Wachstumshormone

Teaching in the Environment and Community (Series)

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seedsofawarenessThis new, regular feature by CLEARING “master teacher” Jim Martin explores how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula.
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Pt. 1: Where Classroom Learning Meets the Real World

Hello. I’m Jim Martin,  a retired teacher (5th through college) and biologist. I started teaching general biology to college students in the early 70s, excited about the new scientific developments which were coming out almost monthly…

Pt. 2: Developing Capacity

We evolved to survive in wild environments by learning them. Our brain did this learning by finding and exploiting patterns in the world it encountered. In the end, our brain has developed into an autonomous learning machine…

Pt. 3: Emergent Phenomena

If you go to a place in the world outside your classroom – your school yard, a trail nearby, a stream bank – and think about it, you’ll find it is a prism which, oriented effectively, holds the power to involve and invest your students in their educations, and empower them as persons. Simple miracle; takes work to discover…

Pt. 4: Inquiry

We are, indeed, the wonders that we seek. To discover them, we must look deep within ourselves, to that part which can reach out to the world and comprehend it. Then release ourselves to know.
Odd, that we must release what’s within us to know what is outside. Traveling within is a process, best taken a step at a time. Enough steps taken, and your teaching will change…

Pt. 5: Questions are Compasses

Our words, leaves falling from trees, in their numbers can obscure the realities they describe. Writing a clear, succinct inquiry question is not an easy thing to do, but can become relatively easy with practice. We can only think as clearly as how well we use the language we think with, can only travel as far as our thoughts will carry us…

Pt. 6: The Easy Part

We’ve been exploring science inquiry, starting with doing a casual observation in a natural area. In the last blog, I found an inquiry question. What did it tell me to do? I discovered how straightforward the Investigative Design is when it is built upon a clean inquiry question…

Pt. 7: From Hand to Mind

Over the past few blogs, we’ve walked through a science inquiry done in a natural area. First, we noticed something there, then asked a question about it, and used the question to develop an investigation. We did the investigation, collecting data that we hoped would answer our question. We’ve analyzed and interpreted our data, and now we need to communicate it. Most science standards and benchmarks overlook this piece of science inquiry, but scientists don’t. This is the place where you really nail down what you’ve learned. Something we often don’t do in American education.

Pt. 8: Where is Curriculum?

We’ve been talking about our ‘Locus of Control,’ the place where the authority for what we do lies. That authority can be outside ourselves, or within. What determines where we find it? Nothing more than experience.

Pt. 9 Digging Through the Brambles:Locating and exploiting the curricula embedded in the environments outside the classroom

At last writing, I’d decided to explore a place outside for the curricular content which was embedded in it. I planned to do a natural science inquiry, and decided to also look for social studies and creative writing curricula units there based on an area near a dog walk. Now, my job is to turn this place into a lesson that will release and exploit the curricula embedded within it.