Sze Wing Yu
My Pedagogy
How Learning Happens
I believe learning happens when one is genuinely curious and makes discoveries based on these interests. The discoveries become memorable and learning becomes a way to seek truth, not memorize content.
Why I Teach
I teach because I wanted to “give back” to the community. I believe that my education has been a gift and has opened many doors such as internships and jobs. It is also central to who I am, as everything that I value comes from my understanding of it, which was learned. So, I wanted others to value the environment and come to respect it, value science as an accessible tool to truth, and value themselves as capable learners and doers. To convey these ideas, I teach. My goals are to instill an appreciation and wonder in the natural world and to never grow tired of it myself.
How I Teach
I create objectives based on content or skills I would like students to learn, then base a field day’s activities off of those objectives. I adapt these plans according to the students’ prior knowledge, skill levels, and learning styles to best use their strengths towards a successful and fun field day. For example, after a relatively unsuccessful lesson teaching a group of squirrely 4th graders about fire ecology, I revised the next days’ agenda to their need for exploration and strength of questioning. While they did not focus well when I drew about fire ecology on a whiteboard, they were totally absorbed in asking questions, designing experiments, and hands-on collecting and analyzing data about stream ecology the next day. By tailoring my lesson to the students’ needs for exploration, movement, and their own questions, my objectives to teach them about the scientific process and macroinvertebrates were met and we all had fun.
I also teach by leading by example. This takes place by picking up trash along the trails, being field-ready with layers and supplies, being gentle and quiet with the macroinvertebrates and wildlife, practicing Leave No Trace, and respecting my TOES (Time, Others, Environment, Self, as encouraged by TSS). These practices are respectful to myself and the environment, and some, such as picking up trash, I adopted after seeing a peer go the extra step to do so. By representing what caring citizens do to help others and the environment, I hope my students will notice and pick up on these habits as well.
Describe how you have evolved as an educator during this service experience.
Evolution is complex and messy. The less adapted individuals die off, the more adapted ones compete for a genetic place in the next generation, all the while their chances of survival and reproduction could be thrown out the window with some unforeseen disturbance…
Similar to biological evolution, my evolution as an educator involves teaching failures, abrupt changes in lesson plans, an overwhelming amount of material to learn, but ultimately, a gradual shift to more successes. With this internship as my first real teaching experience, I began with little confidence in my lesson planning and communication skills with children. I started with a great deal of observing my more experienced co-instructors, taking on only a lesson or two as the lead. A particular moment of growth was when I led a whole field day with the Learning Cycle as my lesson plan structure (see below, “Share a Story” section). Since then, I have taken on full field days, identified areas of personal need, and created concrete goals for improvement.
Examples of areas of personal need and goals are: learn more area-specific content knowledge to facilitate teachable moments; read a group’s dynamics and become better at adapting lessons and behavioral management techniques on the spot; incorporating more diverse questions from Bloom’s Taxonomy; learning environmental science education materials such as FOSS and BEETLES.
Another way I have evolved was my ideas of teaching and learning. I had been a capable classroom learner in school and college, and so my view on teaching and learning was that it occurred in the classroom, lecture-style, with the teacher providing information to the notetaking students. Bringing that perspective with me, my early lessons were mostly me standing with a whiteboard, giving content to my students. Later, with experimentation with the Learning Cycle, I shifted to a more student-centered approach, using their natural curiosity to fuel hands-on and memorable discoveries that they could own. Now, I realize the differences between classroom learning and outdoor experiences, and I continue to experiment and tweak lessons based on the students’ learning styles.
Describe how this service prepared you to implement experiential science education curriculum in the future
In the near future I will be a field instructor at TSS, where I will continue to use experiential science education. Beyond that, I imagine I would like to stay in the environmental education career path, either full-time or part-time (I may pursue wildlife research or conservation). Either way, I would use the skills I learned here, such as casual teachable moments or structured lessons, to provide learning experiences for people to connect with nature.
Share a story that illustrates a moment of growth for you as an educator.
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