Justifications for Science Lessons

The sequence of four science lessons were designed for prep students who study at an independent coeducational school.

This school provides education from kindergarten to year 12 across four campuses and it is founded on the principles of the Christian faith as taught by the Lutheran church of Australia. The school’s ICSEA (Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage) is 1083 (ACARA, 2012), which is higher than the Australian average of 1000.There are currently 801 students with 2% and 3% being classed as indigenous and ESL students respectively. I taught one of the two prep classes, which comprised of 22 students in total with 9 girls and 13 boys. Each class was well supported with teaching resources including a full time teaching aid, cutting-edge ICT resources and a variety of learning toys, puzzles and books.

The majority of children were generally well-behaved and motivated but sometimes had mild disruptive behaviours such as calling out without hands up, whispering and getting easily distracted.The above conditions were taken into consideration when designing my lessons. Lesson Sequence Context and Design Explanation Currently the school is experiencing the curriculum transition. The Australian Curriculum was introduced into schools state-wide in January 2012 and will gradually replace the Queensland curriculum by 2014. At prep level, where the Australian Curriculum does not cover learning areas, teachers will continue to use the EYCG (Early Years Curriculum Guidelines).

In terms of the prep science course, students are required to develop a basic science understanding and science inquiry skills (P-2 Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Advice and Guidelines, 2012). The sequence of lessons were designed as the first four lessons of a science course for the unit called “Movers and Shakers”, which required students to understand and investigate the human and non-human movements. Taking students’ age and cognitive development into consideration, tasks, questions nd assessments were designed to focus mainly on the knowledge and comprehension level, which are at the lower levels of cognitive complexity in Bloom’s taxonomy (Churchill et al. 2011, 261-262). Most tasks required students to observe and identify the information they had experience with. Based on their current understanding of the information, students had to demonstrate their skills of prediction and description.

Supported by the notion that early learning areas of the EYCG should be correlated and learning is integrated across all early learning areas (P-2 Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Advice and Guidelines, 2012), the interdisciplinary integration approach was used to organize the curriculum around the common leanings across disciplines. The aim was for the children to learn things in relation to movements while improving their literacy and drawing skills as well as learning science concepts and skills while dancing, drawing and writing sentences and numbers (dates).Basic productive pedagogies such as connectedness and supportive classroom environment ensured the quality of the lessons. For example, connectedness was created by children bringing their own toys, observing and sharing ideas with peers about how to play with them and why they move as well as observing, experiencing and talking about things related to the movements in their daily life such as swings, monkey bars etc.

A supportive classroom environment was created by me explaining and modelling explicitly on quality performance criteria for each lesson.The Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) approach was employed to suit the students’ learning styles, needs and cognitive development while still matching subject content. As Shulman (1986) noted, PCK illustrates how the subject matter of a particular discipline is transformed for communication with learners. During the lesson planning I attempted to anticipate what made it difficult for children of this age to learn and which strategies could be used to keep them engaged all through the lesson. I also tried to connect the teaching ideas across fields and to everyday life.Children were provided with hands on, shared experience in all lessons.

Assessment In order to understand what students already knew in terms of how things move and parts that enable them to move for the first lesson, I used informal diagnostic assessment to elicit children’s existing ideas through sharing ideas about movements after playing music and games. At the end of each lesson I used summative assessments by asking students to finish their science journals or make a class book to determine if they had mastered the content.However, instead of giving final scores, I only ticked the parts that they did well accompanied by a comment or statement and let them count how many ticks they had. During the lessons, formative assessments through class discussions were used for students to share their experience, prediction and observation. Feedback was provided during these discussions.

To align with Torrance and Pryor (1998)’s argument that formulation of formative feedback needs to be more divergent and more focus should be on overall learning strategies and process, I used a word wall for the whole unit to achieve the long term learning goal.Students wrote down/draw the words they could think of with the correct spelling being provided. As a result, during the entire unit, students could constantly go back to these words to read them with the help of teachers and peers. To empower children to become more independent and effective learner, the assessment for learning was designed to develop their learning awareness and proficiency within themselves through their own metacognition.

I explained my expectations explicitly on what a good journal should be like before they started and students reflected on what they did well or poorly and how it could be improved after they completed their work. Coda I have had many years of ESL teaching experience in China. All my students were adults and most of the courses I taught were exam-oriented such as CET (a national standard English test for all the university students in China), TOEFL and IELTS training. According to Pratt (2000)’s TPI (the Teaching Perspective Inventory), my dominant perspective of teaching was that ofTransmission, which was shaped by the nature of the courses, age of the students and their learning needs. My strength as a teacher was to take the substantial content mastery as priority, providing students with clear objectives and giving well organized lectures.

I made efficient use of class time, answered questions, set high standards and developed objective means of assessing learning. However, currently my teaching career goal has been changed to become a LOTE teacher in the QLD schools, teaching children of young ages.Therefore I am experiencing many changes in terms of culture, students’ age group and different school systems. My first practicum has provided me with excellent experience that helped me gained a bigger picture of what the Queensland school’s system is like and what the current school curriculums are.

I have also gained experience on how to establish a positive rapport and manage young children. Accordingly I have been adjusting my teaching beliefs and perspective from Transmission to Nurturing to deal with the new teaching context.When doing my practicum, it was a common practice that I encouraged children to complete their work by trying their best rather than from the benevolence of teachers. For students with special needs, who either had attention problems or lower confidence, although I tried to gain an understating of where they were coming from by obtaining more of their personal information from my mentor, I made no excuse for them when it came to the tasks they needed to complete. I communicated with these children by showing my trust and gave clear expectations and reasonable goals.

I tended to provide more encouragement and support to these children by spending more time with them on their work and by organizing other children to work with them. Relevant QCT Professional Standards * Standard One: Design and implement engaging and flexible learning experiences for individuals and groups. * Standard two: Design and implement learning experiences that develop language, literacy and numeracy.