Initial Post of Individual Studies Course.

I am still reading through this text, and am even in the process of incorporating some of the labs into my 6-8th curriculum. I will report on the results as they become available. In response to Dr. Pedersen's comments, in my previous position at the high school level in Texas we had district curriculum guides that laid out very specifically what, how, and when we were to teach a given topic, within a course. At the small, rural PreK-8 school I am at currently there has never been a prescribed curriculum in any course, including science. We did adopt the Carolina Biological STC/MS program last year, and implemented it this year, and it is grounded in the Learning Cycle philosophy. Obviously we have had previously much latitude in how we taught our courses, as long as our students were well-versed in the essential PASS objectives.

Based on what I knew coming in, as well as the reading I have done so far this semester, I believe the learning cycle to be a model of teaching, but I would like to know Dr. Pedersen's definitions of teaching approaches, models, and methods before I go any further.

The idea of knowledge construction as opposed to just presenting information to students for them to memorize, makes sense to me, but it is also requiring a turnabout from the methods by which I was taught in school for the most part, and even some of the teaching methods I employ myself. My teaching philosophy, in general terms, has evolved over a nearly twenty year career-spanning third grade through AP/IB/Honors high school seniors-to include as many different ways of presenting material to the students as possible. By that I mean in order to accomodate the various learning styles represented by the students in my classes I might give notes, assign readings, perform demonstrations, have student-driven hands-on labs, student oral reports and discussions, and more, all on the same topic. I realize now that I had in fact used Learning cycle methods without having been formally trained or recognizing the techniques as such. Of course this is all relative to teaching at the high school level for the first fifteen years, and I am adjusting to teaching middle and elementary school students with differing levels of cognition and development.

Bibliographic Note:

John Renner and Edmund Marek, The Learning Cycle and Elementary School Science Teaching, (Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann Educational Books, 1988). I borrowed this book from a coworker to investigate the Learning Cycle on my own.