Developing Theory of practice
Since I hear a constant buzz around the room and receive high student participation during these types of pre-unit group activities and discussions, I believe that they serve as useful methods for engaging student interest in and stimulating student discussion about biology topics. However, I do not simply want to interest students in science just for a specific unit or just for the year during which they have me as their science teacher. As noted previously, my goal is to help students develop scientific literacy skills that will serve students as reflective citizens in society. A scientifically literate person is willing to engage in reasoned discourse about science and technology (PISA, 2013); this discourse must move beyond relaying unsupported personal opinions or strictly scientific facts. As PISA notes, students must show a more in depth understanding of science, built through the practice of explaining, evaluating, designing and interpreting. As my own practice has evolved over the past year in the classroom, I have begun to consciously use these competencies as a guide for how I approach science topics in the classroom. I have developed a teaching style in which I use discussion and collaboration activities to introduce a new topic and engage student interest in this topic, teach content through the balanced use of direct instruction, groups projects/activities, and inquiry labs, and finally close a unit with activities that allow students to investigate and discuss how these science topics relate to their own lives.
Early in the year, one of the first projects that I planned for students provided them an opportunity to practice the scientific literacy competencies of explaining, evaluating, designing and interpreting. In this project, students assumed the role of 'demographer' and analyzed international census data to better understand global human population growth. When I planned this project, I had two basic learning objectives in mind: students would learn about the topic of population growth and experience how scientists perform basic scientific research. Only after reflecting back upon this activity did I realize how deeply embedded scientific literacy was in this project. In this population project, students worked in pairs to learn how to calculate percent annual growth rate. This step required students to study and explain in their activity packets how to calculate growth rate and explain what it means for a growth rate to be positive, zero, or negative. Then, students designed their own study of international population growth rates by choosing two countries to analyze: a more developed country and a less developed country. Students formulated hypotheses regarding which country would have the higher and lower growth rate. In these hypotheses, students had to explain the reasoning behind their hypotheses. Students then collected data on each country from a fairly complex government website (International Data Base Census Bureau website) and interpreted these data. Student interpretation included the construction of population pyramid graphs, careful examination of differences in the shapes of the graphs, and evaluation of factors affecting the shape of the population pyramids. At the conclusion of this project, we created a large graph on the wall outside the classroom. Students hung up their country flipbooks as data points on the graph, according to growth rate and fertility rate. The next day, we used this visualization and spent the first part of class discuss the trends we saw in the data; students had the opportunity to explain their countries' overall census data, provide explanations for their data (more developed vs. less developed, access to birth control, access to cutting edge medical care, access to medicine, predominance of urban vs. rural areas, etc.) and identify where their specific countries lay on the growth rate graph.
Early in the year, one of the first projects that I planned for students provided them an opportunity to practice the scientific literacy competencies of explaining, evaluating, designing and interpreting. In this project, students assumed the role of 'demographer' and analyzed international census data to better understand global human population growth. When I planned this project, I had two basic learning objectives in mind: students would learn about the topic of population growth and experience how scientists perform basic scientific research. Only after reflecting back upon this activity did I realize how deeply embedded scientific literacy was in this project. In this population project, students worked in pairs to learn how to calculate percent annual growth rate. This step required students to study and explain in their activity packets how to calculate growth rate and explain what it means for a growth rate to be positive, zero, or negative. Then, students designed their own study of international population growth rates by choosing two countries to analyze: a more developed country and a less developed country. Students formulated hypotheses regarding which country would have the higher and lower growth rate. In these hypotheses, students had to explain the reasoning behind their hypotheses. Students then collected data on each country from a fairly complex government website (International Data Base Census Bureau website) and interpreted these data. Student interpretation included the construction of population pyramid graphs, careful examination of differences in the shapes of the graphs, and evaluation of factors affecting the shape of the population pyramids. At the conclusion of this project, we created a large graph on the wall outside the classroom. Students hung up their country flipbooks as data points on the graph, according to growth rate and fertility rate. The next day, we used this visualization and spent the first part of class discuss the trends we saw in the data; students had the opportunity to explain their countries' overall census data, provide explanations for their data (more developed vs. less developed, access to birth control, access to cutting edge medical care, access to medicine, predominance of urban vs. rural areas, etc.) and identify where their specific countries lay on the growth rate graph.
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