Artifacts and Characteristics of the Novice Teacher # 7

In the Benedum Collaborative, the 7th characteristic of the novice teacher is someone who effectively integrates content and pedagogy. One way that I can represent this characteristic as being a part of my own personal teaching is through my science learning cycle artifact. With this assignment, I had to create a 3 day lesson involving some form of science concept that would allow my students to fully engage and investigate what they were learning. There were 5 stages within the learning cycle that I had to present and they included the engagement, exploration, explanation, elaboration and evaluation phases. For my particular learning cycle I taught my 3rd graders at the time about vertebrates and the sub-classes within this category. The students first had to be engaged in the lesson and I had to encourage their exploration. So, to do this I had the students create backbones by using pipe cleaners, Cheerios, and Fruit Loops. Then I had the students investigate their backbone replicas by having them bend and twist their examples to match pictures of snakes and birds. After these two phases, I then moved into the more in depth content and explained the facts about the backbone, what the differences between vertebrates and invertebrates were, etc. During this phase I also had the students complete a picture sort to help me assess their learning from my lesson. Next, I elaborated even further into the different classes of vertebrates by showing the students pictures and having them look for information in their textbooks to help them complete a characteristic checklist that I had created for them. Lastly, I evaluated the students over the entirety of my learning cycle by having them complete a written assignment. I gave the students a rubric that had been simplified into terminology that they could understand, and the students were given one type of animal. They were then supposed to create a newspaper article that told all about the animal such as their class, whether it was a vertebrate or invertebrate, name 3 distinctive characteristics that its class had, and they had to define the terminology within their paragraph. The students were also asked to depict the animal so that their article would have an image to go along with it.

Overall, I would say that my science learning cycle would be a great representation for the characteristic of a novice teacher being able to effectively integrate content and pedagogy. This is something that I am very passionate about. Also, I truly feel that this characteristic is present in many other artifacts as well. However, this learning cycle is by far my best example.