for the particular course. A teacher of an introductory course has to assume that students know absolutely zero - not even the stuff taught in kindergarden. You will be surprised how much of the "basic stuff that everyone knows" is NOT known by your students! I teach mothers who do not know what a uterus is, or where it is in the body, or that men do not happen to have one! Be prepared for immense depths of ignorance in at least a minority of your students.

Thus, it is important to be able to calibrate the material to the level of the course, in line with the background students are expected to have. Thus, everything except college upper-level electives and grad-school courses should assume nothing and start from scratch.

Watching your teachers helps. Many students take courses, dilligently study and pass their exams. But, while in the classroom, you should also pay attention to what the instructor is doing, what "tricks" s/he is employing, what effects those strategies have on your (and your friends') understanding of the material. Thus, you can figure out what works and what does not before you ever get to stand in front of the class yourself. Learn from observing the experienced and good teachers.

Even if you do not have to take formal education about education (e.g., in order to get certified), you should take an ed class or two, or at least read about it. You have to be aware of at least some knowledge about the way teachers teach and students learn, about the variety of learning styles, about potential learning disabilities, and about strategies that have been proven effective by generations of teachers in the past, as well as, hopefully, by research.

Is being "good" to be understood as in "good at making new scientists", or "good at exciting people about science" or something else? This, again, depends on the type of course and the level.

High school physics is not meant to produce physicists - at least not immediately. Its purpose is to teach about the way science works, the way science is done, and how cool it is. It also teaches basic facts about the way the world works and how it is relevant to one's life outside of a potential scientific career. It is meant to show, in more or less subtle ways (depending on the geography of your school), how a scientific, rational way of thinking is superior to alternative ways of thinking.

It is meant to excite a subset of students enough for them to start considering a career in science. It is meant to enable other students to understand science reporting in the media, to be able to find relevant information and to be able to evaluate that information, including evaluating the credibility of the source. In other words, it is giving the students both the physics information and the Baloney Detection Kit.

The same kind of thinking goes for introductory college courses, especially for non-science majors.

Once you get to upper-level courses for science majors, though, the game changes. You assume some background and move on from there. You teach more complex material. And you work on fine-tuning the critical skills. Especially at the senior and graduate level, dissecting bad, yet peer-reviewed and published papers, is an absolute must. Practice in designing experiments, writing papers, writing research proposals, giving talks, making posters, etc. becomes quite important. Discussing scientific ethics is very important as well. Laboratory moves from fun with Mentos and DietCoke to the real world.

Higher the level of the course, easier it is to teach it. New hires should be given graduate courses to teach. They are on the cutting edge of research, yet least experienced in the classroom. The most senior faculty should teach gigantic introductory classes. It takes years of experience, many trials and errors, to become an effective teacher of a freshman introductory biology. At the same time, the most senior faculty are often not so up-to-speed on the new developments in the field which is an assett. Textbooks are out-of-date as well. It's a perfect fit. A conservative teaching of conservative material is what is needed for a freshman class - only stuff that is so old that everyone in the field agrees with.

This is also related to the distance kept between the teacher and the students - how much can you be their "friend". Too distant, and you loose then, too close and you loose control of the class. Again, at each level, the distance is different, with upper-level graduate seminars often being just like little "family affairs" which is perfectly OK.

One thing that any new teacher, but especially a science teacher, needs to do, is to realize how the world of education is changing before our eyes. Unlike us (as in "of certain age"), even the most Web-savvy of us, the new kids were BORN into an online world. We learned how to use computers and Internet - they got it by osmosis. They live in a connected world - putting them in a classroom and asking them to turn off their cell-phones and IM is like cutting off their ears and gouging out their eyes - it hurts, it bleeds, and it turns you into not just a nervous wreck but also a blinf and deaf person - which is pretty much an unteachable person. This is the new concept of the Flat Classroom, about which David Wharlick blogs a lot, e.g., here, here, here and here.

As bloggers, we perhaps understand better than most other teachers the power of the online technology in teaching. But, do you know that there is actually a blogging platform specifically designed for teaching - Edubloggers?

From Brian Russell (via Teacher Source), I just heard of a wiki designed to help educators/teachers take a plunge into using modern online technology in teaching - SupportBlogging! Landmark-Project is another useful place to start.

You can see more about my own teaching experiences and thoughts in these recent posts, as well my whole old blog The Magic School Bus.

Why all this? Because teaching is a two-way street. You want your students to tune in to you? Then, you have to be able to tune in to them. You have to learn their language and their mode of communication. That is half of success right there.

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