Wednesday, January 5, 2011

A Road Map for Learning....

I am interested in using my biology class as a lens to teach my students how to learn and practice the skills needed to be a scientist. I've been thinking lately about creating "road maps" for the concepts of class. These road maps would help my students understand what they need to do to learn a concept. Along the road map would be different "stops"; i.e., vocabulary acquisition, content reading and understanding, learning laboratories, experimentation, and reflection. These stops are the different steps needed to understand a concept. At each of these stops, students would have several different options of assignments to complete. On these assignments I'd like to provide feedback, but not grades - these activities are formative assessments. Students may need to complete multiple activities at each stop along the road map if they are not understanding the material. Once a student understands a concept, the road map becomes the students "ticket" to assess out on a topic. There are still questions that I need to continue to think about:
1. What are the steps of learning?
2. Would these stops be the same for different concepts?
3. How much structure to provide in the road map?

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Lecture-Free Instruction

I recently remembered seeing a video about a lecture-free Introduction to Biology class at the University of Minnesota that surfaced last winter. I've been doing a fair amount of reflection about my teaching practice lately, often involving how instruction needs to be changed in my classroom because we have moved to a 1-to-1 laptop setting in our school last year. I feel that my instruction should no longer be about the dissemination of information, but rather the acquisition and processing of information. This has been a struggle for me as an educator because science, and biology in particular, is a very fact-based rather than process based discipline. But at the end of the year, I am more concerned with my students remembering processes over facts. I was intrigued by several aspects of the video at the time of my viewing, but I was not really ready to implement those ideas in my classroom.



I really like the idea of a concept laboratory instead of a lecture. In my effort to drastically decrease the amount I lecture, but still provide structure to my class, this is the framework that I've come up with:
  • Students complete a reading assignment outside of class. I am in the process of producing reading guides for each reading assignment as a scaffold.
  • Using Google Docs, I send a formative assessment form to each student at the beginning of class as an opener to assess their understanding of the reading assignment.
  • Student desks in my classroom are arranged in small groups. In these small groups students will discuss questions, extensions, applications of the reading assignment to process as a group. I can use this time to clear up misconceptions with students as identified by the formative form.
  • Towards the end of class, have a whole group discussion of material. This is a possible time for groups to report out about what they learned or to wrap-up and summarize the learning objectives for the class period.
I am now looking for resources to effectively implement cooperative group strategies in my classroom to maximize the concept laboratories.