The Scientific Teacher

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?