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Forwarded from MnSTA Earth Science Director Dana Smith:

Hello!

As yearly teacher observations are underway, you may come across an issue in your post-observation meeting about the posting of daily objectives.  If you are using three-dimensional teaching strategies, you know that best practice dictates that instead of posting lesson objectives, we should post the driving question and lesson questions.  This is so that students focus on sense-making and solving the problem or question, rather than know ahead of time what the learning objective targets are ahead of time.  

Most administrators are not aware of the practice of posting questions as daily objectives, so you will likely get dinged during you observations.  I sure did!  In looking for resources to educate my administrators, I came across this handy article explaining the importance and use of questions as opposed to objectives in science class.  This was a great way to begin a productive and positive conversation with my administration about this, and set the way for us to work together to modify our evaluation form for this science-specific criteria.  I hope it is a useful tool for you as well, should you find yourself in a similar situation.

STEM Teaching Tools is a fantastic website to use as a resource as you continue to build your 3D toolkit.  Check it out! https://stemteachingtools.org/ 

Dana Smith

MnSTA Earth and Space Science Discipline Director