How are Cells like Cities?
I'm setting a goal to reflect on every major lesson that I teach, and I'm a tad behind at present.
I mentioned my cell city lesson plan briefly the other day in the context of role reversal and the success I had in making my *students* do most of the work rather than being a performing monkey at the front of the class fighting for their attention. I had them use iPads individually to fill in a table of cell parts and their functions, and they got into small groups to create posters of cell cities (or other complex systems - I have students who chose to do a car, a house, a castle, or a school instead) that show the analogue between the organelles of a cell and the parts of the real world system.
My professor from NNMC came to do a formal observation of my lesson and she had a lot of positive things to say, mostly about good techniques that I use almost by instinct without really being aware of it. I think my individual interactions with students are getting better - things like giving feedback or deflecting negative or self-deprecating remarks. Dr. Pruitt couldn't really think of any criticisms to give me, which was too bad, because it went well, but I know that I'm not perfect and I still have a lot to learn. At least it looks like I'll get an "A" in Student Teaching Seminar and won't blow my 4.0 before I graduate from my licensure program in December.
Ok, so I can say that the cell city lesson is working well, but this would be a more useful reflection if I could identify why it went well. I can think of a couple of things. First of all, having students do the scaffolding individually on the iPads kept them more engaged and accountable and prepared them for the synthesis part of the assignment better than I think a lecture ever could have. But I also took time to do a brief whole-class review on cell parts BEFORE I asked them to start their posters so that at least one person in every group had a completed cell part chart to work with. I suspect that if I hadn't taken the time to cover that base, more time would have been wasted on remediation and questions from students who hadn't completed their cell charts the class before.
The assignment being creative and visual is always a plus, and it has some built-in differentiation - groups get to choose whether they want to reproduce my example of a cell city or expand on the idea and pick their own system.
Also, I picked the groups and rearranged the room into pods of four, which shook things up a bit. My mentor teacher told me that this was the first assignment this year where they'd been asked to work in groups that they didn't get to choose. I made a few bad decisions about who to put together, but for the most part it worked out - students were able to engage with the material in a different way because the social context had changed. I noticed some who are often distracted by conversation with friends taking a leadership role within their groups because their friends and their expectations were off in another group.
Yesterday these freshmen spend almost all of their 1.5 hour block period in small group work, and they pretty much worked their butts off the whole time. I think this was a combination of the timer that I put up on the Apple TV counting down their work time and the fact that I told them that that was all the time they'd have before presenting their posters on Wednesday.
This is the timer I use: http://www.online-stopwatch.com/bomb-countdown/full-screen/
At first I was opposed to the idea, being personally averse to the pressure of deadlines. But I find that it does help many students to stay on task and budget their time effectively. Plus there's a lot of curiosity, the first time at least, about what happens when the fuse runs out.
During the timed small group work, many students struck a healthy balance between enjoying the social aspect of group work and staying attentive and productive to their shared task. Overall I'm quite satisfied with the results.
At the end of the period I had them fill out short, formative peer, self, and group evaluations which I will peruse later today to see how they rated themselves and one another. Squeezing this into the last 10 minutes before the bell may not have been a good idea. They sense the bell even though the clock in our classroom is presently broken, and they like to queue up by the door a good 5 minutes before the end of class. Plus, after the timer went off, they thought class was over, and then I informed them that surprise! you have to finish this other activity. So I don't know how many of them really took the time to be careful or introspective. I am interested to see how their self-assessments compare to my observations.
So I guess the best features of this lesson were adequate preparation, creativity, and emphasis on individual initiative. The fact that I've taught it once before didn't hurt, either. If anyone is interested in my cell city lesson plan, now complete with cell parts/functions chart, instruction sheet, formative assessments, and rubric, please let me know and I'll be happy to share.
Tomorrow they'll take a few minutes to finish up their posters and we'll see how many presentations we can get through. It's an early dismissal day for teachers to get grades in, but I'm going with the Environmental Science teacher (a friend of mine who I went to school with) on the field trip that he organized to the local fish hatchery. Neat!
Friday is parent-teacher conference day, so that should be interesting.
