Field Blog 1 AP Chemistry

Over the past three weeks I have observing classes at West Geauga High School. Over the course of these blogs, I will depict the themes and summarize what they mean and how I came about these conclusions. It is also important to state that the themes I found between the classes were very different due to a few reasons given through these blogs. This first blog post will summarize all of the themes that I found while observing an AP chemistry class.

The first thing to note is the size of this class. The class has 4 students in it. This really sets a tone for the type of interaction between the teacher and the students. This interaction will lead into the first theme that I discovered.  This theme is that the teacher was very hands off with the students. Since this was an AP class and there were four of them, it was very easy for the teacher to let the kids go discover the material on their own. This also works because in chemistry, there is a lot of abstract concepts, from designing a lab from inquiry, or finding a tangent line between two different topics to connect them. This reminds me of my time in AP chemistry because there is a certain struggle when you don't know how to design or carry out a lab, and you have to be able to struggle through this in order to learn.

The second theme that is found within the AP chemistry is not as easy to find as the teacher letting the students discover things on their own, and this theme is the use of both the banking style and problem solving style of education. The banking style of education is a pedagogy expressed by Paulo Freire where the students are only responsible for storing information given by the teacher and the teacher is only responsible for giving information to be memorized. Now, you may think that this contradicts the first theme that I have listed, and well, you would be right. However, this is combined with the problem solving method of education. This is also mentioned by Paulo Freire, and states that the teacher has to make the students critically think about what is going on in the real world. This is then incorporated into the learning material. The AP chemistry class utilizes this by using the banking method to give the information needed to have students start to explore. I do believe that this is the best way to teach a class. Give them the materials they need to succeed, and then turn them loose to explore the material introduced.