For all of the past school year, I student taught at Jordan High School in Durham, NC. My mentor teacher is the only Physics teacher at Jordan, and he shared much of his teacher wisdom with me. I'm very thankful for this experience.
A few of the pedagogical concepts that I think are crucial in a science classroom are experiential education and argument-driven inquiry. Both of these practices were formally taught within my graduate program at UNC, but I didn't grasp the benefit of these techniques until I explored them in the classroom.
When my students were learning by discovery and developing their own hypotheses, they were much more engaged with content. Was it better for me to provide kinematics formulas and definitions to ensure complete and correct understanding? Or was it best for students to first explore relationships between variables of motion and risk being wrong about their assumptions, before getting formal instruction?
I came to believe that the latter is a more effective and exciting form of teaching. This is experiential education and inquiry-based learning.
Argument-driven inquiry (ADI) is a technique with many steps, which can be further explored at https://www.argumentdriveninquiry.com/programs/adi-instructional-model. Students not only conduct science while learning, but also develop communication and reflective skills in the context of science. The ADI process is a seamless way for students in technical classes to learn these skills which are beneficial regardless of where life takes them. Additionally, the reflection and revision that occurs after hearing classmates' ideas about the phenomena in question promote a more comprehensive grasp of the iterative nature of scientific research.
While I am not one to follow a pedagogical technique to a T, the ideas and motivations behind these two techniques inspire me. I will not be entering the professional world as a high school teacher, but the lessons I learned in the MAT and alongside my students at Jordan have been invaluable. I hope to teach at the university level in the future, and I will carry these (and many other) pedagogical techniques with me in hopes of promoting more engaging and inquiry-based classrooms within engineering curriculum.
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