Author: wrpvincent

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Resources Teaching & Learning

Practical & Teaching Resource: Genetic Databases

Originally posted on April 3, 2016 @ 9:10 am

Preamble

One of the challenges I have found for teaching the new (2016) IBDP Biology syllabus is getting up to speed with the new content as expressed in the understandings, applications and skills sections of the syllabus. This has been particularly true when this new “content” implies an understanding of new technologies such as the huge rise in bioinformatics databases. To make matters worse, I am the only biology teacher in my school and I have been acutely aware of this when, stumbling across new requirements, I have had no one to bounce ideas off (or steal resources from! :))

So what do you do when you have new content that you have not taught before, that relies on an understanding of bioinformatic technology that wasn’t widely available, or covered on your masters in ecology eight years ago and you have no colleagues to help you? You go back to the drawing board…

When planning my course the year before I had shunned ordering the text book written by the chief examiner for the subject for my students on the grounds that it was too big and heavy. I had opted for a slimmer, light-weight textbook that was written by an old colleague. However, In preparation for times like this, I had purchased a copy for my own reference, not to teach from the textbook, you understand, but to refer to when I was unsure of exactly how much depth a topic needed going into (and therefore how much classtime to devote to it) or what the chief examiner had in mind when he wrote the course as part of the curriculum review committee.

While I applaud the move away from a list of learning statements as we had in the old syllabus, statements from the understandings section, like this one from topic 3.1 Genes:

“The entire base sequence of human genes was sequenced in the Human Genome Project”

often leave me wondering how much time needs to be allocated to them. This is where having a copy of the chief examiners textbook comes in handy.

The Practical

Earlier this term I was teaching the IB Biology core topic 3 – Genetics and while planning came across the following statements:

3.1 S1: “Use of a database to determine differences in the base sequence of a gene in two species“

3.2 S1 “Use of databases to identify the locus of a human gene and its polypeptide product”

These along with several other “application” statements in 3.1 an 3.2 left me slightly bamboozled as to how to approach teaching this, seeing as I had never used these kinds of databases in this way myself, and whats more I was left asking the question – aren’t the kinds of databases that these statements refer to way too complicated to expect 16-18 students to be able access?

Anyway, the instruction was there so I had to do something with it. In the end I referred to the Allott & Mindorf (2014) textbook along and the inthinking biology teacher resource website and combined and adapted two of their practicals to use in my classroom. The result is below:

  1. I designed a practical protocol worksheet which is available here, which could be printed out and handed to students. There is QR code which, when scanned, links to the following video.

Download (PDF, 70KB)

  1. I made the following video that takes students through the worksheet. They can be used together.

Reflections

The video and the activities together take about an hour or just over to complete and do count towards practical hours on the PSOW. I am hugely indebted to the work of Allott & Mindorff and David Faure at inthinking to be able to produce this. Students are able, if they have a mobile phone and QR scanner to link directly to the film and follow the instructions. Alternatively the video can be played on a projector. Students could also complete this as a homework task but this couldn’t then count as practical.

I think that the video and the activities could be broken up into smaller individual activities as I think this may help students to process exactly and clearly what they are doing. These databases can be complex to navigate and contain a lot of information which can be overwhelming for anybody who is new to this area.

While I personally like this part of the syllabus and think that there are some possible IA ideas here, especially when combined with evolutionary studies, I can’t help but think that this material is a bit too advanced for 16-19 year old students, particularly for SL students. It is fairly niche and I would be interested to know how many universities would cover this type of bioinformatic content in their first or second years.

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Coordination

The DP Coordinators view: language level placement I

Originally posted on June 2, 2020 @ 3:20 pm

I am not a language teacher. In this post I want to share some scenarios surrounding language level placement in the IB DP and I would love to hear feedback to the questions raised.

In my experience, one of the most murky, opaque areas of the Diploma Programme is language placement in the group 1 and 2 subjects.

Having worked as a university guidance counselor and diploma programme coordinator for around five years in total (at the time of writing), I have been involved in the discussions around this topic in two schools on two continents.

It can be a highly contentious issue it seems; lots of people want to give their view, including me!

So whats the issue? Surely if a student is a native speaker they should take the language at group 1 and if non-native then they should take it at group 2, right?

Well, no. It isn’t that simple.

International schools can be very complex places and students language profiles are no exception to this. Add to the fact, that schools may have a medium of instruction that is different to the host country language as well as first language of the majority of students in the school, who may come from a country other than the host country or any country that uses the medium of instruction.

Let’s imagine a student. This student lives and attends school in country X where the local language is language Xphone but the schools medium of instruction is Zphone. This students family speak neither of these languages but students parents moved to country X from country Y for work 8 years ago.

The family speak Yphone. At home this student speaks Yphone every evening, but at school they are taught in Zphone for all their academic subjects and studying Xphone as the host country language is mandatory. Ever since this student was in upper primary they have studied at school primarily in Zphone and but also have had lessons in Xphone.

To make matters more challenging this student has been in the langugae aquisition stream for both language X and Z since upper primary and, whilst their language use of both language is strong, they are not fluent or at the level of a native speaker in either of the languages.

How should a student in this scenario be treated when undertaking their choices for the IB DP? None of the language teachers feel that they are strong enough for Language A courses and all recommend Language B HL. Should this student not be allowed to take the full IB DP because they can’t “do” a language A course?

The student in question wants to take school supported self taught literature A in Yphone. Should they be allowed to do this? What if they do not have the requisite skills to analyse literature in that language? They may have been speaking it at home all their life but they have not formally studied in it or with it for many years and so their reading and writing skills in this language skills are somewhat reduced.

What do you recommend? How should we approach this scenario as DP Coordinators?

Let’s imagine another student. This student holds a passport for country C because they were born there but their parents are from country D and moved back soon after this student was born. The family speaks Dphone at home. The school is located in host country D but teaches in language Cphone for most of its academic subjects.

Because of a quirk in the admissions process, despite being a mother tongue D speaker, this student was placed in D acquisition classes in upper primary and has stayed in these classes all the way through secondary. The teachers cite his slow progress in the acquisition class for language D and the fact that he holds a passport from country C as reasons that he has never moved into the main language D classes.

Now it comes to IB subject selections and the student is in acquisition classes for both language D and language C but cannot take both as group 2 subjects – one must be in group 1 but which one?

How do you decide which course would be most appropriate for a student? What would you do to resolve these issues if you were presented with them?

In next weeks post I hope to provide some thoughts of my own.

Categories
Coordination

The DP Coordinators view: Language orals

Originally posted on May 24, 2020 @ 10:55 am

I am not a language teacher.

I am a biology teacher by training but being diploma coordinator requires me to become a generalist in other subjects. In this post I want to summarise my understanding of the coursework requirements of these courses, so as to better understand their placement in an assessment calendar.

The changes in the International Baccalaureate group 1 and 2 courses in the last couple of years appear to have been positively received by the educators I have spoken to.

Aside from the exams at the end of the courses coursework components for these courses has been streamlined, a positive change for both teachers and students a like.

In group 1 subjects HL students will have an externally assessed essay to complete, which replaces the written task. At the time of writing, I suspect that this essay will be submitted as an early component. SL and HL group 1 students will have to complete an oral.

In group 2 subjects HL and SL students need to complete an oral.

The guide for group one subjects recommends that orals for these subjects are placed at the end of year 1 or the beginning of year 2 of the programme.

Teachers and experienced coordinators that I have spoken to recommend that group 2 orals are placed as close to the IA upload deadlines as possible, as this will give students the greatest chance to demonstrate fully developed speaking and listening skills, which makes sense for a language aquisition subject.

Therefore for my assessment calendar, in addition to blocking the internal assessment for the maths courses to occur at the same point in the year, I recommend:

  • Placing group 1 orals in June of DP 1
  • Students taking 2 group 1 subjects they can opt to take one or both subjects at this time or one of their subjects in a second slot in September of DP 2
  • HL essays to be completed between October and February of DP2. There is a potential conflict here, affecting HL group 1 students, with the TOK essay which also needs to be submitted in the early deadline
  • Placing group 2 orals in the middle to end of March of DP 2 allowing 2 to 3 weeks of processing and uploading to the IB eCoursework system.

Thinking about it, while all coursework needs to be checked for authenticity, language orals are the closest in likeness of an exam in terms of the conditions that they are held under. They are less likely to be affected by academic integrity issues.

Are you a IB language teacher? What do you think? I would love to hear from you.

Categories
Coordination

Quality Assurance?

Originally posted on May 15, 2020 @ 11:32 am

“I’m talking about quality assurance not quality control, they are two different things”

Yes, perhaps. But your insistence on checking every teachers work down to the exams they are setting for the end of the year is not only a MASSIVE waste of valuable time with a syzygetic opportunity cost but will only serve to undermine quality, long term, in the educational programs you are trying to assure.

Teachers are generally a hard working lot, who care about what they do. Yes, I have encountered one or two who genuinely were out for what they could get but that is not the modus operandi of most of the professionals I have met.

And I refuse to base management decision based on a few bad apples.

Subjecting colleagues to a work scrutiny is patronising at best and at worst sends the message that we don’t trust you. If I am a hard working colleague trying to balance a quizillion other work tasks alongside regular teaching this scrutiny is going to demotivate me, not inspire me to deliver my best.

Yes, I can think of reasons why you say we should do it too, but they are baloney compared to the long term impact it has on morale and therefore the quality of our educational product.

Of course, staff need to be held accountable but we need to allow them the space to make mistakes so that they can formatively develop. There is a difference between supporting someones development as a professional and operating on the assumption they can’t be trusted to get it right.

To my mind this way of thinking goes in the bin alongside, making personalised exam timetables for students for their mock exams: A massive waste of leadership time and a massive learning opportunity cost for the kids.

Categories
Coordination Teaching & Learning

The DP coordinators view: math internal assessment

Originally posted on May 1, 2020 @ 9:35 pm

I am not a maths teacher let alone an IBDP math teacher and I write this blog well aware of this fact.

The continuing COVID-19 enforced school closures are now beginning to impact the teaching and learning of the May 2021 cohort, particularly in those areas where school campuses have been closed since January. Many students in this cohort appear set to have had almost half of their first year delivered online.

In this post I am not concerned with the actual content of IBDP courses and how that will be addressed, but with the planning of our internal assessment calendar for the May 2021 cohort.

One of the impacts on our campus will be, for a variety of reasons, the combining of IBDP maths courses in each year level. When the new maths courses were published this was something I hoped we would do.

Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your opinion, that was not to be. I was not able to convince colleagues that the new courses should be combined SL/HL  where possible, with common content for all four courses taught collaboratively.

But now it looks like from next year we will be forced to combine them. I am secretly hopeful that this may open a few minds as we experiment with this paradigm.

The Group 5 project?

Teaching and learning aside, what has this got to do with the IA?

Well, I am currently trying to re-design our coursework calendar for the May 2021 cohort as the picture has shifted now the campus has been closed so long and the calendar designed last October is no longer fit for purpose.

One thing that I especially want to avoid is the concertina of assessment deadlines being squished into the first six months of next academic year. Therefore I am actively looking for solutions to address this, one of which might be fence-posting out the dates the times that all maths classes at all course (AA & AI) & level (SL & HL).

For example, the Math exploration should take 10-15 hours of instructional time. Assuming 15 hours, and with 5 x 1 hour classes per week I could block out three weeks from the middle of October until the middle of November for students to focus purely on their maths IA.

No other subjects can set deadlines for coursework in this time that could distract from students focusing on their maths explorations. All maths classes work on their exploration solely at this time. At the end of this time the first draft of the work would be submitted to their teachers for feedback as per IB rules. Teachers could then have two weeks to turn around their feedback and students a further three weeks to work on their final drafts independently.

To my mind the question is:

  1. Is it feasible to expect all maths classes to work on their explorations in exactly the same weeks?
  2. If so, would this approach allow the collapsing of classes so that students can collaborate, teachers can co-teach and support?
  3. If so, would there be increased opportunities for ATL skill and learner profile attribute development?

IBDP Maths teachers out there, I welcome your views. What is your experience with the new courses and the new IA? Would it be feasible to structure the IA like this?