My daughter Sophie is a senior this year, taking a full load of college prep classes and working on her college applications. Many of you know the drill and are living it yourselves. As for me, I find myself savoring every minute with her knowing her time at home will soon come to an end and she’ll be off into the world on her own (sort of).
Often in the evenings while I’m making dinner, she’ll sit in the kitchen and do her homework. For her AP Bio class, she often watches videos by Mr. Andersen, a science teacher turned educational consultant slash YouTube phenomenon (in certain circles!). Sophie loves his videos and will sometimes watch more just for fun, beyond the assignment. To her delight, she discovered that Mr. Andersen has a TED talk on YouTube, and we enjoyed listening to it together last night.
As I was peeling cucumbers and prepping the rice, I heard Mr. Andersen’s message about student centered learning. What a wonderful educator! He knows his students well, and is passionate about teaching them. What he described reminded me of a lot of what we are doing here at Carondelet. I especially appreciated the points he made that school should be fun, failure is ok, and that mastery is the goal, but at each student’s own pace.
Since his talk is from 2012, many of you may have come across it before. In case you haven’t, it’s worth your time to hear from this inspiring educator. For me it was a real treat to learn alongside my daughter at the end of the day. Enjoy!
I love that you share education talks and video moments with your daughter. Thank you for sharing this video as well. The engagement of his students with the game compared to his discussion of student engagement in the day is an interesting comparison.
Thank you for sharing… i did not know this ted talk and am the ted talk junkie so I will definitely be checking this out!
Ok i watched it and it was fabulous… and I think many of the successes and struggles will resonate with the math team!!!
It is an amazing process we go through as educators… tweak, better but not perfect (which we label as failure), weak again… rinse repeat as we strive towards a model that will serve the needs of ALL our students
He is amazing and we used the Boseman Science videos at my old school for a number of purposes. Love the ideas-#EdJourney was a book chairs read that describes schools that are truly putting innovation and a student-centered approach into practice. There is a great chapter on a history teacher who uses a game he created to teach his students….I'll have to pull the name up from the book. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for highlighting my favorite teacher, Paul Anderson! When I was researching "flipping" my AP Bio class way back in 2012, Paul was my inspiration. His video's and his email advice on the old AP Bio listserve were the guidance I needed to build my own library of screencasts. His resources for biology and chemistry are still the best for high school science. I love to listen to him too, even just to hear another crystal clear explanation of the next topic we need to discuss in class!