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?

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.