Ms. Anderson's STEM Blog

 Welcome back to my STEM blog!  This past session we focused on science in the classroom. A point that struck me during this session is the discussions between scientific facts and scientific method. A scientific fact is a static collection of observations, principles, and laws on how the universe works (Davis et al., 2019). Meanwhile, a scientific method is a rigorous strategy of experimental, observation, and verification that is used to validate scientific facts (Davis  et al.,  2019).  During small group discussion, the conversation was focused on how in a classroom most lessons tend to focus students' attention on scientific facts. When stepping into a typical classroom during a science lesson, one would typically see students learning from a textbook. To me this is teaching scientific facts. Curriculum guides and classroom resources tend to focus on the facts that need to be memorized, laws that are applied, and procedures to be mastered through classic ex...

 Hello everyone and welcome to blog post number 3!      This week, the focus was on mathematics in the classroom! As a future math teacher, I have so much to reflect about! A very prominent topic was how math can be taught and the implications for what is taught (Davis et al., 2019). When teaching math, the focus seems to be on the formulas and the final answers. It has been structured around the assumption that math is trapped in a box of logical reasoning (Davis  et al.,  2019). Math is so much more than calculations and answers, it is problem solving and higher order thinking, it is thinking outside of the box!      During this week's session, the class was divided into groups and had to solve two different math problems. One was a problem related to volume and the other was problem that related to missing variables. After everyone had some time to come up with different strategies, there was a discussion on which way the problem was solve...

 Welcome back! Blog number 2 is going to focus on the definition of learning and the implications it has in the classroom.      Learning is a very complicated word to define! As a future teacher one thing I do know is that I will be committed to being a lifelong learner. During this session, the main point that stood out to me was that ideas no not exist in isolation and teachers can use this and the different learning theories to improve their teaching practices. To me, the different learning theories do not exist separately but together; one theory is not more efficient than the other. The different learning theories discussed are folk theories, behaviourist theories, constructivist theories, and socio-cultural theories (Davis et al., 2019). Each of these theories has their strengths and weaknesses in their ideas and implications for teaching. However, the assumption here is that knowledge is an object that exist outside of individuals and learning i...