I’m an avid blog-reader, so I guess it was only a matter of time before I through my own hat into the ring. I’m especially interested in blogs about teaching, where teachers engage in those kind of deep conversations about pedagogy only seems to happen at grad school, and unfortunately not very often around the faculty room water cooler. So far I’ve been fortunate enough to find some stellar blogs that engage these kinds of conversations, but mostly written by math teachers or high school physics teachers (such as Dan Meyer and Shawn Cornally). I don’t know of much out there that deals with K-8 science teaching (but if you blog about this, please let me know!). So this blog is my effort to build the same kind of reflective community for elementary and middle school science teachers, although thoughtful teachers of all subjects and levels are welcome to join in the discussion.
Why call this blog the Scientific Teacher? Because it’s more about a scientific approach to teaching than just teaching science. That’s how I strive to approach my own teaching, by applying the scientific practices of questioning, collecting and analyzing data, researching, debating, and above all experimenting with new ideas in the classroom. And I know I’m not the only one out there that does this- I know there are tons of teachers pushing the envelope out there, but I don’t want to wait until I bump into you by chance at some conference. By leveraging the power of the internet, teachers should be able to communicate with each other to push forward our understanding of teaching and learning in the same way the scientific community does.
So let’s do this thing! I’ll start rolling out posts of my own questions, research, and classroom experiments, and if you’re a scientific teacher yourself, I want to hear from you. Too many teachers work alone in their classrooms and too many good ideas never see the light of day- but we can and should change that. So let’s connect and get the conversation started, and who knows- someday we may be able to conduct our own educational experiments across the many classrooms of our online community. Wouldn’t that be cool?
My name is Nick Mitchell, and I love the art and science of teaching.
The Scientific Teacher 
Love your website! It is so professional. I am curious, though, about your location. Do you teach in Qatar? I’d like to know more about your school.
Am I right that you teach science to different grade levels?
Congratulations on a wonderful site!
Carmen Sanchez
Thanks Carmen! Yes, I teach at the American School in Doha, Qatar. You can find out more info about our school here. I work with the whole elementary school (Pre-K through 5th), but I’m the science coordinator, so I only do some of the teaching. Most of my work is developing curriculum and working with our homeroom teachers to improve our science program. It’s a great job!
Welcome to this awesome, scary, rewarding world of blogging. Finding other passionate teachers to share ideas with and learn from is why I started doing it. I’ve already dropped your feed into my Google Reader.
If you’re looking for awesome K-8 teachers to read, you can’t do better than Jason Buell, who blogs over at Always Formative (http://alwaysformative.blogspot.com/). He’s inspired me post after post.
Thanks Brian- it’s great to join the conversation! Just added Jason’s blog to my feed as well, thanks for the tip.
Thanks Brian for the good words. I gotta say though for my money you can’t beat Michael Doyle over at http://doyle-scienceteach.blogspot.com/ He’s technically a HS teacher but works a lot on elementary science, both at the state level and going into the schools at his district.
I cannot imbed an image from Google Drive into the interactive science notebook. When I click on a document, it just goes back to choose a document. I have spent hours searching for help, but to no avail. Without the ability to upload documents, it is just like having a book with a list of attachments, which is NOT what I want. Do you know why this would be happening? (I have a google site and have imbedded pages, videos, presentations, etc., and have not had this problem.)
Hi Michelle,
Hmmm… that’s strange- I embed images all the time. Just to check, are you clicking on Insert, then Drive, then Image? That should work. Perhaps try it with a different image. If that doesn’t work, another way would be to just click Insert, then Image, then Web Address (URL) and then paste the URL of the image from Google Drive when you open it up. This should work as well. If all else fails, you can share you site with me and I can take a look at it. -Nick