EDSS 531: Educational Philosophy/ Model Integration

               After the class presentations of the eight teaching models: Inductive thinking, Attaining concepts, Scientific concepts, Scientific inquiry, Role playing, Memorization, Synectics, and Simulation overview; there are two that fit well with my teaching style and educational philosophy, which are the scientific inquiry model and attaining scientific concepts.

My passion for the scientific inquiry and attaining scientific concept model is rooted in defining the nature of science.  Science is the discipline where critical thinking and analytical thinking processes are required to excel in the subject.  Students must have great attention to details and at the same time be able to compare and contrast their observations.  Taking the information gained through observations, students must be able to organize the information using high order thinking skills to present the information in a concise, clear and understandable way. The scientific process also involves presenting the information discovered to others, teaching the findings or newer questions to others, to the community.  The scientific process is a lot like teaching! I found out during my clinical practice, that if I organize my lesson plans directly to the way the scientific process is, I am also using the higher order thinking skills that the scientific process end result.  The beginning of the lesson, the INTO, is designed to get the student to transition their thinking from whatever subject, topic or thought into the subject you are teaching.  The INTO is a lot like the scientific process of an introduction or surveying the area/background what you already know about a science process.  It focuses your thoughts on the upcoming subject.  The THROUGH is the hypothesis generation which focuses the scientist on the essential question needed to cover the topic.  A teacher must modify their lesson according to the students’ responses or the students’ feedback from the activities and ongoing assessment and progress monitoring. An educator must then test the students’ content knowledge much like testing a hypothesis to see if a certain teaching strategy was effective or not.  If not, the educator then adjusts her teaching style and strategy to re-test their hypothesis and arrive at a conclusion, which is the BEYOND portion of a lesson.