Tag Archive for Biology

Making Learning Real

10/01/2012 cfe, change, science 4 comments

I’m quite inspired by Ewan’s idea of a problem finder curriculum, but I’m not entirely sure how to get there to be honest…however it has encouraged me to persevere with trying to give my pupils’ greater ownership over their own learning, and making their learning more real.

I know it’s nowhere near the idea that Ewan’s proposing, but I have made a couple of recent attempts to use the web to make learning a little more real in my classroom. The first was with an Intermediate 1 Biology class who were about to learn about body temperature. As a parent, I felt that the learning might seem more relevant if the pupils were to produce a website on body temperature for new parents – something I remember being quite anxious about first time round. I knew I’d use Google Sites for the actual creation of the sites, but I didn’t feel that the pupils would buy into this completely with the horrific URLs which Google Sites uses. So I bought a domain name to try and help with this…mybabystemperature.info

You can view their sites by following the link above. The pupils really engaged with the task, many of them taking the responsibility of producing a real website with an actual audience quite seriously.

I’ve since followed this idea up with something similar, but this time the site can be used with a wider range of classes: biologyrevision.info

As you’ll see, I’ve already begun to use this with Standard Grade classes as well as Intermediate 1. Once again, the pupils seemed to really enjoy producing something which is “real” and has an actual audience. And the beauty of Google Sites is that they can collaborate and review in private and only publish once they’re happy with it.

I’m looking forward to finding better and ever more challenging ways of opening up learning in my classroom…

Do the project first!

30/09/2011 active learning, cfe, change, science 2 comments

In June of this year I was lucky enough to attend the Cramlington Learning Festival, something I’ve already mentioned on here.

One of the sessions I attended was led by the inspiring Darren Mead, who shared his Project Based Learning mantra with us: “Do the project first”. In other words, if you’re going to set a project for students to complete then we as teachers should be trying it first and showing this to the students at the outset. Darren showed us one he’d done. Whilst it was impressive that he’d gone and spent all that time making his project, one of the things that really surprised me at the time was that it wasn’t perfect – at one point his young son was doing the camera work! On reflection, I think this is fantastic. It would be potentially devasting to show the students unobtainable perfection and then ask them to try to do their own projects…

As we’re redesigning our S2 courses currently, we’ve been trying to diversify the opportunities for learning and assessment – and using these to help engage the students in the topic. For example, in our new Genetics & Reproduction topic we’re planning to ask our students to produce a documentary aimed at couples who are planning to try for a baby at the end of the topic. We’re going to share this task with them at the start of the topic, but use this to structure the actual lessons:

The six questions in the list slide provide the titles of each of the lessons in the topic. But, since Darren’s session I’d been thinking…should we be trying this first? Should we have a go at producing the documentary and ask the pupils to assess it before we start the topic…so a colleague and I went for it – remember, it’s a long way from perfection – but deliberately so…

We’ll let you know how it goes…

A Healthy Heart

10/08/2011 active learning, cfe, change, Featured, learning cycle, MEd, science No comments

Following from my previous post, I’ve been preparing the lessons for the class I’m going to using the learning cycle with – one of my S3 Intermediate 1 Biology classes.

We’ll be learning about the heart when we return after the summer break, and so I’ve been trying to use the learning cycle to plan the lessons, and then producing a powerpoint to accompany this. It’s been surprisingly tough going – mainly due to the amount of time it takes. I am also finding it fun though. It’s liberating to plan without such a focus on the textbook and I’m looking forward to seeing how the lessons go next week…

Firstly the planning…
http://fkelly.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Healthy-Heart-Lesson-Plans.pdf

And here’s the powerpoint…
http://fkelly.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/HealthyHeart.pdf

And some other associated files…

The risk paradox

10/06/2011 cfe, change, Featured, learning cycle, reflection, science 7 comments

We changed our timetable this week and have made start on 2011/12, which means I got to meet my new classes and get going on their new courses. This is such a crucial time. Somehow, you’ve got to find the balance between setting the right tone with your new classes and the inevitable wind down towards the end of term. Two of my classes are making a start on their Intermediate 1 Biology courses and I’ve been fighting the strong urge to play it safe. I’ve decided to take what feels like a risky strategy, but why do I think it’s risky…?

To give a bit of context, this course kicks off by learning about the nature of health in terms of physical, mental & social health and then moves onto considering how physiological measurements of health can be taken. In the past, I wouldn’t have given too much thought on how to approach this…draw the health triangle…complete a worksheet on staying healthy…draw a table of methods of taking physiological measurements…and so on. My assumption had been that I would employ similar methods this time around, but I really didn’t want to. This was not the tone I wanted to set with my new classes and felt that if I started in this rather predictable manner, then I would struggle to ever break out of this in the future. Despite this strong desire, I was worried about taking a riskier approach. What if it didn’t work? What if the behaviour was awful?

The strange thing is, my old method wasn’t terribly successful. The pupils tended to find the content quite boring and would soon start playing up. Even worse, they wouldn’t be able to remember any of this particularly well in a few months time. So why on earth would I consider this approach to be the safe one? Is it because it resulted in a relatively quiet classroom with me in control? Or perhaps because it generated jotters filled with notes? Or maybe I just feel it’s what everyone, including the pupils, expect of me? It’s surprising how hard it is to break out of these drivers!

Anyway, despite this strange internal pressure, I managed to resist. I kicked off with some circle time to discuss how we should approach learning as a class. I followed this with a group challenge to draw the health triangle based on short 10 second individual opportunities to view one copy of it at the front. We then made a video of the whole class acting out the health triangle which we watched next lesson before designing posters for doctors’ surgeries to promote all three aspects of health. My plan for the next lessons was to break the groups up into expert teams to research and present on each of the four physiological measurements they need to know, but one of the pupils in one of the classes has suggested we make health promotion adverts instead so we’re going to do that first…

And the result? The pupils’ behaviour has been outstanding – they’ve been much more engaged and motivated so far than I would’ve anticipated from my old approaches – and more importantly, they’re really learning it. But why would I doubt that? All my experience and reading in the last few years emphatically point to these sorts of strategies being significantly more successful, but for some reason when faced with the reality of 40 new S3 pupils it still takes a bit of a leap of faith to take what feels like a risk, but really isn’t at all.

Teaching Doubt

16/01/2011 assessment, change, science 8 comments

There’s a cracking little piece in yesterday’s Guardian regarding scientific doubt. Click here to have a read.

The article states that…

the public often misunderstands the scientific process and the nature of scientific doubt. This can fuel public rows over the significance of disagreements between scientists about controversial issues such as climate change and vaccine safety

This comes as no surprise to me. As a science teacher I rarely discuss doubt with my pupils. Information is presented to them very much as fact. Given that top scientists would like the public to “learn to love uncertainty” why do we spend so little time on this in schools? I’m not sure. My guess is that uncertainty is hard to assess, difficult to control and time consuming to study…none of which are very good reasons for us to avoid it altogether given its importance to the discipline.

The one thing I do know is that it’s not impossible to devise a school based qualification which embraces uncertainty and develops higher order scientific thinking skills…it’s called Higher Psychology. Having taught sections of this course I’ve been blown away by its much more challenging approach to knowledge. If, for example, I was teaching ‘memory’ in biology I’d probably ‘teach’ them one model and present it as fact. In psychology they learn a number of models and have to be able to make the case for and against each of them based on evidence.

I know when I’m back in school I will have confidence in my own values and practice to spend more time on these sorts of thinking skills – particularly in S1 to S3. However, as long as our qualifications are based around the assumption that biological models are fact and students don’t need to be able to evaluate the evidence which support these models, we will always be restricted by what we can achieve in S4 to S6.

Unless of course you choose Higher Psychology…

« Older Entries