“A great question is one that gets us all thinking…students questions give us a glimpse into what they are thinking, what issues are engaging them, where their confusion is, where and how are they making connections…where are they seeking clarification?” Richhardt et al 2011
Counseling
Why do you think you want this versus that?
How will your long term plans be impacted and why?
What would you lose if you didnt do that, and why?
What would you do if you could do whatever you wanted and why?
Write down the first thing that comes to mind when you think of college?
If you could say one thing to your parents what would it be?
Write down one message to your children?
Teaching
Questions need to focus on learning and not on work, using the language of inclusion (we not I or you)
Give praise for the effort not for the outcome = growth mindset.
I was wondering if…
Can you say more about that?
Im not following you can you explain that in another way?
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:
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.
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.
At the start of this year, a colleague and I joked about starting a Films for TOK Cocurricular/ExtraCurricular activity, and that got me thinking – what films would TOK teachers recommend we watch. So I went back to the facebook group and asked the questions.
The list below summarises their answers.
12 Angry Men
The Matrix
Shawshank Redemption
The man who knew infinity
The Challenger
Contact
Equilibrium
How Long Is a piece of String: Horizon
Goodbye Lenin
2001 a space odessy
Sophie’s World
I love Huckabee
Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind
Memento
Being John Malkovich
Slaughterhouse 5
Mr Death
Hiroshima Mon Amour
Moon
Blade Runner (They would both work, but Rutger Hauer`s final speech has excellent TOK context.)
The Truman Show
Cloud Atlas
Soleil
Capturing the Friedmans
Slumdog Millionaire
Inception
Arrival (I LOVE Arrival for showing how Language and Science can work together, and also that perception and perspective can inform reality and what making an informed decision can look like and and and (I’m a really huge fan of that movie, even though I cry every time)).
Behind the Curve
Groundhog day
Inside out
F for Fake and Rashomon (nature of truth)
Waking life
Finding Altamaria
The Great Hack
The Doubt
The Ship of Theseus
Inception
Gattaca
Baraka (how to communicate without words/language. Is music a language?)
Today was the first day of the new academic year with students after a week of inset training.
Last week we had a whole secondary training on TOK for subject teachers which was the final part of training in our work towards curriculum coherence using TOK.
To begin to bring about a coherent curriculum we have decided to look at ways that TOK (Theory of Knowledge) can act as a joint between different subjects. This could be pursued in a variety of ways:
Developing horizontal links between TOK and subjects within particular year levels.
Developing vertical links by embedding TOK lower down the school:
through form time activities
through links to curriculum content in MYP and GCSE
Inculcating conceptual ways of thinking within members of the teaching team over time.
Inculcating thinking routines, moves and steps as techniques that learners of all ages can use to think through problems
Last year we began this process by learning about Philosophy for Communities (P4C) where we learned a suite of techniques that can be used to open up a classroom to dialogic teaching.
We now unpacked what TOK is with the aim of helping all teachers in the secondary understand a little more about what this strange subject is all about and help them get over their “Feary of knowledge”. We hope that this will encourage all our team to be a little more daring in trying to link to TOK in their lessons or plan to present their content in a way that is more exposed to uncertainty and therefore debate. This isn’t something that has to happen all the time but occasionally it will provide opportunity for students to reflect, discuss and debate.
To that end I updated the P4C concept lightbulbs (used in the P4C full inquiry method) to include terms more suited to a TOK classroom and I also weighted it a little more to the science classroom as that is one that I work. These lightbulbs will allow DP teachers to use the P4C inquiry model to open up discussion about the nature of knowledge with their students. What do you think? Can you add any more concepts?
