High School Bio Teacher Chronicles

This semester, I’ve learned about many different approaches to design lessons, units and curriculums.  In undergrad, my area of study really only focused on one approach to designing lessons, and that’s where I’ve always stuck myself when I design.  Now, after I’ve learned about all of these different methods and their benefits, I think I’d like to change it up when I’m designing!  I’ve always gravitated towards a inquiry based learning design approach, but when thinking about next year I’d like to incorporate things like gamification, cosmopolitanism and ADDIE.  Gamification would just allow so much freedom and add a competitive element for students when I know that’s something they really enjoy.  If they are having fun through a game while learning, then they are probably more likely to catch on and understand the material, so I’d like to add more of that aspect in rather than just playing games for review.  I’d also like my students to share what we are doing in class and what they are learning with the world, like I mentioned in a blog post earlier on.   Most of the time what happens in my classes, stays in my classes.  We make a lot of cool things and solve a lot of problems that sharing those with the world would be beneficial for them.  They’d see even more that what they are doing in the classroom is valuable.  Lastly, I’d like to try designing with the ADDIE model.  When creating my lessons, a lot of times I just start at the beginning and then try and find an end.  The ADDIE model wants you to start with your end goals and what you want the students to do and know.  I’d like to incorporate this approach more into my designing because then the activities I create will probably have more meaning if I’m designing them to get students to the end goal.  Overall, there are many theories and models and ways to design, but I think you can use more than one and adapt your style into them and make it work best for your students!

I know we are all counting down the days until the end of this school year(at least I know I am).  I also know that no one wants to even start thinking about next year, and trust me I am going to take a BIG ole mental break before I even think about planning for next year, but there has been something I’ve been thinking about.  I’ve been wondering how next will look.  I hope for all of our sakes that we won’t have to endure anymore zoom, online classes or hybrid classes.  Let’s all hope that we get just all of our students in one room for the first time since March of 2020(unless you got that this year and if so, it still probably wasn’t super normal).  So let’s just pretend, we get back to “normal”.  I’ve been wondering how the last year and a half of weird online, hybrid, back in person learning will affect these students.  I know for myself that I’ve extended more grace to students than ever before, extended deadlines, gave too many reassessments, etc, as I’m sure others have as well.  Where I’m concerned is that now students will expect this same grace in a normal school year.  How do we go back to discipline and rigor, after there was a year and a half of “pandemic teaching”.  Trust me, giving grace and pulling back was the right thing to do, but coming back from it is going to be rough.  Students are really going to struggle to get back into the swing of rigor and strict schedules.  I am curious if anyone else has thought about this and how they or their school will handle this.  My school hasn’t really discussed it, we’ve put together a spreadsheet of missed content, but that’s about it.  I know amongst my colleagues, we’ve just acknowledged that it’s going to happen, but have not discussed how we will address, deal with it!  Anyone else thinking about this, or are we just trying to get through the next few weeks??

I have come to a realization that I’ve always been missing a component of inquiry-based learning.  I have given my students freedom to explore, design, look at problems and determine solutions, but what have they done with those designs and solutions? Nothing.  The final component to inquiry based learning is for students to share those findings or do something about it.  I really would love to incorporate some way for my students to do this but I really have no idea where to start.  Part of where I feel like my issue is, is that our curriculum has to go by so quickly in order to get everything in, that there isn’t time for this part of inquiry.  This part of inquiry takes time, so it could be hard to put time into class for the sharing of their products or solutions.  I wonder if part of the class could be like blogging or vlogging about what they are doing in class and epiphanies that they are having.  This could be where they share their solutions or designs, and it could be something they get to do publicly.  I wonder if students would buy into this concept of sharing their thoughts on science with the world.  Sharing ideas in the science world is such a common practice though.  In every study done, they have to share their findings publicly or it really won’t mean anything.  So getting students in this mindset that their thoughts and ideas matter and that others might find them helpful.  They could use it explain how they were able to finally learn a concept, that maybe a student across the world would read and then it could help them learn the same concept.  I wonder, has anyone else done something like this before?  Anyone have any suggestions on how this would work?

I’ve recently been thinking about how to better incorporate inquiry-based learning into my classroom.  Inquiry-based learning is very popular in science education right now and it was something that was introduced to me in my undergrad.  I remember it being taught me as allow the students to make an observation, create questions, develop a hypothesis and test it.  To me it didn’t feel realistic to do that continuously throughout the year.  Maybe I could do it once a semester.  Now I have had the chance to do some further research on inquiry-based learning, and I realized that inquiry-based learning something that can be applied to any unit of study.  The key part of inquiry-based learning is involving students in the learning.  The students will still be making those observations and gathering data but it doesn’t have to be as formal as I had thought it was.  Let’s say I’m teaching a unit on genetics.  I could show students a bunch of different strands of DNA and just let them make some observations on similarities and differences.  These are things that many teachers just lecture on, but students are much smarter than we give them credit and could easy point out similarities and differences.  It’s also a skill that would be great for them to have. Which is another component that inquiry-based learning focuses on, is for students to learn skills rather than memorize content, because facts in our world are ever changing because we learn new things everyday, so the logic behind inquiry-based learning is that we should teach students problem solving, creative, gathering data, analyzing data skills that they could apply to any situation.  If I go back to the genetics unit example, after they look at the similarities and differences, I can explain why and explain a little more of the content, but they’ve really done the ground work.  Then I could either come up with a question that we as a class investigate, allow all students to investigate a different question, or have the class create questions and the whole class chooses one, and we try to find solutions to the problem, or answer the question through research or through experimentation.  I think I was making it much more complicated in my head than it really is, and the main idea is just to teach students skills of inquiry so they can apply it to problems and questions they have later in life.   I am teaching a new class next year, freshman biology, and I feel like it will be such a great class to try and implement so many inquiry-based lessons into.

Here is a great video explaining how to help student develop questions in inquiry-based learning.

I recently learned about how well or not well I’ve been using TPACK.  Basically TPACK is a model used to describe the type of knowledge a teacher needs to be effective and shows how these different types of knowledge overlap, and all are needed to be effective.  The three areas are content knowledge, pedagogy knowledge and technology knowledge.  A teacher could be really smart in their content knowledge but not know any pedagogy and how to teach their children.  A teacher might have a lot of the teaching skills but really struggles with the content.  There’s probably a lot of teachers out there with the content and the pedagogy but struggle with technology.  I feel like my strongest area is pedagogy.  I’ve really had to rely on it as a high school teacher who keeps changing the classes the I teach.  I student taught teaching freshman bio and anatomy.  Then my first year I taught 6 sections of physical science and had no clue what I was doing content wise.  I relied heavily on the focus on science skills to teach my students rather than going too deep into content.  Then the next year I taught bio II, environmental science and chemistry, and so I felt a little better with content, but it was all new subjects that I had to relearn because I’d never taught them before.  So again I was relying on my pedagogy knowledge.  This year I’ve really had to grow my technology knowledge because of COVID, as well as I’m in my 3rd grad school class on technology in the classroom.   I still have a lot to learn and put into practice, but I can see a big difference in how I approach technology now.  Once again I am switching up my classes for next year teaching freshman bio and AP bio, which the AP bio will be a HUGE challenge for me content wise, as it’s just been a few years since I learned these concepts, so I will again be relying on my pedagogy knowledge in that class, and now maybe my technology knowledge as well!  I’m excited that I continue to get to grow in my content knowledge, but I hope I can start to get some consistency!

I recently made a timeline of my technology use over the years.  I was then able to look at some other colleagues timelines and compare our journeys.  I realized that my tech use is really limited to the last year and a half of my career.  Now I’ve only been teaching two and a half years at this point, but before then I didn’t really see a need for technology.  Maybe it was because I was technically challenged and always struggled with it, or I was comfortable doing it the way I always had.  At the first school I worked with, it always seemed like such a hassle because some students would forgot theirs or forget their chargers and it would be dead.  I had some classes where students didn’t have their own laptop because only freshman and sophomores had them.  I had some students get theirs taken away from them, so it was mostly just a hassle to figure the logistics of that out to me, so I rarely used them.  Fast forward to when I began at the current school I work with, all students 9-12 had their own device and it seemed they were much better at at least bringing it to school with them.  They might not have had the charger but that could be shared with other classmates.  I also have never had the issue with them being taken away from students.  The biggest issue I see is the technology not working and then they can’t complete an assignment because of that.  I think that part still kinda bugs me sometimes, but I’ve found enough value in technology that I can look past that.  One example that I’ve found very valuable recently is instead of making students read through a pre-lab, they do a virtual lab first.  Then they come to class to do the lab and already have it visualized.  It really has helped take away time from having to explaining those things to students.  I have also learned to make sure the technology is enhancing the learning, and not just replacing something that could have been done with paper.  I need to use technology in a way that students are doing something they never could have done without technology.  I am still learning the best approaches to that, but I think I am getting closer to it by having that mindset!

I spend a lot of time in my work life trying to find ways for my students to learn.  A lot of the time, that process is really quick and I don’t spend too much time “geeking out” with tools that I have my students use.  I read reviews, and ask teachers about it but never really have spent time diving into it myself.  After going through this HOMAGO experience, I see the value in taking significant time to learn about an app to find the benefits, to find the flaws, and to find what it can be used for.  I feel like I really understand how the app, Nearpod, really works now because I have spent so much time with it and doing research on it.  I have learned the value in taking time to mess around and mess up when learning through something new.  I also realized that this is a process that all teachers go through when trying something new in the classroom.  We mess around with it first, then let our students hang out with it and then eventually we become so accustomed to it that we geek out over it.  I just never saw this process before even using with students before, but I think there is benefit in really geeking out before the students use the tools you choose for them because then they see your excitement about it before you use them.  When I was planning my wedding almost two years ago, I was looking all over Etsy for decorations and the prices were freaking me out.  Then I had this thought that, it can’t be that hard, I could probably make them myself.  So I teamed up with my grandma, we did some research on best practices for making wooden signs and just went for it.  The signs for my wedding was just me messing around.  Through that process, I learned so much about making those signs, and trouble shooted so much, that I see I was hanging out in those moments.  From that point I have now made signs for Christmas presents and have even been paid to make them for other people’s weddings.  I have gotten to the point of geeking out.  So I think it’s something that a lot of us do in our lives when learning and creating hobbies, and we just don’t realize it. As far as students go, I think I could get better at implementing times for them to HOMAGO.  I do let them choose their own tech tools for projects, but they seem to default to what is comfortable and in this remote atmosphere, when I have tried to force them to use something else, they have been frustrated trying to figure out how to use the tool and have just reverted back to something comfortable.  In the classroom, I would be there during that frustration and be able to help walk them through how to fix the problems that they were having.  Even with that, I still think that the students could be given more experiences where they are just messing around, and figure out what they like.  One idea I have for my classes, is to give them a project at the beginning of the year that is pretty basic in it’s content.  The beginning of the project would be to take time just learning the tech tool they decide to use to create it.  I’d love to give them a day or two to just sit with tools and mess around with them.  Then they would hang out by creating their project with it.  Lastly, they would geek out by showing their project to the class, as well as show the class how to use their tool.  Then students would have this bank of tools they have knowledge of for future use, and I can just point them to that when they are creating their projects.

MY TECHNOLOGY MANIFESTO

Throughout the challenges completed in this class I have learned so much.  There is so much that I will take with me.  Below I have decided how I plan to use what I’ve learned through some goals.  In this post I will go through those goals, how I got to them, and how I will measure them.

 

Goal 1: Incorporate more personalized lessons in my classes

The reason that I want to incorporate more personalized lessons in my classes is because I value creating experiences that matter to my students.  Not all students are the same and they aren’t all going to the follow the same path.  I want to create experiences for them that include something that they are passionate or allow them to use their strength to show me that they have learned what we have discussed in class.  The reason that I value that for my students is because I know that they will be more invested in my class if they care about what they are doing and learning.  By making it personal, that will help make the content matter to the students.  The issue in the past with how lessons are created is that they are based on what teachers or state officials think is important for students to learn, not what the students are interested in.  More and more teachers these days are trying to personalize lesson for students but it’s really hard to do in the current system we have.  There are standardized tests that require teachers to cover certain content.  As a high school elective teacher, I have much more freedom in my curriculum and see that I have much more possibility for personalization rather than my other coworkers.  In the future, I can see education heading in more of a personalized direction, and I think that if we do that students will enjoy learning more. The direction we need to go is allowing students to choose their path in high school, as well as work at their own pace in a class. The reason why this is so important is because so many students don’t enjoy school, and don’t further their education after high school or even don’t finish high school because of it.  Learning should be exciting.  So if I fail to do this, I could fail to create future learners. Challenge 4 is what inspired me for this goal, as well as some ideas from Challenge 7.  In challenge 4, that is where I learned how important it is to personalize learning for students to make them engaged.  I felt like in Challenge 7 I learned some strategies that could personalize it for them.  I really like the concept of stations for this, but keeping it broad so it can be personalized for students.  Another Challenge that gave me ideas for personalized learning was Challenge 8 and the extended reality.  That can get very personal if students choose how they want to explore extended reality. I always knew that you had to make learning personal for students, but I never thought about making it this personal, for each individual student.  I always thought about it as personalizing it for a class, but I see now that there are so many different types of students in a class that it might not be as affective.  I will try to measure this goal I have created by making sure that I have incorporated one personalized lesson in a semester for each class that I teach.  That will be my measurement at first.  If I get more comfortable, I will try and add more later on.

Goal 2: Incorporate extended reality in my classes

The second goal that I have is to incorporate extended reality into my classes.  I value experiences that are useful to students.  I think that give them virtual experiences will be so useful in their lives or future careers.  If I taught a medical class, the students could practice doing medical procedures.  I think that is a valuable that students could actually use.  In the past students would memorize steps or read about procedures or places, or just see pictures.  That isn’t as good as actually experiencing something.  Currently there are great VR goggles out there, but just not all of these cool experiences that I think that there could be.  Right now what we have is experiences such as going through the human body or travelling to a place in the world, which is crazy that we can do that, but sometimes I think it’s hard to find a valuable experience in that other than it just being “cool”.  Where I think VR can go that would make it valuable is travelling somewhere and completing tasks that you would need to do in that field of study, like digging for bones and identifying them, completing challenges, talking to coworkers and discussing ideas.  This matters because so many people go into college without knowing what they would actually be doing in the job.  It also matters because it creates equity.  Some students don’t have the ability to go to a cool summer camp or travel the world for experiences that help them find what they like to do and these simulations with VR could level that playing field.  One challenge that inspired me to have this goal was Challenge 1, as that was the technology I did research on that most people feared at first.  I think VR has come a long way and that it has so much further to go in the future.  The other challenge that helped me create this goal was Challenge 8, where I really dove into what extended reality could be.  All of my ideas of what extended reality could be in the future came from this lesson, or were brainstormed because of what I read in that lesson.  I also think about Challenge 3 when thinking about this goal because in Challenge 3 I learned so much about the inequity in technology at schools and the gap that we have between students and schools.  We need to create this space were all students have equal opportunity.  When I first began this class I really just thought of extended reality as what it is now, just something to give kids cool experiences but really doesn’t have learning value to it, and now I see that it could change the way students learn and create experiences.  The way that I will measure this goal would be to find a virtual reality experience for my students once a semester per class.  Over time, I again would hope that would continue to increase.

 

Goal 3: Include more technology experiences that allow students to create and engineer their ideas, rather than replacing non-tech experiences

This last goal that I have is simple, but I really want to incorporate more tech experiences where students use their creativity, rather than just replace a paper, with an online version of the same thing.  I want to do something with it that they couldn’t do without the technology.  The reason why I want to do this is because I value experiences that make students learn.  If I just replace a google document with a paper copy of a document, they aren’t learning more than they did with the paper copy.  I want technology to enhance the learning that the students are having.  A problem in the past that new workers in their career are having is that they don’t know the technology required to do their job.  If we taught students technology problem solving skills or schools used technology that are used in specific careers, then students would be familiar with it when they get to the job.  Instead of using technology that replaces a previous experience, we need to add technology that isn’t currently being used in schools to teach students what they would need in the future.  It matters to do this, because so much of a students college career or even the beginning of the career is spent learning this technology whereas it could be better used actually doing their job, or making them better suited for their job.  The challenges that helped me create this goal was Challenge 2 and the concept that we need to be thinking about the future of technology and create forward thinkers in our students that can solve problems with technology and expose them to new technology.  Technology is always changing and will continue to do so in their career, but if they have the skills to learn new technology and problem solve with it, that is the only skill they will need to adapt to changes.  Another challenge that inspired me here was Challenge 6, because through that experience I learned that when trying something new, practice is important.  If we give students time to practice new technologies, then when they encounter one in life later one, they will already have the practice of trying something new and going through the trials of it. I can even take this into my own career because through this I now see that technology is always changing for me to, and I always need to be searching and researching new technology to be able to present it to my students and give them the most updated experience that is beneficial to them.  I will measure this goal by putting a tech experience where students are practicing something new or creating using technology in every unit.  There are a lot things that students do in my classes in which could be turned into a technology experience, and in the next year I am excited to do that!

 

For my final plan of integration of nearpod into my lesson plans, I’ve decided to add it to the next unit I am teaching in my chemistry class.  That is the class that I struggle with making lecture interactive.  I typically don’t lecture as much in the other two classes that I teach, but I do in chemistry because there is so much content to learn and so much practice that students need to do.  So I really am excited to integrate nearpod into that class to bring those lectures to life and get students involved.  We watch a lot of videos in that class to show demonstrations or spark student interest.  I would love to add videos in nearpod and then ask students questions either in the middle of the video or afterward.  then with nearpod I can see their responses, show them to students and it can be a discussion starter.  I can ask students why they gave the answer they did, or look at similarities and differences between all answers.  Students can also create a drawing, if I asked them to create a model or draw out a process in the middle of a lecture, they could draw it right on their laptop and then we can compare those as well.  It’s a quick check to see how students are doing in the middle of the lecture.  Whereas normally we just keep going through and the only students I know are understanding or not understanding are the ones that are talking or asking questions.  I know that some students just don’t like speaking up in class, and this is their way to do that and for me to check for their understanding.  My next unit in chemistry is on electron configuration and that is a very hard subject for students to understand so this will be a great unit to start using nearpod for.  While I begin to make this nearpod, I am curious if any of you use this regularly and how you’ve used it?  Do you use it every time you lecture?  What feature do you find to be the most telling of students understanding?  Is there a feature that creates classroom discussion more natural than others?  I would love to hear your experiences!