Meet Alexandra Khelil-Schmidl from Austria
School: BG/BRG 21 Bertha von Suttner - Schulschiff
Subject and Grade Taught: Biology and Physics, Science Lab (10-18 years old)
Years Teaching: 6 years
Years in Amgen Teach community: 1.5
Participation in Amgen Teach programme:
National training: Molekularköche und Zelldetektive (Molecular Kitchen and Cell Detective) by Christian Bertsch (PH Wien) and Karin Gerber (Vienna Open Lab), March 2015. 8th Science Projects Workshop in the Future Classroom Lab organized by Scientix in Brussels, October 2016.
Alexandra is a Biology and Physics teacher from Vienna (Austria) that has been active in the Amgen Teach community since the beginning of 2015.
After attending the IBSE trainings, Alexandra commented: "it is very important in teaching sciences, that students are able to establish hypothesis. To proof their hypothesis, they can set up experiments, so they will get results which support or refuse their hypothesis". In this regard, she believes that Amgen Teach, increased her "knowledge of new pedagogical practices based on IBSE" and encouraged her to focus in participatory and experimental learning.
During the trainings, Alexandra was introduced to IBL and received teaching material and other useful resources. Based on them, she applied IBL at her science lab courses: "For me it has been fascinating how 10-13-year-old students discussed their own ideas and explanations about an experiment with the help of pictures… they realized how plants collect energy from the sun and transform it into organic substances (photosynthesis)".
Her students have been able to recognize that science is a dynamic process which needs to be discussed in order to stimulate new ideas for the future. As a result of this, most of them have shown to be much more motivated when exploring science tasks.
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