Pedagogical
My central pedagogical question has been, “What are the best practices for teaching science?“. The question was motivated by a sense that many teachers are engaging in what they assume to be worthwhile practices for science teaching with little rigorous empirical evidence that their methods are effective. Sub questions that follow from this question and were part of my research include: “Does there exist a substantial gap between common science teacher practices, and best practices for science teaching as defined by the current state of education literature?, If a “common practice” and “best practice” teaching gap exists, what are the major reasons for that gap? What supports would most effectively help teachers teach science more often and more robustly (in line with the best practice concept outlined above)?”
You can read the paper in which I attempt to answer these pedagogical content questions here.
Content
The content question I pursued was, “What societal policy shifts most effectively balance the tradeoff between cost of implementation and benefit of addressing climate change?” In order to answer that question I also explored the sub question – What’s the current evidence for the principal drivers of climate change and what has and will be the impact of climate change?
I was motivated to choose this question because I am part of an NSF funded grant called the Climate Empowerment Learning Initiative (CELI) in which teachers from different subject areas at my school site are working collectively to instill in our students a sense of agency for tackling the climate crisis. As I have been teaching my students about climate change a student query has arisen time and again, “What should we be doing?”. The answer is not straight forward and demands different responses depending on whether your lens is that of an individual or whether you are considering systemic societal approaches. Inevitably there are tradeoffs to every climate strategy, and a major purpose of this research is to get a clear picture of the cost-benefit of the different approaches.
On the Content Resource Collection page you will be able to navigate to resources of different mediums that I have collected to investigate my content question.