Intern Teaching #2

For my second blog post, I would like to discuss my 8th graders in my afternoon Science course. This year, my Science mentor teacher has decided to switch things up a bit and do "stations" with each of his classes. The students (so far) seem to like this new transition from last year. Among these students though are a few who try to slide by with doing as little work as possible. They are simply trying to rely on their group members to do the work them. A way to fix this was to make each student do a notebook. Each student is now in charge of bringing their notebook to class every day and putting all the information needed to complete the expeirment and so on. The students are also responsible for doing ~8 vocab terms (definition, sentence, synonyms, and a drawing). The notebooks are collected at the end of each concept/unit and is counted as a test grade (100/100 points). The students are also responsible for posting to their blog online while rotating through stations. Since this has been implemented in the classroom, we have seen a wide range of results. Some students have rose to the occasion and have began to take action in their learning and organization skills so that their notebooks are done correctly. Some students have went backwards and are doing little to no work in their notebooks and their grades are showing it. After this week, I am going to try to accomidate to some students to help them improve their notebook grades. We'll see how it goes!