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About This Example. For me, attention to planning is a key ingredient in weaving lesson strands together. I do this by scripting lessons, timing activities, and planning connections. I also create mnemonics, songs, and visuals to actively engage students and meet the needs of diverse learners. Careful planning pays big dividends by ensuring that students are actively engaged with key concepts and pedagogy. This lesson is from the 11th week of the semester, and I am revisiting science process skills, the Learning Cycle, and Bruner’s Discovery Learning to reinforce these ideas. Typically, I begin class with an activity that focuses students’ attention on the big teaching idea for the day, in this case How do you engage students in their own learning? My goal is to create lessons that confront students’ teaching misconception de jour (gleamed from feedback after each class and through active listening), and I try to set up situations where “aha has” are more likely to take place.

Confronting Students’ Teaching Misconceptions.  Many of my students are enrolled in the language arts cluster as well as the math-science one. This is evidenced in the lessons they plan for their K-6 students. Although I focus on inquiry-based lessons that begin with the exploration of interesting experiences or discrepant events, many students submit M201 lesson plans that are thinly disguised reading lessons with science themes. They also struggle with the idea of what constitutes hands-on science––“But I’m having them cut out pictures to illustrate the story I read. You mean that’s not hands-on science?”

The first activity in this lesson is designed to confront students’ notion that the best place to begin a science lesson is to use trade books to define terms and explain concepts. Embedded within the deceptively simple apple investigation is a lesson on the inappropriate use of models in science teaching. Later, I contrast this with an exploration where plastic egg models are essential to the inquiry process. The apple investigation also connects to the energy theme we have been exploring when I challenge students to find out if apples (and other foods) will burn, and make connects to calories, nutrition, and food groups. This lesson is an example of how I address the perennial dilemma of too much content and not enough time by designing activities that serve multiple purposes (see Midterm Exam). Go to lesson plan sample.