Andrea's Portfolio

A Summary of the Presentation

Each year, the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) hosts a national Conference in the United States. In 2011, I had the opportunity to both attend and co-present at my first NSTA National Conference in San Francisco, CA. The group of presenters consisted of my graduate school professor and 3 fellow teachers, and we conducted a workshop titled “Building Complex Understandings Through Inquiry Activities”.

 

In this workshop, we modeled the inquiry process through a series of activities with flowers. First, we allowed participants to learn about flowers by dissecting a flower, labeling its parts, and using study aids to learn those different parts. Then, participants had to reconstruct the flower on a manila folder, labeling each part of the dissected flower. Participants compared the different flowers they dissected and reconstructed to solidify their learning before creating a group drawing of a flower. In this activity, participants had to accurately draw and label their flower without using any of their study aids from previous activities. This allowed us as presenters to informally assess learning thus far, and fill in any gaps before moving on to the final activity. The final participant activity was to create a new type of flower, complete with all the necessary flower parts and pieces necessary to help it live in its chosen environment. In this final activity, we assessed participant learning and understanding of flowers and their structures for survival.

 

Why Present?

As an educator, my goal is to share my learning and expertise with others both in and out of the education field. The NSTA conference presentation was a perfect opportunity for me to share my science expertise with other educators. Collaboration is important in the education field, as we are all experts at taking an idea and tweaking it to make it our own. By collaborating with my professor and fellow teachers on this presentation, we shared different ways we had used the activity with our students, from primary grades through upper elementary.

 

This inquiry methods presentation is important to this portfolio as it reflects my student-centered teaching style, and has helped lay the foundation for project-based learning in my classroom (for more information on project-based learning, please see The Educator).

 

As previously mentioned, inquiry is key in my educational philosophy, as it is foundational to higher order thinking skills such as creation and application. Not only is this method preferred with students, it is also an engaging way to teach adults. The participants in this conference session appreciated the hands-on nature of the workshop, and the additional teaching applications we offered. Not only did they walk away with knowledge, but they also left with their flower dissection folders and their flower creations. Through my experience with conferences, teachers appreciate being able to walk away with “tangible” things in addition to ideas they can implement in their classrooms.

 

As this was my first formal conference presentation, I appreciated the group format of the presentation. Not only did it help put me at ease, but it also allowed for us to help our participants as there were many “hands on deck”. As educators, we learn and teach best when we collaborate, and this presentation style reflected that.

 

Future Endeavors

After giving my first conference presentation, I walked away with growth as an educator and as a person. I gained confidence in speaking in front of an adult audience, something that still makes me nervous on occasion. I enjoyed meeting and speaking with other educators, sharing knowledge with them, and learning from them as well.

 

This presentation also helped me realize the importance of inquiry-based methods in teaching, and I have been using them heavily ever since. Students recently learned about mixtures and solutions by designing their own experiments to make sweetened iced tea. This method led to deeper thinking, and students researching questions I hadn’t told them to research.

 

In future conference presentations, I will keep the participant engagement piece at the forefront of my planning, as that is crucial to my teaching methods.