Student Led Learning

I have been kind of struggling on what to reflect on each week during my student teaching. I write down notes about each lesson and how the day went and what I would improve upon, but nothing I'd say was worthy of a blog entry. Out of this week, one thing I can say I have explored most is that learning can be both achieved and evidenced in so many ways. I've noticed that students don't always retain what I teach, and sometimes retain things I had no idea they would even remember overnight.
 This week, I tried to challenged myself to speak as little as possible from the front of the room. I wanted the students' input on how they want to learn and evidence that learning to me. I started this week with an intro to lipids in food science where the students tested various materials to determine if they made a good lava lamp. They were able to experiment and explore to their heart's desire and record what they noticed. I was actually surprised by what they kept track of, and the connections they made. I noticed my higher achieving students were the ones who were the most bent on finding the "right" answer, while my often trouble students kept their phones down and started mixing and matching compounds the entire class period. I really noticed by this seemingly simple exercise how my students learned. There were the "look it up and follow the directions we read carefully" students, contrasted with the "just try it out and see what we do" students, along with everyone in between.

By nature of food science, I have a lot of questions asked throughout the week that I can't answer myself, but we lack the time to explore during that class. Dr. Foster had suggested making a space to capture our thoughts and questions and review during the week. I came up with the idea during lunch on Friday to have the students post questions into a tri-fold display "food cupboard" that we will review at the end of the week. I had never tried this, but I asked them what THEY wanted to do with the questions throughout the week, and how we can make Friday into a food "mythbuster" day. They came up with several ideas on using the cupboard and how to evidence student accountability with the Mythbuster day. on Monday they will design the board and the procedures for posting in it each week.
Throughout my teaching, especially in food science, I've been exploring ways I can put the accountability for classroom learning on the students. I've been asking them what projects they would like to work on, or what ideas we have on this or that topic. Even at the start of the semester I asked students what they wanted to learn about food and I had a wide variety of topics and some actual interest in the class. I've also tried to develop topics that allow students to explore things without too much direction from the teacher, like the lava lamp one. Another student teacher and myself looked over some of our lessons and tried to identify ways we could allow the students to have better investment and control over their learning. Sometimes all it takes is to think of the best way you can get out of speaking at the students, and put it back on them. The trick is to provide limited, yet explicitly clear instructions for whatever they are doing. I hope going forward I can look at ways to allow for student autonomy and inquiry based learning, by removing myself from the front of the room and to my students' side to engage and educate them.