This is a photo of a great-horned owl that I happened to catch sitting on my neighbor's snowbank one morning recently. The the puppy woke me up for an unexpected trip outside, and I am glad I got the chance to see it sitting just outside of my living room window, even if it meant traipsing outside at 1:00 am in the bitter cold.
What does this have to do with this particular blog post? In truth, nothing, but I did first spot it from my backyard, and that is my title, and how often does one get to see an great-horned owl sitting in the snowbank, post rabbit (as evidenced by the entrails, and the hind feet left in that spot in the morning)? I find that there is a learning experience to be had in and around my house almost daily, if I just take the time to really look.
So, back to relevant, learning related content.I have been doing some clinical hours at Oshkosh North High School in three freshman Physical Science classrooms. This is not my particular area of science interest or expertise, but a great learning experience for me. The teacher I am with first hour is teaching this course for the first time in over ten years, and he models his instruction and his lessons after the second hour teacher that I am with. This second instructor co-teaches with another teacher, due to the large number of students having learning disabilities in their classroom. I spoke with him at some length after I realized that they didn't use a textbook in the class. He said that the textbook was not very useful to the content he needed to teach, and it didn't cover the standards that Oshkosh had established for Physical Science. He commented that the books were great for propping things up when needed. The textbooks didn't look to be very old, but perhaps they were just very gently used in general. He said he mostly relied on handouts that he had created himself to cover the material. I asked if he ever used additional reading materials to go along with his lessons, and he said that reading was not his strong suite, so he didn't have any extra materials, such as articles or books for his students. He did comment that for his Astronomy class that he teaches, that he often used magazine and newspaper articles to teach about new discoveries in astronomy. I found this hopeful.
The teacher that I am with for the third hour also relies on his own handouts to teach most of the material. He said that there are reading comprehension benchmarks that are required for the freshman, so he does have them read selected chapters or sections of the textbook. Again, the comment was made that the texts simply don't cover the material that needed to be covered. I asked if he used any additional or extra reading material for his students, and he said no. It just so happens that our book for Discussion, Rocket Boys, is about all of the science content that these teachers are currently discussing in class. I asked all three of them if they had ever thought about using it for their classes, and none of them had even heard of it. They did not seem to want to talk about it any further, either.
What I take away from this is that we may not have the textbooks that we would like to have to teach our classes.Textbooks are a very expensive purchase, and they are expected to last for many years of use. So if we don't like the way in which they present information, it would seem that having comprehensive text sets may be necessary for all units. Creating handouts is fine, but from what I saw of how they are used in these classes, it is no different from writing on the board while you lecture about the printed material. I wonder, is reading in the content area a new idea? These teachers were not overly removed from college, yet none of them really saw using additional reading material as something that would benefit their students. I can definitely see where text sets would benefit the students in these classes.
