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Resources Teaching & Learning

New DP Biology site launched (but still under construction!)

Originally posted on July 28, 2017 @ 12:28 pm

So I have moved over my DP biology resources to a new google site designed for delivering the course. You can view it here: 

In my first school I worked with a colleague who made workbooks for her students, that were tailored to the 2009 syllabus. The kids loved them. At this time I was still working on a paper basis with large lever arch folders, and photocopying the exercises that I wanted to give to my students. To simplify my planning and preparation I thought it would be easier to copy my colleagues idea and collate all of my exercises into workbooks for each subtopic that I could simply print and hand out to my students. It took me a few years to develop these workbooks and then the syllabus changed.

For the first two years of the 2016 syllabus I worked on updating my existing workbooks to bring them in line with the new syllabus. By this point, I had moved school’s twice and had been exposed to quite a few different pedagogical approaches and philosophies, as well as different levels of technological tools with which to teach. It seemed the time had come to convert totally from paper to digital.

I share this website as a resource for other educators and their students but please be aware that, while I certainly welcome discussion, critique and comments, I have designed this website with the following purposes in mind:

    • To consolidate my existing resources and methodology into one digital space.
    • To structure the course that I currently teach to my own students into one place for my own students to access.
    • To provide a structure to the exercises that I use in class. It is NOT intended to be another content heavy IB site

There are plenty of IB Biology content-driven resources out on the web, some of which are truly excellent. This is not intended to be such. Instead the aim is to provide structure and exercises to query and engage with content-driven resources, like website, video and textbooks.

If you wish to feedback please remember that in addition to creating this website I am:

    • A full time teacher with other responsibilities in my professional life and a young family.
    • Preparing this work, primarily for my own personal professional use.
    • Making no claims that their are no mistakes in this website, please check carefully and if you feel so inclined drop me an email to let me know.
    • Making no claims that the exercises, ideas and resources are entirely my own original work. Please see my acknowledgements page for details.

 I am intending to follow this up with a google site dedicated to MYP Biology and another for guidance counseling. I will keep this blog purely for noting down my thoughts when and if they occur!

Categories
Teaching & Learning

This weeks grade 12 revision advice

Originally posted on February 3, 2017 @ 5:04 pm

DP Revision Instructions

  1. Make a list of all of the experiments and procedures mentioned in the DP guide. –make sure you know what these are and can describe them.
  2. Make a list of all of the calculations (including statistics) included in the DP guide.- make sure you know what these are and can use them.
  3. Make a list of the drawings required in the syllabus included in the DP guide.- make sure you know what these are practice drawing them.
  4. Make a plan (for however many weeks you have) of which topics and in what order you are going to revise, along with how many hours of review you will put in each week.
  5. Execute plan
  6. Complete past papers
    1. Start with open notes
    2. Progress to closed notes
    3. Progress to timed with closed notes

Active Revision tools

  1. Textbook
  2. Ofxord IB Biology Guide (thin orange textbook)
  3. Workbooks
  4. Syllabus (AKA confusingly as the DP Guide)
  5. Use all the above to create shorter and shorter summary notes for each topic/sub-topic

Active Revision Strategies

  1. Connect-Extend-Challenge.
  2. Brainstorming and reviewing against notes.
  3. Peer-2-Peer teaching and feedback.
  4. Thinking/Discussion about the course material that pertains to specific functions as you carry out those functions e.g. digestive system while you are eating.
  5. Word-Phrase-Sentence to help you summarise and re-summarise.
  6. Create voice memos on your phone for each subtopic and then listen to these on the train/bus/etc.
  7. Create mind maps and concept maps.
Categories
Teaching & Learning

Practical Work & The Internal Assessment

Originally posted on January 19, 2017 @ 8:37 am

ICT in Biology

The documentation on the ICT requirements for the new course is currently not well documented. However it is expected that the five categories will remain the same as they were in the old course:

  • Data logging
  • Graph plotting software
  • Spreadsheet
  • Database
  • Computer model/simulation

ICT in IB Biology is an excellent resource for all aspects of ICT usage from graph construction to online databases.

Datalogging

For DP Biology I recommend Vernier and the resources in terms of practical protocols they provide.

 Graph plotting and spreadsheet software

HHMI Spreadsheet Data Analysis Tutorials will show you how to use google sheets to analyse data, produce tables and plot graphs.

It is currently (to the best of my knowledge) not possible to put error bars onto data points in scatter graphs in google sheets (although you can for bar graphs oddly) and I therefore recommend that students use Excel to carry out data processing and presentation.

The problem arises in schools with BYOD policies that don’t take into account that students need to have the same version of these programs to ensure a flow of learning in classrooms where teachers are trying to instruct their students on this stuff.

Databases

 

Computer models and simulations

A list of online simulations

Internal Assessment Guide

Lessons in Action

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Teaching & Learning

Goals for 2016-2017

Originally posted on August 21, 2016 @ 9:00 am

In this post I am trying to clarify my ideas for my goals and focus of my pedagogical practice for the academic year 2016-17.

Teaching

Firstly following on from my reading this summer and as discussed in an earlier post I want to bring thinking more to the front and centre of classes. By this I mean that I want to make the types of thinking used by scientists more explicit to my students and to help them further develop their thinking dispositions.

1) Learner Profile

I have come to see the learner profile as the the dispositions of a learner. It is these dispositions that we are trying to develop.

Goal #1: Make the Learner Profile front and centre of class.

2) ATLS

If the Learner Profile is the disposition then the ATLS are the tools for developing those dispositions. Highlighting the approaches to learning and showing students how to develop these skills will develop their own learner profile.

In terms of IB teaching, this year I plan to spend more time focussing on the approaches to teaching and learning (ATLs). Thinking skills is a subgroup of this and the work of Ritchhart is referenced by the IB on their ATL guide in the thinking skills section. Ritchhart also talks about the need to make his thinking routines explict, as what students cannot name they cannot own. I think that this applies to all of the approaches to learning and  I am convinced that the methods used to make thinking more explicit would also be beneficial in terms on making all the learning skills more explicit to students, and therefore helping them develop the skills to become independent learners.

I think it would be wise then, to start by making the ATLs and the essential questions of science visible and on display in the laboratory. The same could be said for the TOK classroom and the college counseling office. What are the essential questions in these areas of school life?

In delivering my curriculums I will try to use routines more readily for study and thinking, the challenge now is to work out which routines will be best suited for my subjects in my lesson planning. And develop good routines for the other ATLs not necessarily just the thinking routines.

Goal #2: Make the approaches to learning explicit in class.

3) Thinking routines

A subset of the the ATLS are the thinking skills and routines have been developed by Harvard’s Project Zero. In using thinking routines I need to develop my skills of questioning to make thinking more visible and encourage my students to share their thinking. After all, individual thinking benefits from being challenged; from the need to articulate things clearly to others. Therefore collaboration is the stuff of growth and acts to give students the tools to work together by developing their own thinking skills.

For something to be truly valued it has to be well articulated and identifiable. To value thinking we have to unpack it and identify what it entails in any given situation, therefore leaders of any group need to articulate what kinds of thinking they value – what kinds of thinking do we want in a science class? In TOK class? Vygoytsky stated that children grow into the intellectual life of those around them therefore we need to surround children with thinking.

In the DP Biology course the Nature of Science sections lend themselves perfectly to developing the types of thinking required by scientists.

Steps to thinking involve: honesty with students, essential questions for science. Types of thinking moves. Thinking routines.

Goal #3: Teach for scientific and critical thinking.

4) Concept Inventories

Goal #4: Become more familiar with the research on “threshold concepts” and the Biology “Concept Inventories”

5) EdTech

On the EdTech front I am going to try to integrate Periscope more into my teaching. I think that the app has a lot of potential benefits for schools including the ability for students to connect in a non-threatening way with other students across the world, disseminate information to parents, and getting feedback on my teaching like a digital lesson study.

Twitter and Instagram could also be useful research tool for students and could be co-opted in to class if students are given advice on useful people to follow.

Goal #5: Make more use of Twitter and Periscope in my work in school.

 

 

 

Categories
Teaching & Learning

Is content king?

Originally posted on August 14, 2016 @ 9:00 am

This post was written in 2016 and does not reflect my current thinking about teaching biology. Please see this post to read about my updated views on teaching the subject.

I have reached a watershed in my thinking about teaching and my philosophy about teaching science.

I trained and begun learning to teach in a school with a very robust academic record. Teachers were considered absolute experts in their field and students were, on the whole, very high achieving but who had high expectations of their teachers academically too.

In this environment I learned that the teacher’s fundamental responsibility was to be an an absolute expert in their field; if you didn’t know everything, and could not answer every question, the community of students would lose faith in you. Or at least that it is what it felt like.

I mentioned in my review of Ritchhart et al of comments made by an ex-colleague of mine which reinforced this sentiment.

In those formative days then learning to teach was about mastering your subject knowledge. Content was King. Delivered in lovely little powerpoint slides where students would simply copy down their notes and then memorise them.

I left that school confidently arrogant that I was an expert in my subject and in the IB. That any school was going to want to employ me after the time that I had spent in that school. And indeed I was partly right. I secured a position as Head of Biology at a prestigious boarding school. The time there was little different. I benefitted from working closely with the chemists and physicists, in a closely knit science department. However the sentiments were the same. Content was King. Our role as science teachers was to deliver the curriculums content. The learner profile was dismissed by the Head of Science as fluff.

Since moving on from that school I have been involved in setting up a school and taking it through its IB authorization process as the only Biology teacher and as one of two or, more recently, three science teachers. I cannot point to any single experience from this time that has been the catalyst but my thinking has begun to change. Perhaps it was being forced to seriously consider the IB’s other bits; the ATLs; the IB Learner profile. Perhaps it was being exposed to and challenged by the MYP. Perhaps it was teaching a new DP Biology syllabus with so much focus on the nature of science. Perhaps it was beginning to teach TOK. Perhaps it was becoming a workshop leader. Perhaps it was working with so many truly excellent IB educators. I don’t know.

But I now question the sentiment that content is king in science teaching.

I am beginning to think, to really think that more important than learning the content, my students need to learn to think. It might sound like an odd thing to write. It certainly feels like an odd thing to write.

I’m sure that many people who aren’t teachers would raise their eyebrows at what I wrote above. Surely, a teachers job is to teach students to think? But it’s not as simple as that. Teaching students to ask strong questions and to develop different thinking dispositions is no simple task. It’s much easier to focus on the curriculum delivery. What are my students supposed to know? Fill the time in with student-centred activities, and group work, debates and presentations and you are doing a good job right?

I’ve moved on from didactic lecture like teaching in my early days to worksheet, activity based teaching but has anything really changed? My students still present as apathetic. School is still something that they just do on the whole. I’m sure most of them forget what they “learn” instead of engaging with the deeper issues.

And this is what I want: I want my students to be engaged, passionate and switched on critically to the world around them and be scientifically literate.

How do I do that when sometimes I question my own scientific literacy?

Perhaps its time to really focus on the thinking and the types of thinking that are needed in science and needed to be developed in students of science. The trouble is I am sometimes not sure that I know what thinking really means…

In Making Thinking Visible Richhart et al (2011) discuss turning the content into a vehicle for teaching and framing certain thinking skills. It is argued that developing thinking skills is important because these skills are the tools that students will take forward into future life when the content is forgotten. They are the tools the future adults will utilize to navigate life.

The thing is, thinking doesn’t just happen. As teachers, we need to be explicit with students about the types of thinking that are useful in certain situations and provide strategies that help students learn to think in these ways. We can’t just leave it up to chance. After all, traditionally, we don’t leave the content up to chance (normally), instead, we are explicit with it. We need to give students the chance to think about their own thinking and what it means to them.

Ritchhart provides a list of “high-leverage thinking moves that serve understanding well”:

  1. Observing closely and describing what is there.
  2. Building explanations and interpretations.
  3. Reasoning with evidence.
  4. Making connections.
  5. Considering different viewpoints and perspectives.
  6. Capturing the heart and forming conclusions
  7. Wondering and asking questions
  8. Uncovering complexity and going below the surface of things

I will be posting these “moves” in my classroom as a start as well as try to relate the activities we are doing to these types of activities.

As science teachers, we need to ask ourselves: What type of thinking is important in science? More specifically what types of thinking do we want to develop in students of science? How is thinking framed in terms of the work that scientists do? What are the essential questions of science?

Clearly, the thinking moves above are addressed by different elements of scientific enquiry. Observing closely is an important part of observational studies and also hypothesis generations so is wondering and asking questions. To generate a hypothesis requires building explanations and reasoning with evidence. When we draw our data out we try to capture the heart of a problem and draw a conclusion,

Once we have a clear idea of this then we can begin to teach the thinking alongside an understanding of the nature of science through well-planned content. The difference is that our learning objective is twinned – we have a thinking objective and a content objective.

Understanding how to teach in this way is important.  Biology teacher Paul Strode has written some articles in this vein. In one he looks at reasoning like a scientist and the other deals with teaching the hypothesis. Although he still focuses on framing the content instead of necessarily framing the questioning, these are good reads. However, I feel that the questioning and thinking strategies needed to become front and centre of the teaching instead of the content.

Thinking relies heavily on questioning. In science we are trying to ask the following questions:

What do I notice?

What does that tell me?

Why does it work like this?

How can I test this idea?

How can I be sure that my findings are valid?

Or, according to strode whose list is below:

Step 1: What claim am I being asked to accept?

Step 2: What evidence supports the claim? Is the evidence valid?

Step 3: Is there another way to interpret the evidence?

Step 4: What other evidence would help me evaluate the alternatives?

Step 5: Is the claim the most reasonable one based on the evidence?

Teaching like this requires teachers to step down as the “font of knowledge” in their classrooms and have the courage to be wrong. I have worked in schools where the culture of the school would simply not allow that to happen.

As Ritchhart points out we need to be able to ask our students authentic questions, meaning that the teacher needs to not know the answer, and if teachers are worried about seemingly not knowing something how can they do this?

This academic year I am going to try and put thinking centre and front in my classroom. I just hope that the crazy timetabling and work-load pressure doesn’t push me back into easy, old habits.