Community Meets Classroom
As educators, we often seek ways to involve our students in community outreach, but I believe it is equally important to give the community opportunities to come into the classroom, as well. In an earlier post, I spoke of inviting parents to attend as a guest speaker. Allow me to outline just a few examples of such occurrences. Each year, my Anatomy & Physiology class learn about the cardiovascular system. Our local EMT has an individual who is assigned to give presentations to students. At our last meeting, he admitted that we were the only school to every ask him to attend and give his presentation. I was shocked! He was responsible to several of the surrounding counties, and none of them had reached out before. My students were thoroughly engaged as he demonstrated the use of the echocardiogram machine. Students volunteered to have their heart rate analyzed, and he skillfully taught them to read the printed graph. Student scores on the assessment were notably higher than had we ...