THE IMPORTANCE OF GROUP WORK IN THE SCIENCE CLASSROOM

As our pedagogy has developed, we’ve paid great attention to the importance of individual learning needs, developing individual education plans for exceptional students but also promoting the concept that teachers build a strong relationship with each of their students. This relationship is intended to help the teacher meet the student where they are, and encourage their involvement in the content of the course through their interests and the interaction. The content should be learned in isolation, between the teacher and the student, and often teacher and student via technology. Certainly we’ve enabled learners in our classroom to push themselves further and engaged them with this model, but we’ve done so at the cost of true authenticity in modelling the discipline of science, and indeed the primary mechanism by which many working environments function in general.