The Evolution of the Bio Curriculum

Written by Quinn Loch

The bio team, like most teams at EG, has been reworking its curriculum since I joined it three years ago. The largest changes have been with our learning targets and our grading practices. We are always trying to figure out both what we want students to master and what that mastery looks like.

We recently worked together during a pull-out day and examined our curriculum on a more global scale. Our collaboration led to great questions and conversations. For example, why do we have a "scientific method" unit? Doesn't this unit include the skills that should be developed throughout the year and not just in small doses? Isn't our course supposed to be a year long investigation into the process of science that is just driven by principles in biology? How often should we be assessing skills related to experimental design and analysis? What are these skills? How often do we have labs where we practice these skills and how are we providing feedback on them? Should large themes like change over time (evolution) be taught independently or weaved throughout the year as an important overarching reality of the world around us?

It was great to have this open dialogue and it really helps reset our priorities in a science classroom. We spent the beginning of the day agreeing to eliminate our independently taught scientific method unit. Instead, we would use our standards based rubric that we developed as a way to constantly assess on science skills throughout the year.

By using this rubric, students can track their progress throughout the year on important lab skills like procedure writing, graph making, and conclusion writing. This rubric format was modeled off of what Kim Miklusak and the English team use for writing.

On top of re-evaluating skills in the classroom, we re-worked our content for the year as well. This included re-writing learning targets so that they are more student friendly and re-structuring so that large themes like evolution, energy/matter flow, and interdependence are interwoven throughout the year.

What part of our brainstorm looked like in the Collab Lab.

The biggest challenge still, in my opinion, is how to connect progress and student mastery in the grade book. This is what I consider to be one of the biggest "growing pains" of our transition to standards based grading in biology. As a team, we are on the same page as to our targets and what mastery should look like, but are our students? How are we weighting formative and summative assessments in the grade book? How can we make a student's progress throughout the year clear and understandable? What's the best way to communicate this?

Finding solutions to these challenges is the next step and will help make reassessment more efficient and hopefully increase student ownership.

SBG Skill Rubrics

Written by Quinn Loch

A couple of years ago, the science department decided on a list of  “ins-and-outs”, or skills that we wanted each student to develop before they left a specific year in school. A significant amount of these ins-and-outs related to the scientific method and experimental design – crucial skills that students needed to development in lab based classes.

Based on the common skills (hypothesis writing, identifying variables, data organization, procedure and conclusion writing) we came up with the lab matrix.

A snippet of the lab matrix.

This matrix provides a nice framework for students to organize their experiments coherently. It also provides an opportunity to drive instruction towards a specific skill development. For example, the focus for our freshman is hypothesis writing, graph construction, and identifying variables. When designing our labs, as a team we can decide how much scaffolding to provide based on the skills we want to focus on.

This Summer, myself and the biology team designed a rubric to help assess a students progress on specific parts of the experimental design.

Part of the experimental design SBG rubric. 

Instead of grading an entire lab with arbitrary amounts of points throughout, I can provide specific and targeted feedback on skills within experimental design. For example, on the pH lab that my freshman are working on, I will be providing feedback only on their variables, graph, and analysis

This rubric can also be used to help peer-assess as students become more familiar with it throughout the course of the year. The goal is to, by the end of the year, have student progress on all of these skills so they enter sophomore year with a solid foundation that they can build on.

Peer Observation: Round 2 (Post 3/4)

Period 5

Christina Barnum invited us into her freshmen biology class.  They used Socrative as a self-assessment tool before starting a lab.  Socrative engaged the students because it provided instant feedback on content that would be needed to complete the lab.  

Period 6
Carmen Ruiz-Bergman invited us into her AP Spanish class.  They were discussing and learning about the commonalities and differences between Halloween and Dia de los muertos.  Students had studied the traditions of Día de los Muertos, but did not really know the history behind Halloween. Therefore they were asked to research and record their findings in Notability in order to write a cultural comparison between the target culture and their community.  Some of the pieces they looked at were:

       

A.  la historia

B.  la corrida

C.  la tumba / los cementerios

D.  "Trick or Treat"

E.  Tradiciones

F.  Etc.

Interactive Whiteboards and Student-made Videos: A Review

Today the CollabLab welcomes guest blogger Quinn Loch, a Science teacher at Elk Grove HS.  He can be reached @Mr_Loch_EGHS

Interactive whiteboards on the iPad provide a way for you to record your voice and writing so they can be watched later. This can be great for providing notes to your students both inside and outside of class. Conversely, students can also use interactive whiteboards to explain and share their understanding of a topic related to your content. This provides a unique way for students to retain information and concepts--we all know the best way to remember something is to teach/explain it to someone!

Lots of options are available, and there is no “perfect” option. Below is my list of pros and cons for the more popular interactive whiteboards available on the App Store. By no means is this a complete list. Your best bet is to try them out yourself.

Explain Everything ($2.99)

Pros:

- Very powerful – Lots of export and import features

- Lets you edit videos during and after being made – great for when you make mistakes!

Cons:

- Takes a long time to encode a video (Encoding is done on the iPad.  A 3 minute video may take 5 minutes to encode)

- Not free

ShowMe (Free)

Pros:

- Easy to share videos – Great for student made videos

- Very easy to use

- Mp4 versions of your videos can be downloaded from their website

Cons:

- Cannot zoom in while writing/recording

- Videos can’t be sent directly to YouTube

Educreations (Free + In App Purchases)

Pros:

- Lots of shared videos from other teachers

- Very easy to use

Cons:

- Lots of features require a “Pro” account. (Unlimited number of videos, video file exporting)

- Can’t record a multipage document

- Can’t zoom in while writing/recording

bContext (Free + In App Purchases)

Pros:

- Lets you move between multi-page documents without breaking up the recording

Cons:

- $0.99 per video to mp4 (however videos can be downloaded after being uploaded to YouTube for free)

- Posts to YouTube can take very long (videos are encoded on their end, not on the iPad)

In my opinion, Explain Everything is the best overall option and is worth the money. Otherwise, I think ShowMe is the best free option. The reason I point out the ability to convert to mp4 is that having the raw video file gives you freedom to post it in lots of places and is more “futureproof” in the sense that it’s not associated with an app/service that might not be around forever.

I have used Explain Everything for my video notes, ShowMe for student created videos, and bContext for making video keys for ACT benchmarks.

Ultimately it all comes down to personal preference and your end goal. I hope some of this information helps! Thanks for reading!