Pedagogy

LOVED science and have especially had a heart for high school students (I volunteered with a ministry called Young Life for over a decade, and also coached a local high school dance team all through college). I knew from my teacher training program that a lot went in to teaching other than JUST teaching. I would have to write lesson plans, grade tests, prep labs, and go to faculty meetings. What I HIGHLY underestimated was how parent communication would be a HUGE part of my job.

If you’ve been around my corner of the internet for a little bit, you know how much I HATE REVIEWING. It doesn’t matter if it is for the AP bio exam or a unit test, I just truly dread review days. One of the BEST ways I’ve found to review for exams or unit tests is by making review stations.

It’s that time of year. The weather starts changing, the days start getting longer, and your students start becoming absolutely stir crazy. Some call it spring fever – I call it senioritis. And regardless of if you teach seniors or not, this “disease” does not discriminate based on student age (although seniors seem to be the MOST affected – if you’ve ever taught seniors, once they receive college acceptance letters, it is borderline game over).

I love labs, model-building, and inquiry-based activities like any good secondary science teacher – but I also still really enjoy lecturing. Lectures don’t have to be boring like the 300+ person lecture hall courses you took in college. You CAN make lectures engaging – and I am here to share with you my 4 best strategies (plus a bonus tip for all of you currently still teaching virtually #blessyou) for doing so.

Teaching students how to take notes is a huge part of being a high school science teacher – whether we want it to be or not. I am excited to share with you how to use Cornell notes, as it has been a method I never set out to be

So the 1st day of school in high school science is approaching and you don’t know what exactly to do with your students. There is so much procedural/background content you want to cover, but you also want the day to be FUN and engaging so your students know what to

The summer before my first year teaching I read everything I could about how to start the year strong. A lot of it was about being really strict at the beginning of the year to prove your authority. Some even mentioned not smiling until after winter break (I could never

It didn’t take long into my teaching career to realize that my students had no idea how to prepare for tests. While many schools are moving away from tests as a whole, I have still taught in multiple schools that give tests at the completion of each unit as a

I know everyone says this, but it truly feels like yesterday that I was a first-year teacher. I will never forget the feeling of walking into my first classroom the summer before school starting and taking a big deep breath, reveling in the fact that this space would soon be

Not one time in my 4-year undergrad teaching program or my 2 years of graduate school did anyone ever teach me about parent communication. So naturally, I went into my first teaching job blindly unaware of how much of my job would be communicating with parents. I was 22 but