Inquiry activities

I have been enjoying seeing other students ideas in the last few classes. It has been interesting to see varying interpretation of 'inquiry' as well. Some clearly view it as anything the student thinks up for themselves while others view it as experimental discovery by the students. All ideas have been great and something I would enjoy using in my future classes. Interestingly, our group worked on 3C microbiology unit and it turns out that I will be teaching that unit on this practicum, from theory to practice in one easy step! Hopefully I will be able to use some of the activities our group designed and see how well they translate to a real classroom. I have been doing a great deal of observation lately between observation days and volunteering at a local high school and I definitely feel that variety is the key to an interesting and motivating classroom environment and developing KICA books has encouraged us to design activities to meet these goals. They will be a fantastic resource in the future!

My first biology practicum

I thought I would blog of the actual course topics this week because I was able to visit my last practicum school on Friday. My first two practicums have both been chemistry, which is probably a good thing as that is my weaker subject so a little practice is always good. However, I am definitely looking forward to teaching biology this time (well and grade 9 electricity... Yikes!).
I will be able to teach grade 11 college biology for their microbiology unit and grade 12 university for the evolution unit. I have been told that teaching the evolution unit will be a little interesting as the student population is very religious so its actually a good idea to include a little info on creationism too. So its going to be an interesting practicum. For the first time I will get to teach my lessons more than once which I am also excited about. I am looking forward to trying to improve a lesson between its 'first' and 'second' runs as I think that will be an excellent experience. So all in all, it looks like a great final practicum where I will get to teach in my preferred subject so it will no doubt be lots of fun!

Visual Networks

I think this is a very fun and useful type of activity for students. I'm sure they would resist the first unit but if you just made it part of the course, and maybe did the first section of a unit as a class or group activity they would warm up to it. Its definitely good for processing the information. I guess this is kind of how I processed information when I made my study notes, as I always had to rearrange the information from the order in which it was taught, my way of making the connections meaningful for me. It was definitely an effective way to study and to focus on the important points. This is just a structured way to teach your students how to do it and with practice I think they would get good at it and come to like it. As a teacher you'd have to be careful to make sure you were grading quality of connections and content not how 'pretty' it was though. Otherwise I think its a great activity that I look forward to using with my students.

DNA and the nature of a revolution

First,I would like to say that i appreciated that you chose to spend a little time on debriefing from the racism video yesterday.

Now, as to a conversation started earlier, I would like to express my view on teaching DNA as a scientific revolution. I think it would be a gross misrepresentation of the dynamic nature of science and the biological sciences to teach that evolution was the last revolution. You claim DNA was not a revolution. However, most of the field of biology would call DNA a revolution and not even the latest. THere is in fact another revolution in thinking and understanding happening as we speak in the field of RNA research, and yes it IS a revolution.
The discovery of DNA changed the way EVERY scientist in EVERY biological field thought, worked and interpreted their field and their experiments. Yes, evolution also did this. However, I firmly believe DNA is an even more important revolution. Knowlegde about DNA has changed not only scientists lives (like evolution) but has changed everyone's life (unlike evolution). For the first time in human history we can conclusively proof guilt or innocence, parental lineage, tell whether you will get the same disease as your parents, in fact tell what disease, exactly we have. And DNA is providing the tools to treat and even cure these diseases. You no longer have to wish desperately for a child without your genetic disorder, you can test embryos and implant only the healthy ones. Within the next 20-30 years there will be the option to run your DNA against standard DNA to tell you what diseases you have or have pre-disposition to. Will you have a stroke? Alzheimers? Take a sample of blood and find out.
A discovery/idea that has quite literally changed the nature of all the biological sciences forever and changed the everyday lives of people. What more could you want from a revolution?
I for one fully intend to teach biology as a very dynamic field full of rapid discoveries and reversals/alterations in thinking that impacts on everyday lives.

Racism

I'm not really sure how helpful the movie we watched today was. In the first place, I don't think anyone seated in our classroom would ever exhibit the type of overt racism demonstrated by that teacher. We have grown up in a multi-cultural society and have had a great deal of training in not being racist. That's not to say that we are free of prejudice and free of any attitudes that may adversely affect our students, just that I don't see any of us berating our students and calling them 'stupid indians' or anything. Therefore, I'm not sure how helpful that particular video was as a learning tool for us. It may have been better to focus on the inadvertent ways in which we may disadvantage minority students in our science classes and discuss ways to avoid that. I didn't really appreciate the lack of time for discussion of the video either as many of us were bothered by her methods and by various aspects of the video and it would have been good to have a chance to talk about it. In the end, the group of us that have chemistry after our class ended up discussing the video for the first 10mins of that class as we needed a debrief time. Thankfully Sarah was willing to tolerate our discussion as we cut into her class time a little. Next year, if I were you I would either not show the video or cut the intro down to 20mins so there would be time afterwards for discussion. Its just not a video you can watch without talking about it as that's really the whole point.

Teaching of Inquiry at Althouse

I had an interesting discussion with several science student who were general science and a physics students. One of the students is in one of the other biology sections as well. During our discussion the idea of inquiry came up (from me) and I was shocked to discover that none of them had any idea what I was talking about. When I tried to describe it and indicate that the way we teach science at high school is about (and is) to go under a significant change to teaching via inquiry I was met with a great deal of resistance from these other students who couldn't imagine teaching science this way. I found this very surprising as inquiry has been such a strong emphasis in my chemistry and biology classes. I therefore assumed it was being universally taught to science students at Althouse.
I was definitely disappointed to find that it isn't as due to my science experience I am well aware that our current teaching methods do not reflect the way science is really done and I am very excited to use the inquiry method.
Perhaps all those that teach science at Althouse should meet and discuss how they are teaching us to teach! I think it is critical to teach using inquiry and for future science teachers to seriously reflect on how science is taught versus how science is done.
All of the students I was talking to were very disbelieving when I tried to convince them that the hallowed "scientific method" taught in schools bears little to no relation to how science is really done. This is very unfortunate as they will all just continue to perpetuate traditional science teaching.
I for one and very excited that I am expected to teach inquiry. It will be a challenge but one I certainly welcome and that I am hopeful will help students to enjoy science.

First weeks back

I really enjoyed our interview day. I think that was an excellent exercise for everyone. It was no doubt good for the few to practice being interviewed but also good to watch, listen and learn. It was both informative but also provided a lot of good starting material to help/encourage us all to start thinking about interview answers ourselves.
The lesson on technology in education just needs to be updated. It felt like we wasted an hour on a history lesson of outdated stuff rather than learning about tools, methods and programs we could use currently. The format would have been fine if the history was kept short (no more than 10mins) and the rest was on info we could put to use in our teaching. As in our online course, there is a lot of information about technology and how to use it that teachers should learn about and perhaps next year, you could cover some of that info in this biology lesson.
As for our 'science for all' lesson, some great points were brought up and I think, for those who haven't thought about it much, that it was a really good topic to start thinking about. I have certainly thought a great deal about what I think science education should be and feel that science should be taught to at least the grade 10 level but that perhaps the content should be modified to cover the aspects of science that will trully be important for this generation to know and leave the "less-important" topics for those that wish to specialize in an area. So perhaps a greater emphasis on genetics and chemistry of pharmaceuticals and bio-engineering rather than say optics. Just a thought. This coming generation, more than any previous one needs the ability to make informed decisions in the area of science.