Erin Van Diemen Oct. 25, 20
Journal Reflection Pro D
October 23,2020
For me, this Pro D day was all about assessment. Which actually worked out very well because my first workshop of the morning was ALL ABOUT ASSESSMENT. Being a Science lover, I chose 3 workshops that would hopefully give me some ideas for Science in the classroom as well as First Nations content and then hopefully touching on assessment throughout the presentations. The three workshops I chose were “How Do We Know?” Taking Secondary Science Outside, Ocean Literacy, and FPPL: Bring the Poster With You! These were great workshops that really helped me think about my lesson planning, what I would bring into my classroom and how to assess these lessons.
My goal is to become an elementary school teacher but “Taking Secondary Science Outside” gave me ideas even for elementary classes. We were asked to go outside, and it didn’t matter how but we needed to bring back evidence of the season outside. I like many, took a picture on my phone. Depending on where we were across the province, some came back with leaves, some with sticks but most were pictures of snow in their backyard. Our task focused on assessment. The big question was, “As a teacher, how do we know that our student understood what I asked them to do?” What if there were no phones in our classroom? How would we assess the students understanding of the task? It was quite clear that our pictures on our phones had the evidence, but other ideas started flowing; collecting leaves, snow in a container, it was all great evidence. The next question: Where does this lesson go from here? What do we wonder? How would this assignment fit into a grade 9 classroom? How would it fit into a kindergarten classroom? There were many great ideas ranging from chromatography experiments to basically learning our seasons. This workshop really made me understand where one simple activity could have such a huge range in grades.
Ocean Literacy sounded really interesting and for me, who loves nature, I thought I would see what this one was about. Like many, I thought it was stories about the ocean or stories about creatures living under water. What Ocean Literacy really is, is understanding our impact on the ocean and the ocean’s impact on us. The only assessment in this workshop was that the speaker gave us a questionnaire to see if we had ever heard of Ocean Literacy and gave us some time in breakout groups to talk about what we though Ocean Literacy was. It was interesting to know that there is a University course at SFU that is focuses just on Ocean Literacy. It sounded like a very interesting course to take as well as how to bring ocean literacy into my own classroom.
One of the things that I am working on is implementing more in my classroom is First Nations content into my lessons. One of the things that I will take away from this workshop is When you’re asking kids to do an activity and you don’t know if it’s going to work – do it yourself. Walk through the steps and understand how you get through the process. Make notes as you go to go through each step, so you know what to expect from the students. Will they have difficulty on certain areas? What questions will come up during the activity? This was a very informative Pro D Day and I absolutely loved it!
