Teaching Blossoming Scientists

This practical and user-friendly professional development guide is written for educators who teach middle school students at schools and for those who teach from the home. This book assists you in developing, implementing and evaluating your science teaching and your students' science learning. The included activities allow for individual reflection and/ or shared group reflections while guiding you to conceptualize science teaching as a personal activity requiring a large capacity for reflective thought, deliberate action and experimentation. Before you can begin to teach science effectively, you need to understand yourself and your teaching philosophy. Then you need to begin to develop an understanding of your students; you cannot teach unless you know your audience. In this book, you will conduct in-depth reflections on who you are and who your students are. What are their views of science and scientists? What prior knowledge do they bring to the learning environment? What experiences did they have in their early years? What are the demographics of the school and the community and what kind of support can you reasonably expect from them? What are the implications of the diversity in your children for how you develop and teach science lessons? Great science teaching and learning is a result of meaningful preparation and collaboration amongst teachers, students, parents, schools and the community. As an educator, you have the power to make an outstanding contribution to the scientific pipeline by nurturing the critical thinking skills of blossoming scientists so they have the opportunity and foundation to become our nation's future scientists.