Robison - Week 3 Readings

I really enjoyed all three of these readings. Although challenging, it gave me realistic examples of ways to have better in-class discussions with my students to overall open up their way of thinking. The questioning, on the teacher's part, is vital in creating beneficial "science talk" in the classroom. I tend to want to give my students too much information without making them think through it for themselves first, and these articles gave me ideas of ways to steer away from that. I want my classroom to be a place where the students are doing the thinking, so in turn, they are doing the learning. I hope that my students are able to have informative discussions with one another about the topics that we discuss in class, and more importantly, the "bigger picture" of each topic.

These articles have encouraged me to do more planning on the front end of my lessons in order to formulate good questions to generate more classroom discussions. I feel that in many of my classes, I am doing most of the talking, but I would love to have my students do more of the talking. I hope to encourage them to engage with one another in higher-level thinking and conversation through my formulated questions so that I am not just giving them the "right answers" for the tests.

My favorite part of the readings was the last article, which discussed interviewing your students. This is not something I ever would have thought to do, but how do you know what your students already know without asking them? Although this would require a little bit of extra time and planning at the beginning of the unit, it could save the teacher time in the end. It is important to realize that students might know more information than we, as teachers, think that they do. In order to frame our way of teaching and our students' learning, we must discover all of their prior knowledge to the topics.