Over the course of the last few months, I have had the opportunity to learn about classroom management strategies, dive even deeper into the state and national science standards, and develop a more concrete understanding of what it means to be a reform-minded science teacher. The Get Real! Science Cohort and I had the opportunity to reflect on our daily and weekly student teaching placements and read about the most effective teaching and management practices, and then implement said practices. Moreover, we established an even deeper understanding of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). These standards, which I am happy […]

Up until last night (April 7th), in the state of New York, a child as young as 7 could be charged with a delinquency, and any child by the age of 16 could be charged and tried as an adult. The debate launched the Raise the Age Act, which luckily passed last night. Under the act, with a few case by case stipulations, children will no longer be tried as adults at the ages of 16 and 17; instead, New York, like 48 other states (North Carolina is still excluded), will try 18 year olds and older as adults.

Although I […]

For all educators reading this post, have you ever had a moment when a student does something for another student that just melts your heart? Those moments make our jobs worth every second of planning, photocopying, and management. This past week in one of my classes, one in which has a particularly high population of students with 504s and Individualized Education Programs (IEP)s, I witnessed one of those heart warming moments.

One of my more accelerated students voluntarily took the time to work one-on-one with another classmate, one who is classified with an IEP, has significant behavioral issues, and works with […]

This week in class, we spent a generous amount of time planning our slowly approaching unit bundle. The assignment entails preparing a minimum of a six-lesson unit to teach in our second placements. In previous weeks we began our initial planning process by exploring our topics, finding the corresponding standards (the current New York State Common Core Standards, the preliminary, new 2017-2018 New York State Standards, as well as the national standards captured in NGSS, the Next Generation Science Standards). During these earlier weeks we also followed the Understanding by Design (UbD) template developed by Wiggins and McTighe (2011) to guide […]

Happy 2017!

My apologies for not blogging recently, or frequently in the past few months. With the holidays over and the new year up and running, my blogging will become more consistent. Over the past four weeks, I have been full time student teaching at an urban high school in the Rochester City School District. With only one day left of teaching my Living Environment students, I want to take this time to reflect on my experiences and share a few reform-based pedagogical techniques I have learned along the way.

One technique entails clarifying content knowledge for students, while also allowing […]