Cara

Some challenges I've faced have been teaching in an informal environment and having the students for a short period of time. Disregarding that, I think it would be helpful to have a program that has teachers work with their students to develop inquiry that could be completed on a trip to our nature preserve!

I tried Ebird for this discussion. I always find that when using Ebird, I try to commit my time and energy to locating every species - but sometimes I am challenged by not observing a species even if it was on another's checklist that very same day. I always try to remind myself though that this is a good thing, a mini "failure" that can improve data or make it more real for scientists. Perhaps it's the time of day that I am birding, or the temperature, or the presence of a predator species in the area - and that's why I didn't observe the meadowlark. I would expect students to learn similarly to the soil experiments that an absence in data doesn't mean it's not valuable.

While I was doing my sound map, I think the most impactful thing that I noticed was just how if you focus, you can hear wildlife all around the loudest human made noise (lawnmowers!!). I like to encourage children that I work with to listen to wildlife by cupping their hands around their ears, and turning them into "deer ears". Especially for younger children, this helps them focus on what their hearing and which direction it's coming from.

The three teaching practices are so concise and understandable. I think that I hope to model further "attend to the unexpected" and realize that "failure" or even no data, can be just as important of a result as a successful expedition. I think that teaching and focusing on this mindset is important as an educator, because it puts value back into the process of citizen science.

Like some of the educators that already commented, I am an informal educator and only have students for a short time. One of the topics that we teach, Owls and Owl Pellets, would fall into the category of "structured inquiry" since students are told in advance of what they might find in their pellet. Maybe one way to make it more inquiry-based would be for the students to first hypothesize about what an owl would eat, and how they might digest the bones. If they can't digest the bones, what do they do ? What could they do? And so forth!