New Academic Year – New Beginnings
A photo of the West Coast Trail by one of the physics teacher-candidates from 2014-2015 cohort.
As we are beginning this new academic year, I am thinking of the former Teacher-Candidates and now newly minted science and mathematics teachers who will be entering their classrooms as part-time or full-time teachers for the first year this fall. While I have been teaching for a while now (20+ years), I still remember the excitement, anticipation and even some fear of being a new teacher… While I think that teaching future teachers in many ways is very different from teaching secondary school students or even first-year university students (teenagers…), I still feel a bit nervous about starting my EDCP 357 Physics Methods Course tomorrow. What we will be able to do in our methods class in many ways will help shape the views of our teacher-candidates and will send them to the path of teaching that will hopefully help excite their students with science. I remember how big an impact my teachers in teacher education had on me… I hope I will be able to do the same.
Every year I have an opportunity to reflect on my teaching and what happened in my class and how I want to improve it. This year I will be working on having less lecturing and more teacher-candidates’ engagement. I will try to make time for more mini-teaching sessions and most importantly I will try to help them prepare for their practicum. I hope it will be a great group and this initial nervousness will grow into positive and productive relationships with them. I am especially excited about using educational technologies to promote learning in my class. We will be using PeerWise and Peer Instruction, we will be video taping mini lessons and analysing them. We will also be using Google docs and other collaborative software. I hope modelling the use of these technologies to promote collaboration will be useful for teacher-candidates.
These are a few of my recent papers on the topic.
Chapter_8_RevisedMilner-BolotinSpringer
Let us see what tomorrow brings and meanwhile I would like to wish everybody a very productive new academic year! Happy learning!