What makes a good science teacher?...
Lots of other ScienceBloggers have given really good answers to this, so I'll just add one more thing. A good teacher has to know what students don't know. When I ran into problems, I was always assuming that the students had sufficient background. I think too often teachers (and for that matter, people in general) underestimate ignorance--what students know and remember. If you keep that in mind, you won't lose the class (hopefully...).
- Log in to post comments
More like this
"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires." -William Arthur Ward
Every so often, people get up-in-arms about teaching and education in college. New studies come out, new methods are touted and tried, curricula get revised,…
Over at Aetiology, Tara has an interesting post about interview requests from journalists. Since part of my job is to deal with journalists, I thought I would offer some thoughts.
First, Tara's absolutely right: don't bother scientists at scientific meetings. We have far too much to do as it is…
Yesterday, I wrote about students using science blogging as a way to develop an on-line portfolio and document their skills. One friend wrote me this morning and asked if my instructions to our students were really as simple as I described.
Well, no.
In fact, it wasn't easy to persuade my…
As I said last week, I recently wrapped up a term experimenting with "active learning" techniques in the two intro courses I was teaching. The diagnostic test results were a mixed bag-- one section showed really good improvement in their scores, the other was no better than the same class with…