Parent Involvement in Science Learning

If you think it is the science teacher's job exclusively to instill the love and curiosity of the subject in students - think again. Parents and other caregivers can nurture this curiosity in children of all ages by creating a positive and safe environment at home for exploration and discovery.  Learning to love math and science is important for so many reasons as our world becomes more dependent on technology.  It's much easier than parents may think to your children in the world of science and technology. The internet is a great place to start.  A simple search on Pinterest can open up a world of experiments, fun infographics and even links to sites that can be used as a supplement  or further application of science lessons  taught at school.  By taking the time to execute simple yet worthwhile experiments such as planting seeds, or taking a nature hike - even feeding ants in a field, parents can encourage children to be curious and ask questions- traits that will most likely spill over into academic life and flourish with time.  Curious thinkers need to be nurtured at school and at home.  Together we can raise our students to love and learn science.

International Arab Conference on Quality Assurance in Higher Education

Lebanese International University had the privilege to host one of the greatest influential educational conferences in the Arab world that target higher education. For the eighth time this conference has been pioneering to find solutions for the problems faced by higher education in the Arab World. Researchers, experts and scientists from around the Arab world studied issues like promoting employability for university graduates, how we prepare them for the work place, how to ensure maximum learning, how we incorporate technology and E-learning, and many other issues that assure quality and accreditation in higher education. The audience this conference targeted was people of high stalk like university presidents, deans and directors of Quality Assurance and Accreditation offices, people within the research community, but how can a university student benefit from such conference?

Dr. Wafaa Ahmed Zahran of Menoufia University mentioned in her research on how accreditation changed and improved learning in their medical school, that one step they took in the road to reach accreditation was to let their students know what their rights are and what they are supposed to benefit from during the time spent in university. This awareness is exactly why university students should attend this conference, which can help them assure the quality of their own education.

On the other hand higher education does not differ much from lower education systems. As a teacher in training I found it very inspiring to hear people who devoted their lives to improve education talk about their findings. We both aim for individuals that are able to survive the outside world, in the case of higher education in the work place. The term employability was repeated often during the conference. Dr. Narimane Hadj-Hamou the founder and CEO of CLICKS in Dubai-UAE spoke on how important it is to expose students to the workplace and allow them to experience situations through hands on activities where they can apply the skills and knowledge they learn in classes. She also spoke about effective pedagogy that supports employability, which refers to the strategies that educators use to teach students skills that make them competent in the workplace. Those innovative pedagogical techniques might include metacognition skills that teaches students to think about their own thinking which is the highest level of thinking according to bloom's taxonomy. Dr. Hadj-Hamou also mentioned how important it is to teach through technology as she said that "students might know how to use technology, but do not necessary know how to learn it".

All of this brings us back to what we have learned during many of our TD courses, and is another proof that we can also reach quality assurance in our schools through these very own techniques.

Finally, I think it is important to note that after attending this conference and listening to all these great speakers, it makes me very proud to know that these people who belong to the Arab world have such impact in the field of education. In addition, this conference made me realize how blessed we are to have a university like the LIU that endorses education in all its forms, and is always looking for methods and ways to better the journey of education to yield individuals who are professional and can tackle the outside world with no complications.

Teaching Students About Climate Change

Our planet faces the threat of climate change everyday. The temperature is on the rise and unless we do something about we might melt before we know it.So what can we do as teachers to help in decreasing this change? We can raise awareness among our young students. We must teach our students how important earth is to us, what is offers, how it protects, its specialties, and show them how to love it. Show them videos of the ice melting in the north pole, the rise of the water level, and the way penguins and polar bears are losing their habitat. Show them the amount of plastic in the sea, the fish, whales, and sea turtles that die from consuming it. Talk to them about extinct organisms, whether plants or animals that were once present in the ares where they are living that are not there anymore. Present statistics to them of the amount of carbon emissions by cars, factories, and wars. Involve them in recycling activities, planting trees, or even picking garbage of the roads. Explain to them how scientist are spending days and nights trying to figure ways to decrease this change, and what they can do to decrease it as well. Do not forget to show them stories of people who succeeded in finding methods to decrease climate change or preserve a specie on the verge of extinction. Doing so will give them hope to believe that it is still possible to save the planet. 

  

My One Month Teaching Experience

Growing up my parents being both teachers who poured their life into their job made me realize how beautiful yet tiring teaching is. Thus I decided to be a teacher to inspire students the way they did. I haven't finished my teaching diploma yet but i applied to the school I used to learn in last summer, so when they needed a teacher to substitute they choose me to teach for a month. Teaching in the school I used to learn in was a dream come true. I used to set in these very seats when I acquired my passion for science and I was hoping I could help my students find that passion. However, as a went around asking for their names and checking how they felt about science I was surprised that my students hated science, and the reason was their teacher. After I heard most students from grade 1,2, 5, and 6, say the same thing I knew I needed to be different to do things she does not do, however I still needed to be myself. One of the things I tried to focus on is to give my students a chance, hear them out, although their questions might be silly sometimes or too complicated, I did my best to give them answers with the knowledge I had while staying within their comprehension span. Another thing I focused in is to include all students during lesson explanation, and keeping them all engaged at the same time. I had to move around, call on students, and ask them to come to the board to write or read off the book. As to class management I have to admit it was really hard. The students are used to noisy periods, where some students would take advantage of their teacher and would get kicked from class sometimes. I put in mind that kicking students out was not an option and what happens in class can be resolved internally. In addition, I tried making science class more interesting, and with the help of the coordinator I showed my students grasshoppers, and conducted an experiment with them, I incorporated cooperative learning, used the microscope with my students and prepared slides with their help, and used the concept attainment model...If it was not for the stress and the pressure I felt juggling school and university I would say I had a great experience. Of course this month was not perfect but I am proud to say that my students look happy when they see me. 

Webinar- How to Boost Emotional Intelligence in Students

As I mentioned in my reflection on the EDUC560 course webinars are highly beneficial for teachers who are willing to enhance their pedagogical repertoire through the knowledge of experts. I witnessed this by attending a webinar presented by professor and former director of clinical training in Department of Psychology at Rutgers University Maurice J. Elias, and director of the center for Child & Family Development in Morristown, New Jersey Steven E. Tobias who are also the authors of the book titled Boost Emotional Intelligence in Students. Emotional intelligence also referred to as EQ is the ability to manage one’s feelings and interact positively with other people. Prof. Elias stressed the importance of EQ and said that it is one of the most important issues students face, just like not being able to read will present challenges to students, not being able to read people will present them to challenges as well.  EQ is very similar to and is sometimes called Social-Emotional Learning, Social-Emotional and Character Development, Social Skills Development, Cognitive-Behavioral Skill Training…etc, which all aim to boost EQ.

Why should we focus on EQ?

Having high EQ is related to having a sense of self, as well as the ability to have meaningful and rewarding relationships with others. Just as IQ is important, not having EQ will result in having a hard time listening, paying attention and working in groups in class.

Having EQ will help students achieve better academically and become more available for learning. In order to make the best of the time spent in school, boosting our students EQ skills will help relieve the stress they face at home whether economical, violence or trauma.

Accountability assessment or the test our students take in schools will not prepare them for the tests of life. This is the mission both Elias and Tobias aim for, to prepare students for life. Studies show that emotional intelligence is correlated with career success and academic skills. A Study done by Google identified seven soft skills referred to as emotional intelligence skills to determine whether their employees are successful they are: Value responsible, hard-working, can handle stress, can communicate clearly and assertively, problem solving skills, resolve conflicts, and get along with team members all being aspects of emotional intelligence. Many other studies support that in order for our students to succeed emotional intelligence skills are indispensable throughout the process of kindergarten to university and later on career life.

Three primary EQ areas:

1. Area 1: Self-Awareness and Self-Management: focuses on feeling and self-regulation. 

2.  Area 2: Social Awareness and Relationship skills: deal with the ability to get along with other people. 

3. Area 3: Possible Decision-Making and Problem Solving: is the capacity to deal with the obstacles life throws at you in an ethically and morally responsible ways.

Techniques to build skills in these areas:

1. Sample time Frames and Lesson planning: for example if you have the whole you year you must target all three areas of EQ, if not focus on only area 1 (more like a pre-requisite for the next two areas) and either area 2 or area 3. Devoting some time to practice skills of these areas in a necessity that will make your other instruction more efficient. Conclude with a self-evaluation assessment of what was learned and how to keep skill development going. Lesson can be 30 minutes long to as much as you can take. Practice is key, working intensively helps students internalize these skills.

2. The structure of lessons: Skills we should focus on in our lessons:

        EQ area 1 (Self-Awareness and Self-Management):

- Skill 1: Knowing your EQ strengths and challenges. Understand and recognize the fact that even the most miserable child has emotional intelligence strengths.

- Skill 2: Understanding your values and being your best self.

- Skill 3: Thinking and talking about feelings.

- Skill 4: Recognizing negative self-talk and practicing positive self-talk.

- Skill 5: Achieving and maintaining self-control.

EQ area 2 (Social Awareness and Relationship skills):

- Skill 6: Anticipating and defusing trigger situation: To be able to regulate emotions and be aware of the things that set you off. We want students to understand what sets them off and learn how to manage those thing when they happen or even avoid them.

- Skill 7: Assertive communication.

- Skill 8: Reading the social and emotional cues of others.

-  Skill 9: Playing our many social roles (communicating differently with different people).

- Skill 10: Empathy (how people around you are feeling).

EQ area 3 (Possible Decision-Making and Problem Solving): helping the kids have a problem solving strategy they can use no matter the situation.

- Skill 11: Using the ESP problem solving process.

- Skill 12: Goal setting.

- Skill 13: Brainstorming.

- Skill 14: Anticipating Outcomes.

- Skill 15: Planning for success and overcoming obstacles.

While teaching those skills we have to model them for our students.

Some skills to use in lessons while teaching EQ skills:

1)      Developing a feelings vocabulary: to help your students define how they are feeling. You can start by asking students “How many feeling do you think you experience in a day, an afternoon, an hour or even at the same time?”  to introduce the topic or start a discussion about feelings in a sharing circle which will help in developing empathy and communication skills.

2)      Developing self-control: Ask students what they do to calm themselves down and when is it important to control strong feelings. Then show students techniques that will help them exercise self-control (e.g breathing techniques)

From this webinar it was very obvious that if we focus on emotional intelligence it will make is easier for us to deal with students. In my opinion, when our students realize that we care about how they feel they start trusting us more and become willing to listen to us giving us the chance to instill in them more emotional intelligence skills.

Dealing With Gifted Students

Gifted children are those who possess abilities that are significantly above the norm for their age. Giftedness may manifest in one or more domains such as; intellectual, creative, artistic, leadership, physical or in a specific academic field such as language arts, mathematics or science. Not all gifted students are the same. It is up to us as adults and teachers to know how to deal with gifted individuals to maximize their intellectual abilities. 

Characteristics of Gifted Individuals

 Because gifted children are so diverse, they do not show the same characteristics. But the most common ones are:

1.   Excellent memory and thinking abilities

2.   High curiosity level

3.   Creative with high imagination

4.   Prefer to work independently even being good in leadership  

5.   Enjoys solving problems, especially with numbers and puzzle

6.   Great sense of responsibility and leadership

7.   Longer attention span and intense concentration

8.    Learn basic skills quickly and with little practice

9.    Puts ideas or things together that are not typical

10.               Keen and/or unusual sense of humor

11.                Is easily bored with routine tasks

12.                Is self-motivated (does not need external motivation)

13.               Desire to organize people/things through games or complex schemas

14.               Strive for perfection

15.               Bursting with emotion and sensitivity

16.               Can express him or herself well

17.               Adapts readily to new situations

We often assume that gifted students are perfect and cannot possibly suffer from any behavioral or learning problems. However, we are wrong and gifted students can have these problems but require us to deal with them differently than we would do in regular students. Here are some of the Symptoms of gifted children with behavior problems might show:

-       Easily gets "off task" and "off topic"

-       Is impatient when not called on in class 

-        Is easily bored when they finish an activity

-       Can become disruptive in class (annoying others)

-       Shows strong resistance to repetitive activities and memorization

-       Completes work quickly but sloppily

-       May resist working on activities apart from areas of interest

-       Leaves projects unfinished

-       Takes on too much and becomes overwhelmed

-       Challenges authority

-       Does not handle criticism well

-       Does not work well in groups

-       Tends to be absent-minded regarding practical details

-       Forgets homework assignments

-       Can be very critical of self and others

-       Likes to argue a point

-       Is a perfectionist and expects others to be perfect as well

-       Easily gets carried away with a joke

-       Has a tendency to become the "class clown"

-       Sometimes perceived as a "know-it-all" by peers

-       Is sometimes "bossy" to peers in group situations

Many signs exhibited by gifted kids can be seen as symptoms of a learning or behavior disability. For example, the ability to acquire information quickly can result in a child who is bored, impatient with slower kids and rebellious when it comes to classroom routine and rote drills. A child who is creative and innovative might be seen as disruptive and out of step with his peers. Poor handwriting, for example, often is a sign of a learning disability, but many gifted children who have poor handwriting might just be thinking faster than their hands are getting it all down on paper. Furthermore, some gifted students are face being underachievers.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR TEACHERS

1.    Implement a multi-level and multi-dimensional curriculum.

2.    Be flexible with the curriculum.

3.    Make the curriculum student-centered.

4.    Allow students to pursue independent projects based on their own individual interests.

5.    Try to maximize your students’ potential by expecting them to do their best.

6.    Teach interactively. Have students work together, teach one another, and actively participate in their own and their classmates’ education.

7.    Explore many points of view about contemporary topics and allow opportunity to analyze and evaluate material.

8.    Consider team teaching, collaboration, and consultation with other teachers. Use the knowledge, skills, and support of other educators or professionals.

9.    Involve students in academic contests.

10. Consider parental input about the education of their gifted children.

11. Always remember that gifted children are similar in many ways to the average child in the classroom. Do note place unrealistic expectations and pressures on gifted children.

12. Address the counseling needs of each student to support emotional growth, as needed.

13. Do note assign extra work to gifted children who finish assignments early. This is unfair and frustrating to them.

14. Provide plenty of opportunities for gifted children and average children to engage in social activities. Some gifted children may need help in developing social skills.

15. Establish and maintain a warm, accepting classroom. Teach your classroom community to embrace diversity and honor differences.

Remember that implementing some of these strategies will benefit all of the children in the classroom, not just the gifted ones.

A True Inspiration

Our learning journey, from kindergarten to university, is definitely one of the most influential and character shaping journeys a person will embark upon. If an individual is fortunate enough such a journey is life changing and uplifting. Science class, and later on biology, from grades five through to brevet, were by far the most memorable part of my personal journey at Salah El-Deen Educational Center. Miss Faten, this enthusiastic and vibrant teacher who would go on to teach and inspire so many began her pedagogic journey by teaching my grade five science class. Because my generation came of age in an educational atmosphere still very much influenced by the remnants of archaic teaching practices, it was awe-inspiring as a ten year old to see a creative, active, as well as intelligent teacher breathe life into the otherwise limp learning experience most of us were living. Whether it be bovine organs to show heart valves and ventricles or beautiful, fresh flowers to show reproduction in plants, this teacher was always looking for ways to keep us intrigued and captivated by the subject matter at hand.  She also used a very generous, non-food reward system in which she made certain the “smart” students didn’t monopolize rewards as we had experienced occasionally with other teachers. What was obvious during my teacher’s lessons was that she was always prepared. She explained her lessons with clarity allowing us to master the art of analyzing, interpreting, describing, hypothesizing, and constructing graphs, by the end of grade six. Moreover, she would make sure each year after that we were able to apply these pillars of scientific method.   Classroom preparation is not however exclusive to a plan book. Her remarkable effort was seen through all the posters she meticulously hand crafted, and the actual animal organs she would supply to aid in demonstrating the different systems within animals. She had short, stress-free quizzes to assess how well her previous lesson went so that she would know where our level of comprehension stood. Perfection is something we all strive for but can never achieve because we are always looking to do better-to be better. As a first year instructor, this science teacher may have been going through all of the trials and tribulations a first year teacher goes through but in retrospect she was a motivator, an innovator, able to balance proper classroom management without sacrificing fun science.

Importance of Bloom's Taxonomy

Day in and day out our role as educators advances. Not only are we responsible for building students’ character, we are obligated to teach them how to think. We need our students to be able to approach problems and complications in various and innovative ways, and examine them from different perspectives. They must be able to recall previously learned information to understand what is being taught, apply it in the right areas, analyze situations, synthesize by putting together the material that is learned and finally, evaluate according to given standards, the last six being the basic elements of Bloom’s taxonomy. The more we as teachers are aware of how important it is to help our students reach higher levels of thinking the more likely our students are able to succeed. In other cases it was proven that truth-seeking, open-mindedness, self-confidence, and maturity also improved along critical thinking when teachers aimed to increase students’ thinking abilities. If we are to find lasting and honest success as teachers it is crucial that we move away from teaching young minds by rote and move towards the innovation and expansion of students’ minds by training them as well as ourselves, to use higher levels of thinking.  A large mass of cognitive research has overwhelming proven that problem solving and reasoning engage our children on levels that far exceed traditional mechanical, parrot-fashioned, methods of old. It is obvious that Bloom’s Taxonomy is a foundation for learning that is easily applicable in a classroom environment when success of students is put first and foremost.

My philosophy of teaching

Teaching is one of the most noble jobs in the world, we are blessed with the chance of influencing young children every day. Being a successful teacher does not come easy, we must be role models for our students to follow, believe in their ever growing intelligence and abilities, and encourage them to be the best they can. Every students has the right to learn and express themselves, it is our job as teachers to promote an environment that stimulates our students to grow socially, emotionally, physically and mentally. I believe that students learn best when they have access to hands-on activities and have a teacher that encourages experimenting and trying new things. We are under pressure to create individuals who have the confidence, perseverance, discipline, and intelligence to become effective contributors to the society, I hope to bring the best in my students to become such individuals. Learning is not only limited for students, as teachers we should keep an eye out for learning form our students, environment, and family, while keeping our own knowledge and teaching methods up to date. This is my philosophy of education, and I know it will constantly change, but that only means that I am growing.