In this episode, Mark talks with Beth Burns, who is a modeler and modeling workshop leader who teaches chemistry to both high school and college students. They talk about her journey from working in industry to teaching, and to modeling instruction. They talk about how whiteboarding is so importing in modeling instruction as part of giving students autonomy in their own learning.

Guest

Elizabeth Burns has been teaching Advanced Placement Chemistry as well as Syracuse University Project Advance (SUPA) Forensic Science at Fairport High School in western New York State for over 20 years. She is also an adjunct professor of General Chemistry at Nazareth University. She has a BS in Chemistry and an MS in Education. She took her first modeling workshop in 2019 and has been using the Modeling Instruction pedagogy ever since.

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Highlights

[5:02] Beth Burns "Why do we know what we know and do we just trust or do we do some investigations and kind of create that knowledge as we're learning?"

[16:03] Beth Burns "I always tell my students, I'm like, when you go off to college and you go on and get a PhD and you discover a better picture of what the atom looks like, you're gonna come back and tell me what it is, and then I'll teach it to my students."

Resources

Ep 68 Transcript

[5:22] Building Thinking Classrooms by Peter Liljedhal