Name: Max Zinman

Essential Question: How does teaching while learning affect how one learns?

Critical Reflection #3: Now that you’re three weeks (half way) into your senior project experience, are you answering your essential question?

At this point in the senior project process, I’ve learned a pretty good amount about my essential question and sub question. Through teaching the 10th graders in Preethi’s physics classes, I’ve realized that I’m responsible for the knowledge of those who I teach via my understanding of my own knowledge. As a result, during the course of my research project and  sustainable energy class I’ve changed the way that I learn about things. Rather than start at the main idea, I instead make sure I’ve learned and concretely understand the basics of the topic, and then move up from there because that is what I need to know in order to adequately explain something to someone when teaching them. In regards to teaching in particular, I’ve learned a few important techniques, such as explaining things on the student’s level of understanding, encouraging their own discovery of ideas through rather than just lecturing, asking questions of the students that force further analysis of the topic at hand, and that there are some things that simply need to be taught rather than learned, such as how to read certain types of graphs/charts, because of how important they are to the central topic.

They way that I’ve been exploring my essential question is almost exactly what I expected: I’m teaching students and adapting my way of explaining and understanding the 10th grade physics material to suit them, and observing how those cognitive changes lead to changes in how I learn new things, specifically about lasers in my research project and various energy-related topics in the sustainable energy class.

None of the challenges so far have been particularly surprising, but there was one significant one nonetheless, which was leading full class discussions. I have trouble being in charge or at the center of a given situation, especially ones involving a lot of people, due to heavy social anxiety, and leading full class discussions forced me into scenarios that were exactly that. As a result, I was extremely nervous during my first few times leading the discussions, but I overcame that obstacle by simply forcing myself to do it, and through that I both got more experience leading the discussions, which allowed me to feel more prepared to do so, and became more familiar with the setting, making it less anxiety-producing with each subsequent discussion. Overcoming this obstacle allowed me to get a lot more out of my teaching experiences since I’m no longer overcome by fear when in those situations.