Category: Teaching & Learning

Originally posted on April 13, 2018 @ 7:15 am

In my view, biology is a subject that is largely about language instruction. Of course, this doesn’t mean, to the exclusion of all other considerations. Yes, of course, there are facts and concepts that need to be learned and understood but, at its heart, it is a subject concerned with language acquisition.

And just like French, it is full of irregular verbs.

Personally, I remember the challenge of all the new vocabulary of the subject at A level, as being something that attracted me to it; I had the impression that by learning all these new words I would be entering another higher plane of existence.

So just imagine what this vocabulary is like for a new student, stepping into this level of biology and operating in their second or third language and perhaps with a very limited exposure to schooling in English. I am always surprised by the number of other adults, parents and administrators, who don’t seem to see this.

Parents, particularly, seem surprised when I bring up the issues of academic language acquisition

I have had some amount of experience teaching students who have started the subject with no English or very little English and this post will outline what I understand about teaching them today I fully recognise that  I am no expert.

James Cummins: BICS & CALP

My first foray into the realm of EAL teaching brought the work of James Cummins to my attention. To summarise, Cummins’ work postulates differences between basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS) and cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP).

Essentially, the former can be developed over a relatively short period of time (1-3 years) and is the language of peer culture. Children who have developed BICS may well sound fluent and indeed can communicate on a level using common everyday terms and phrases with their family and peers. The latter can take much longer, 5-7 years, and once developed allows the individual to think, manipulate and utilise complex academic concepts mentally. They can think with the language and they can think in very abstract terms.

It seems to me that the work of Cummins suggests that schools should resist simply placing older EAL students into secondary subject-specific classes and hoping that they will catch up. This may work with students going into grade 6 and 7 classrooms but could actually retard students progress in grades 9 and up.

Obviously, in the international context, students may well keep joining older classes (I once had a student who joined grade 10 directly from school in Israel. She has never been taught in English and yet was expected to just catch up in grade 10 biology) and so we can’t reasonably say don’t come to school. But the approach of some managers seems to be that students will just pick up the language.

These students need intensive English instruction first (if that is the language of instruction of their academic subjects) using methods that have been shown to have the largest effect size. Strategies in this category have the best hope of bringing the students learning forward faster and thus the best hope of bringing the time for students to acquire CALP down.

Isabel Beck: Tiered Model of Vocabulary Aquisition

More recently I have come across the work of Isabel Beck whose model of vocabulary acquisition places words into three categories:

 

• Tier 1: These are the common, everyday words that most children enter school knowing already. Since we don’t need to teach these, this is a tier without tears!

• Tier 2: This tier consists of words that are used across the content areas and are important for students to know and understand. Included here are process words like analyze and evaluate that students will run into on many standardized tests and that are also used at the university level, in many careers, and in everyday life. We really want to get these words into students’ long-term memory.

• Tier 3: This tier consists of content-specific vocabulary—the words that are often defined in textbooks or glossaries. These words are important for imparting ideas during lessons and helping to build students’ background knowledge.

 

In biology instruction, it is the tier 3 words that all students are going to struggle with initially, but EAL students may also be lacking a good number of tier 2 words, which will make their comprehension the tier 3 words that much limited as these words often provide the context for the tier 3 words.

For example this year I can think of the words “coolant” and “yield” that came up as not being known by my grade 11 students. Many of these are students raised in English speaking families but have been attending Swiss public schools up until the start of grade 10 or 11. These aren’t words that come up in everyday conversation but are used across academic domains.

I am relatively new to the idea of Tiered vocabulary but it does seem, on first impressions, a useful way to think about words that EAL students may or may not have and to plan to help students bridge that gap.

Perhaps, one wider school aim could be to map out the tier 2 words that are common across subjects. Once a working list is compiled then students can be assessed for their knowledge of these words and interventions put in place.

Strategies

• Identify and pre-teach complex vocab (tier 3 words) before starting the unit (I use Quizlet “learn” for this)
• Get to know your suffixes and prefixes so that you can explicitly model your understanding of the terminology to students.
• Keep new words on the board, clearly visible to students to use in their thinking, speaking and writing.
• Encourage more reading and writing in your classroom. Encourage students to constantly use the new terms that they are being exposed to.
• Use a reading age analysis to examine the tests and exams that students in your class are likely to sit – what is the level? What is the English reading level of your EAL students?
• At the start of the course give students lots of opportunity for guided reading, ask students to identify words that they don’t know and keep a running list. Provide explanations for these words.
• In line with the above, continue to identify Tier 2 word gaps in your student’s knowledge through reading exercises.
• Perhaps try to list out common tier 2 words in your subject (this would take time) and compare with other departments. Check students understanding for these.

Originally posted on April 3, 2018 @ 8:00 am

There has been a bit of twatter on twitter recently caused by the headlines in newspapers suggesting that students should do seven hours of revision over the Easter break in preparation for their GCSE exams. Reading through some of the stuff is a good voyage through fluffy thinking.

Firstly, there is the outrage that working for seven hours a day is just the worst thing that could happen to a 16-year-old student. Stamping out childhood and all that. Surely at that age, they could just as well not be in school and working a full-time job… McDonald’s anyone? (Disclaimer: my first job at 15 was in McDonalds and I had weekend jobs throughout sixth form).

Then there is the implication that revising hard for big exams at the end of 11 years of schooling means that the students and schools have wasted the last 11 years of schooling…..

Then there is the implication that if students are revising they haven’t been taught well, as if teaching well and revising hard are mutually exclusive

Then there is the implication from this tweet that working for seven hours can’t possibly be a quality revision..

Working seven hours a day on revision for one or two Easter holidays of a young adults school career (once in the run-up to GCSE’s and once in the run-up to A Levels) isn’t that much to ask.  GCSE exams and A Levels exams are both fairly high-stakes examinations which can have impacts on a student’s future prospects. The person who should be primarily responsible for investing their time into their future is that student, and it is a teachers role to advise and instruct them how to best approach this time.

Neither does working hard and investing time in your future during your Easter holiday undo the work of the last 11 years of schooling. In fact, it is an incredible opportunity to develop personal discipline not unlike that required in training for any major event one wishes to undertake. Simply committing this quantity of time to self-regulated learning is a great opportunity for learning and practising self-regulation.

I agree that revision is about quality of activity and that it shouldn’t be a proxy for not teaching well. I also think that revision needs to be thought about carefully in terms of a teaching sequence if it is going to be used for maximum effect.

One of the things I love about the revision period as a classroom teacher is the chance to really bring the subject content together. Sure, I will have been making links with topics throughout the course, just see my IBDP biology course outline.

But structured revision is the point where students who have built up solid domain specific declarative knowledge are able to begin to develop a thorough understanding as this material can now be abstracted in the mind to allow the development of connections of understanding.

As a teacher part of my role is to help students birth this understanding, that can be the underpinning of excellent further study.

To be able to refer back to topics and help students finally begin to make connections because they have built up a solid factual base to allow them to think.

My advice to my Y13 biologists is as follows:

DP Revision Instructions

1. Plan! Focus on planning for a normal 8 hour working day (0900-1300 & 1400-1800).
2. Make a schedule that spaces your subjects out. Out of your six subjects focus on three a day and rotate every two days. This will give you 1-2 hours per day on each subject.
3. Plan each hour for 50mins study and 10mins of break.
4. Plan activities and rewards for the evenings.
5. If you want to do something in the afternoon or morning, shift that study session to the evening.
6. Plan sleep and proper breaks that will take your mind off of your work – give your brain recovery time.
7. During the 50mins study time, switch off notifications (turn on do not disturb or use an app)
8. During the 50mins of study time undertake “active strategies” you have seen throughout the course.

Essential Activities 

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.

You can find these lists prepared on the course website.

Active Revision Strategies

1. Connect-Extend-Challenge.
2. Quizlet activities
3. Memory clock – 12mins revising a topic – 30mins answering questions – 12mins reviewing your answers.
4. Make lists of everything you don’t know when studying from a text.
5. Peer-2-Peer teaching and feedback.
6. 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.
7. Word-Phrase-Sentence to help you summarise and re-summarise.
8. Create voice memos on your phone for each subtopic and then listen to these on the train/bus/etc.
9. Create mind maps and concept maps, try to build links
10. When self-correcting and reviewing your work, use a new contrasting colour to help you remember the information you were missing
11. Complete past papers: Start with open notes
12. 1. Progress to closed notes
    2. Progress to timed with closed notes
    3. You can also reuse these – if you know that there is an eight mark question of the light-dependent reactions of photosynthesis you can use this question over and over each time you review this topic.

Active Revision tools

1. Textbook
2. Oxford IB Biology Guide (thin orange textbook)
3. Quizlet for key vocab
4. Syllabus (AKA confusingly as the DP Guide)
5. Question bank on kognity.
6. Use all the above to create shorter and shorter summary notes for each topic/sub-topic

Originally posted on April 2, 2018 @ 9:00 am

Recently (when I first started this post at least) I blogged about the best way to begin the DP biology syllabus and I was frustrated by the limitations of the syllabus to be able to pick and choose different assessment statements.

The DP biology course has always been knowledge rich. Maybe not as full as the A Level syllabus to take account of the fact that students are taking six subjects plus a summatively assessed course in Theory of Knowledge, a summatively assessed research project: The Extended Essay, and their Creativity, Activity and Service Program.

Now, the IB changed the syllabus to allow more conceptual teaching, by removing the series of statements about students should be able to:… “explain x” and “state y” and grouping knowledge into brief statements under the heading of understandings, applications and skills. However, the structure of the syllabus with the essential idea for each topic tends to hamper the ability to lift assessment statements out and add them to new areas. i.e. mutations and oncogenes in topic 1.6 could be taught with topics 3.1 after 2.6. See the biology guide for the full IB syllabus.

This year, my Diploma Programme Coordinator, asked the subject departments to focus on developing their written curriculum.

It seemed timely to be asked to do this, when over the summer I had been musing about the best place to begin the course and the best ways to break up the different topics – many of the schools I have worked in simply teach the course topic by topic and the IB is keen to point out in the biology guide:

“The order in which the syllabus is arranged is not the order in which it should be taught, and it is up to individual teachers to decide on an arrangement that suits their circumstances. Sections of the option material may be taught within the core or the additional higher level (AHL) material if desired or the option material can be taught as a separate unit.”

Over the course of this academic year, I have thought a lot about how best to structure the course to allow the “best” progression of concepts. Actually, I think that this is a process that began when I first started teaching my current Y13s, and I am an exceptionally slow thinker! I do remember reflecting on how to best position evolution within the course and which topics would be best coming before or after it.

But it wasn’t until this year that I have had the time within my working week or the emotional time within my personal life to really dig down and get to grips with writing up my ideas into the formal IB course outline.

I have also been exposed to new ideas about teaching and learning over the last twelve months. Last summer I read Dan Willingham’s book “Why don’t students like school?” which I think I got put onto after reading Michela’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers”.

Idea’s from cognitive science have become more and more prevalent on my twitter feed as well as I have started to interact a little more with the #CogSciSci crowd.

All this to say that my thinking has evolved in the last twelve months.

I now know that, generally speaking, content knowledge, concepts and skills are domain specific and that learners have to become fluent with a subject’s facts before they are able to transfer that to abstract concepts and develop understanding let alone build connections with other subjects.

I am also beginning to understand the concepts of retrieval practice, spaced practice, dual coding and the distinctions between declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge and how all this may apply to my subject teaching or pedagogical content knowledge as Lucy Crehan puts it in “Clever Lands”.

Translating this into biology teaching is still not well understood (or so it seems from my vantage point) but conversations like the ones below (propositional knowledge = declarative knowledge) and blogs like this one, are beginning to help me unpack this.

The finished product

The below is the finished course outline that details the units and sequence of the teaching of the course. It is an official document used in the authorization and evaluation process of IB World Schools.

The below is my SOW for the course. It has six tabs. The DP overview shows the number of teaching hours recommended by the IB for each subtopic along with my grouping of them per unit. The Year overview shows the spacing of the units through time for both Y12/Y13. The next two tabs are for the week to week (mid-term planning). The Bio and TOK tabs show the TOK links that I have chosen to focus on the topic and are to support collaborative planning with the TOK team. Finally, the PSOW tab shows the practicals that can be built into the course. The IB mandates a specific number of practical hours for both SL and HL courses.

Final Word

The other effect of this learning for me is that I am now worried about the direction that the IB is taking in its philosophy.

If research from cognitive science is telling us that learners need a solid factual knowledge base before they can build conceptual understanding then what does this say for a course whose syllabus is about “understandings” as opposed to knowledge?

I have not heard anything from the IB that shows that it is reviewing research from cognitive science. Is the IB becoming an ideologically run institution that ignores research that doesn’t fit in with its own paradigm?