By Carmela Jones, MNS
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” -Socrates
One very warm, humid Hawaiian day, my classroom was uncomfortably hot with no air conditioning. I was excited about teaching a high school General Chemistry stoichiometry lesson. I was in my early thirties at the time. My face was glued to the chalkboard, while students were in neat rows of desks behind me.
I wrote with classic white chalk on the black, dusty background one formula after another, balanced one equation after another, solved one problem after another. I was pumped; I was in the zone. There were at least five imaginary bulbs flashing above my head; I felt the neon colors blinking on and off in a synchronized fashion.
Picture my dismay, when I turned to face my students and all I saw were glazed over eyes and confusion written all over their zombified faces. No light bulbs above their heads. No neon learning going on there.
Fear. Panic. I’m not doing the job I’m getting paid to do. Uh oh, what now? Something needed to be different; something needed to change. I voraciously sought out that something different, that secret ingredient that might make all the difference in my students gaining something, anything, from my lessons.
I spent the next five years continuing to teach. Simultaneously, I also spent that time searching for that mysterious, secret sauce, teaching formula that continued to elude me. You know, the one that would spark student engagement and student ownership in my classroom. The culmination of those years landed me at the University of Hawai’i one summer with a dozen or so eager, science educators. We were set to learn something called Modeling Instruction. What happened next changed EVERYTHING!
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If you are a Modeling teacher, share your story by sending it to the email listed. If you know a great Modeling teacher, encourage them to send their story to the email listed. cjones.stemprofessionals@gmail.com.
If you are Modeling teacher and want to interact with other Modeling teachers with a question, an issue, a classroom experience, an announcement, or anything other MI teachers might be interested in, post it on the M2M (Modeler to Modeler) blog on the AMTA site. https://modelinginstruction.org/submit-a-blog-entry-to-m2m/
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