Welcome to Part 2 of my series of blog posts in which I discuss a few tips which I feel have been essential to building confidence in your teaching sprinkled with tidbits from my own experience. If you missed Part 1, check that out below.

Promoting Inquiry-Based Learning: Strategies for Engaging STEM Students

• Incorporating hands-on experiments and projects
• Encouraging critical thinking and problem-solving skills
• Fostering collaboration and teamwork
• Utilizing technology for interactive learning experiences

Incorporating hands-on experiments and projects

I can’t actually think of a better way to get students interested in learning than to incorporate hands-on activities.

In science, this comes in the form of labs, projects, and inquiry-based education.

Inquiry-based education is my favorite approach to teaching science, and was first introduced to me by my mentor teacher from my first 5 years of teaching.

The overall goal of inquiry-based education is to immerse students in the process of actually doing math and science through story-telling and problem solving approaches.

The best place to look for resources on inquiry-based education is through the American Modeling Teachers Association – check their link at the end of this blog!

Encouraging critical thinking and problem-solving skills

Long gone are the days of requiring students to memorize and regurgitate information with little to no application for their day to day lives.

As a teacher, I love to converse with my students, to find out their likes and dislikes, and to foster a love of learning, critical thinking, and problem solving skills that will help them to lead more prosperous lives.

In the small school district in which I teach, I have a lot of opportunity to get to know my students well. That then helps me to ask open-ended questions, promote discussions, and provide relevant real-world scenarios for my students to learn and reason from.

In my students’ math classes, sometimes finding open-ended questions can be hard to come by – however, I have a created a few here that you might like to try:

Fostering collaboration and teamwork

Managing expectations in a classroom is a huge part of promoting effective student collaboration and teamwork.

I was one of those kids in school that didn’t mind group work – many times I ended up doing a lot of the academic work, but through attending a small school, my class and I were all pretty aware of what each others’ strengths and weaknesses were and we delegated other tasks well. However, I understand this doesn’t always turn out so well in other classrooms.

Through research conducted by Peter Liljedahl in his ground-breaking book Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, there are a few ways to promote teamwork and collaboration.

One that I focus on in my classroom are to use visibly random grouping that changes daily. It is important that students are able to truly see that the grouping is random, and not that you as a teacher are pulling the strings, It is also important to change that grouping daily so that students don’t get comfortable falling into specific roles, and also so that students who may not get along don’t have to spend multiple days or weeks in a row together.

I also like to post affirmations in my classroom. Check those out here:

Utilizing technology for interactive learning experiences

As a teacher who went to school herself during the technology revolution, and who also sees her students constantly staring a screens, I actually like to take a step back from technology and from using the one-to-one devices in my classroom as much as possible.

However, I absolutely see the benefit of using technology when experiencing something in real life in the classroom just isn’t possible.

A few things I like to use tecnology for:

• Immediate feedback on practice problems
• Interactive diagrams
• Short videos (I try to keep these less than 20 minutes)

The website I use the most with my students in my math classroom is Khan Academy. You can even assign practice problems and example videos if you set up a teacher and student account!

In my science classroom, my favorite resource is biointeractive.org. So many great teaching tools, lessons, and videos to share.