Knowing and Learning Online Journal

Engage What defines the culture of thinking in chemistry is observations of the physical world and making hypotheses about the unseen. Most chemistry is trying to explain changes and reactions that happen on an atomic level. As in any science subject, the culture fosters the chance to make observations and challenge themselves to explain what they observed, supported by experiments. Explore The essential elements of mathematical and scientific thinking are finding connections and using prior knowledge to learn. While this can be applied to all subjects, it is especially prevalent in math and science in order to create a suitable curriculum in schools that help students towards success. External representations give a visual for students and teachers to see the connections. Instead of simply talking about connections and making predictions about how each thing relates, the external representations allows for teachers to see what connections the students are seeing....

Engage Perhaps it is because it has been a long time since my last math class but Peterson's visual approach examples were very hard for me to understand. While learning math, I always cared about the how and the why, which seemed to be lacking in the modeling, at least the small demonstrations that were shown in the video. I believe in order to solve the large struggle with science and mathematics concepts, there needs to be more than a visual approach. An organized and easily understood verbal explanation to accompany the model. This way the students can make more connections between the model and the intended topics. Explore Extend The similiarites between indigenous practices of teaching and western practices is their focus on using modeling as a visual for the students to interact with and study. Also similar to western teaching lectures is the oral transmission of the indigenous people. Some differences are how the indigenous people interact with the children. Largel...

Engage This video made me question my approach to teaching. I guess it must be because I grew up under a more traditional education before research was becoming applied but I really enjoyed the textbook problems that broke down the approach step-by-step like the ski slope problem. Growing up, I thought the best way to convey a difficult or new concept was to break it down step by step. However, after this video and the reading about misconceptions, I realize that this approach really only helps a small percentage of the student population. I incorrectly approached teaching as if the students were "mini-me's" which would have resulted in a failure to address most of the students needs. Explore

Engage To think mathematically/scientifically means to think about the problem from a scientific or mathematic point of view. For example, when faced with a problem and try to break down the problem into parts and try to solve them. Setting up Christmas decorations is a good idea. From deciding how to distribute the decorations evenly across a certain space. And which decorations should go up in a specific order for highest efficiency.  Explore Fish is Fish story really teaches us that prior knowledge and perception is really important to take in consideration when teaching new ideas. Constructive psychology perspectives is a really good way to explain Fish is Fish story to human learning. The fish has a previous construct of what other people should look like. Thus when the frog was explaining birds and humans the fish based the information of his construct of other animals. Hence the imagined creatures were heavily based off of a body of a fish. Same as Fish, other peopl...

Engage Dr. Gopnik described children as flittering butterflies. The description really captures the excited explorative minds of students. Students have a short attention span and a wild imagination. From her video, I really feel a drive to include various activities and techniques while teaching in order to expose the students to various representations of scienctific knowledge. I really loved science and the science experiments that we would engage in as well as demos that the teacher set up. The experiments broke up the mundane lecture style teachings that my high school chemistry teacher tended to use. I really liked how Dr. Gopnik's comparison of a child's attention span to a spotlight where they cannot focus on a single thing. Their lack of direct focus gives teachers a chance to bring real-world examples and applications to the textbook topics. The possibility of links is astronomical. Explore

Engage We engage in thinking every day, from the simplest "what should we eat for lunch?" to more complex thoughts of how to make lunch. Starting with what ingredients are needed, what order to cook the food, and how to plate it; there are so many different types of thinking.  Thinking  is the action that occurs when we are actively using our minds to place information together and make a decision. From the lunch example, we make our decision on what we should eat for lunch based on what ingredients are in the fridge or what restaurants are in the vicinity. Evaluate Dr. Cabera's ideas about thinking skills are understandable and relatable . Many times students simply memorize formulas for a certain problem however as soon they encounter a variation of the problem then they are unsure how to solve it. Teaching skills where students are encouraged and driven to think actively and deeper will certainly aid their schooling in the long run. Over my years of schoolin...