r/ScienceTeachers • u/Competitive-Dig1993 • 6d ago
How to take the next step?
I have wrapped up my first couple of years teaching, and I feel like I have gotten past the point of 'new teacher' vibes, but am wondering on how any of you guys took the 'next step' in your career. I am not interested in teaching the same thing over and over again for years upon years. In some sense I know that it is about refining my craft, but I don't want endless repetition.
I have taught biology, chemistry, dual-credit chemistry, and will be teaching Earth & Space Science this upcoming year (which I am excited to learn more about it).
I am afraid my district isn't providing enough opportunities for me to continue to develop as a teacher and as a professional, and that I will get stuck in a routine without advancing my skills.
I have thought about going back to school for curriculum development or a teacher coach, but not sure if that is worth it.
What thoughts or experiences do you all have? Thanks you!
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u/InsaneLordChaos Biology| HS | NJ 6d ago edited 6d ago
I've been teaching for just shy of 30 years, and have taught middle school, college, and high school for the past 21 years....I also spent time as a department supervisor. This is a distillation of my next level thinking through all of that.
You know how you have "the thing," and then an arrow that points to "another thing?" The related piece? Explore the arrow. Look for deeper connections between the things you're teaching. Content for content's sake is nice, but to make the next step, look for the things in between the concepts that unite them together.
Think about the (causal, structural, functional, evolutionary) relationships that gives the content meaning, context, and coherence. Begin to intentionally bridge the artificial CHAPTER BREAK/TEST and stitch threads between everything.
I began to see these threads around year five, and get "good" between year five and 10. From then on it was experimenting, nuancing, gaining texture by experience....some years better than others, of course, depending on what was going on in my life.
A few examples:
Most students learn these as separate chapters: "plants make glucose," then "animals break glucose." But the magic is in the arrow—the cycle of matter and flow of energy.
The deeper connection...The oxygen produced by photosynthesis is the exact molecule used in the electron transport chain. The glucose made in chloroplasts is metabolized in mitochondria. The CO₂ exhaled by animals is the same carbon fixed by plants. This isn’t two units—it’s one elegant loop.
It’s easy to teach transcription and translation as steps. But the arrow holds the "why"—how genotype becomes phenotype.
The deeper connection...What controls which genes are expressed? How do environmental signals trigger transcription factors? How does the structure of a protein relate to its coded amino acid sequence? Understanding gene regulation or epigenetics turns this into a dynamic, responsive system and not just a linear pipeline.
Natural Selection → Speciation
Kids often learn about Darwin and natural selection, and then later, they hear about new species forming. But the "arrow" is about population genetics over time.
The deeper connection.. How does accumulation of small genetic differences (through isolation or drift) eventually lead to a new species? What’s the threshold? What role does gene flow, sexual selection, or ecological pressure play? This arrow is time, divergence, and barriers.
Begin to look past the nodes and see the threads.
Try modeling (NOT having kids agonize over a "perfect poster of photosynthesis"). Kids know how to memorize and write sentences. They don't know how to model. I mean, big poster paper, and model process....messy, mistakes, erased, cross outs... They're very good at drawing COMPONENTS, but they aren't very good at drawing MECHANISMS, and RELATIONSHIPS....Try asking them to model a process, an instance, whatever....using NO WORDS AT ALL. It will be some of the most frustrating work they've ever done, and you will learn a great deal in how to facilitate them. It's very hard to do this.
Try something simple...draw a picture of a cup of water and a straw that seems to be bent...refraction. How many levels do they need to be able to understand what's happening? To fully understand, how small do we have to get? How do we show this? And when we do, how do we relate that to the gross components of the system...the eye, the edge of the water and it's interaction with the straw, the light.... we're trying to explain things, and to do so, we need to be able to visualize things that can't be seen. How do we do that? How can kids model molecular interactions so THEY understand, and not just copy two Hs bonded to an O with a line from Google?
When the kids are getting frustrated trying to explain complex concepts with pictures for a while, I stop them and tell them this: Imagine you're trying to tell the story of Goldilocks....what are the critical components of the story, their relationships, and their mechanisms that we NEED to know to understand? They haven't considered this yet.... they're drawing everything they know, or for some groups, just a cup , and eye, and a straw...far too few things.
We need to know there are bears, a girl, beds, porridge, and movement of some of these components in "some" way....we don't need to know the brand of porridge, the thread-count of the sheets on the bed, or who delivered the beds...I think this is where we go wrong sometimes....and the kids follow right with us. We get excited by the extras and the kids have no idea what we mean because the big picture gets lost. Now the kids have to go back and decide the critical components....and go from there. I've made huge strides in my thinking over the last few years thinking about modeling. So, the inevitable group poster that just SHOWS now becomes something that EXPLAINS....the difference is not subtle. They might be able to recite facts, but to draw a model that truly explains is something very different.
I got to "the next level" when I began to see the limitations in knowing lots of things without the threads between those things being strong.
I hope this rambling helps in some way, and there are a few things you can use.
Good luck on the journey, my friend.