Meet Tom Jenkins: Tch Laureate Transcript

Ways in which I’m looking to improve my classroom this year, you know, the requirements of the next generation science standards. My background gives me quite a bit of knowledge and quite a bit of leverage when I teach things like physics. But when it comes to other areas which I understand the content, but I’m not necessarily sure how to share that content with my kids.

For example, if I’m doing a physics project then I have such a good knowledge base in physics, where I can easily come up with an engineering design challenge to go along with that content to where the kids actively working, they’re journaling, they’re going through the engineering design process.

However if it’s something like genetics, then it’s much more difficult given my background to come up with an engineering design challenge that’s going to keep them active to the save level. So what I hope to do is to share some of my physics lessons and my physics design challenges and hopefully other will share with me ways to improve how I teach ecosystems or how I’m going to go through and how I’m going to teach chemistry, or how I’m going to teach biology to my students in a method that’s most effective and goes along with next generation science standards, rather than just me telling students here’s the information that’s on the board, we’re going to have a quiz over it, maybe like a cookie-cutter lab.