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Exit Slip: Reflections on UBC Orchard Garden experiences

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Today we visited the UBC Orchard Garden and my experience, as a prospective teacher was one much different than I have had before. This time around, I took in the garden as a place of learning. It was a place where I could engage my senses and gain a sense of wonder for the space I was in. Susan did an excellent job of allowing us to show our wonder via the drawing activity we did. We were asked to draw man-made and natural things we saw but I found myself spending all 30 minutes drawing a pumpkin and a bit of its background. One thing I learned from this activity was that when drawing man-made objects there is often a start, and a stop. Contrastingly when I was drawing this pumpkin I saw the stem attached to another plant and the plant attached to the ground and the ground holding other pumpkins and insects on the leaves and on and on and on…What I took away from this is that natural objects are continuous, and are all interconnected. This struck a bell for teaching in...
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Exit Slip: Praise, blame, mindset and student engagement - Alfie Kohn & Jo Boaler

The concept of praise is very interesting to me for the following reasons. When praise is given, students may begin to seek the praise instead of the actual activity that the student is being praised for. However if praise is not given, then students may begin to lose sight of even doing the activity needed to be done. Social (verbal) praise, in my opinion, will promote more positive vibes whereas other types of praise (e.g. physical rewards like a piece of candy) could distract the student from the importance of the actual activity. The concept of blame is a negative one in my opinion. A better look on the situation is whereby someone should take responsibility, or ownership of the problem. Blame versus ownership is an important distinction that can cause one to dwell on the problem (blame) as opposed to trying to fix it for the future (ownership). In terms of mindset and student engagement I believe it is important to foster a positive environment in the classroom where students ...
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Entrance Slip: Reading on marks in math or physics (Boaler or Sarte et al paper)

I liked this reading (http://einsights.ogpr.educ.ubc.ca/v14n01/articles/sarte/index.html) because it is highly relevant to me right now. I was in my first ever classroom observation session yesterday and students in Science 10 were learning about gene alleles and traits. Briefly, this has to do with how certain alleles are dominant over other alleles: if B=brown fur, b=black fur, then BB= brown animal, Bb= brown animal, bb= black animal. When I asked one of the students if she understood this concept she said "Yes, when the letters are both uppercase it's homozygous and when they aren't it's heterozygous." I took a step back and asked the student "Yeah, but do you understand where in the body these 'uppercase' and 'lowercase' letters come into play? Like how are these pairs of letters even relevant to our bodies?" She had no answer for me. Now this is just one student, but I feel like she represents more students in the lack of conceptual...
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