Reflection on Bio 351: Tutorial in Advanced High School Biology
I am currently finishing up my work for Bio 351, a tutorial organized for the four science MAT students in the class of 2007. In the fall, the four of us decided that we wanted to arrange a class in which we could delve deeply into certain topics within the high school biology curriculum, learning more about them and developing lesson plans that we would be able to use as part of future classes we might teach. Professor Peter Klopfer agreed to teach this tutorial and work with us to develop a new high school biology curriculum.
At the beginning of the semester each of us chose a section of the biology curriculum to focus on. We tried to each choose a section with which we were less familiar, our goal being to gain knowledge of the content for our chosen area while also developing lessons. Because my background tends towards the botanical side of biology, I decided to focus on animal diversity for this class. The other three MAT students in the tutorial chose ecology, evolution and genetics to study. For this class, we met once a week to discuss our progress on lessons and get feedback from Professor Klopfer. In between meetings, we each worked on developing our individual lesson plans.
A major goal of this tutorial was to develop a biology curriculum that would get students to think about biology as a dynamic discipline. Rather than merely teaching students a set of facts about biology (which may or may not remain true a decade down the road), we wanted to develop a set of lessons that would get students involved in lots of inquiry about the natural world. We also wanted to develop a curriculum that would teach students to think critically about what they hear and read regarding biology. Therefore, in our lessons we tried to incorporate lots of hands-on activities, and to use an approach in which the teacher would facilitate questioning and discussion about the major themes of biology and the process of studying living organisms. Although the curriculum we developed is idealized and does not cover every topic in the current Durham pacing guide for biology, we feel that it does cover the essential topics of biology and that it covers these topics in greater depth then they are allotted under the current pacing guide.
Please feel free to browse through the pacing guide and table of contents for our new biology curriculum.