Inner City Arts / STEAM

3/12/13

 

Last week in my professional development at Inner City Arts, I had the opportunity to experience the innovative strategies of teaching through kinetic motion. For the 3 hours that my UCLA cohort was at inner city arts, we investigated ways to implement kinesthetic motion into a variety of life science concepts. With the help of my fellow science peers, we were able to create a fun and interactive lesson about mitosis using 12-14 individuals. Each individual was assigned a role and participated in acting out the different phases of mitosis. We found this lesson to be extremely engaging and required the participation of everyone involved to make the lesson work. This not only directly connects to building community through sociocultural theory but also provides students with an additional modality to learn a science concept. Upon completing this lesson, we were all very proud of our work and I plan on trying to implement more kinetic lessons in my classroom so all my students can get the support they need to learn and develop.     

11/13/13

Over the past 5 months the UCLA Impact Grad-students have had the opportunity to learn very simple, pure, and holistic teaching strategies at Inner City Arts that allow our students to embrace who they are while still learning conceptual information about the world. In this session, I learned the importance of contribution and paritcipation from students. This is a video of all of us in a drum circle and all the contribtions coming from everyone gave the exercise character and personality. Without everyone's participation the drum circle would've been dull and lackluster, but because everyone joined in the music created was special and something everyone can say they were apart of. This drum circle was just an example of how participation by students can help them become confident in themselves which can open up their willingness to learn from educators.