March Madness and How I Learned to Love Physics

It has been a rough week, and it is only Monday.  March Madness has an entirely different connotation for IB teachers.  While basketball fans all over enjoy the frenzy of NCAA fever, IB teachers are similarly overcome with a frenzy of panic.  Will I finish the syllabus before mocks or better yet, exams in May?  Will they manage to submit an internal assessment that will give them the points that they need to achieve their goal?  Have I done all that I can do to combat the senioritis that is invariably picking my students off one by one? This is my March Madness, and it happens every year like clockwork. It is times like these that I need to remind myself why I teach in the first place.

I have been teaching biology for the past 16 years.  It is my first love and my passion.  Naturally, chemistry fits right into my passion, so by default, I love chemistry as well.  If I could spend my days exploring the mysteries of these two disciplines in depth with my students, I would be a happy girl.  However, when you teach in a high school with only 200 students, you need to be a jack of all trades.  This means that physics has to enter into the equation.  For 13 of my 16 years of teaching, physics has been a part of my repertoire.  Every year, I converted countless students to the biology and chemistry fan clubs through my enthusiasm for these two subjects alone...and then I taught them physics.  A large percentage of the population share my former apathy for physics, and an even larger percentage of the population break out into a cold sweat and curl up into the fetal position at the mere mention of kinematics and energy conversions.  Imagine how hard it is to convince students to embrace physics when you yourself are counting the days until the trimester of torture will end.  I realized last year that I had two choices: learn to embrace physics and find my passion for teaching it, or move to a school with 2000 students where I could avoid it altogether.  

I decided that I could no longer let physics control my major life decisions, and I began my search for the magic that was missing from my relationship with Isaac Newton and James Joule.  It just so happened that I was researching games-based learning for my task force with the Research and Development Team.  To borrow from Dr. Strangelove, this is my story about “how I learned to stop hating and love physics” through gamification.

A couple of years ago, Jason Roy, a friend of mine who teaches Math, described a Newton's Law activity that he used to do with his physics students called "Save Kelly".  Essentially he would give the students a survival kit filled with random stuff.  It doesn't matter what you put in it, but you need to include ​materials that could be used to propel a vehicle of coins across the room on a string.  He would give them the period to design a vehicle and then hold a competition at the end.  He then had them write up their lab in a creative way.  One student actually wrote an obituary for Kelly.  You can imagine how that vehicle turned out.

Anyway, I thought the idea was genius, so I shamelessly stole it (with his permission of course) and transformed it into a week long project to introduce my physics game that takes the kids through the concepts of work, energy and power.  ​Since he frequently reads my blog (mostly to find ways to mock me), I am hoping that he will write a counter post (success...check it out) on his blog and share some of the work that the students produced. 

You can find all of the instructions and the rubric for Save Earth! under the Integrated Science Lessons ​tab.  Each year this project gets bigger and more fantastic.  Tomorrow as a faculty we are supposed to share ways that we address the following 21st century skills in our classes:  creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and information fluency.  This activity hits the three c's right out of the park.  I cannot tell you how much I love watching these kids struggle with epic fail after epic fail as they collaborate on creative ways to design their vehicles.  By allowing them three days to create, test, fail, destroy and repeat over and over, the learning that takes place is out of this world (pun intended... you will understand when you check out the assignment). 

Here is a video of my students working on this project this year.  Thanks Jason Roy for planting the seed. There is certainly something to be said for stealing like an artist.  It is hard not to love physics after you see this project in action.

http://bit.ly/14k981K

Steal Like an Artist

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"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

This quote by Albert Einstein reminded me of a book that I read last year called Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. If you haven't read it, stop reading this right now, and order yourself a copy.  This book was like absolution for all of the amazing activities, ideas, and lessons that I have "borrowed" over the years and adopted as my own after infusing them with my own signature flare. 

In his book, Kleon compares good theft to bad theft. Good theft is to honor another person's work rather than to degrade it (check).  Good theft is to steal from many rather than just one (check).  ​Good theft is to transform a piece of work rather than to just imitate it; remix rather than rip off (check, check). 

In ​Kleon's list entitled, "10 things nobody told you about being creative", he states that the secret is to do good work and share it with people.  The purpose of this blog is to do just that.  I guess you could call it my penance for all of the good theft I have committed in my life as a career criminal/teacher.  Can you tell I was raised in a Catholic family?

As promised in my last post, I wanted to share a great meiosis activity that I stole years ago from an anonymous source and made my own.  I later discovered that a man named Harry Wong designed it originally, so thank you Harry!  It is called, "Homologous Shoes".  ​

On the day that I teach meiosis to my students, I make them take off their shoes and carelessly throw them in a designated area.  I then carry on with my lesson for the day acting like nothing happened.  When we get around to discussing prophase I of meiosis, I gather all of my students around the "nucleus" and we look at our two "sets of chromosomes" otherwise known as their left and right shoes randomly dispersed.  Each pair of shoes represents a homologous pair.  Though they are similar enough to be distinguished from all other pairs of shoes, they are not identical (left vs. right etc.). 
We then begin synopsis. Each student is instructed to pick up the first shoe that they encounter that belongs to them with their left hand and the second shoe they encounter with their right hand.  This helps to set us up for independent assortment in metaphase I.  They then hold their shoes together in the form of a bivalent/ tetrad and we discuss chiasma formation and crossing over.  I then have them line their shoes up along the "metaphase plate" and we make observations about their arrangement.  I then ask them questions like, "If we were to start this activity over, what are the chances that the shoes would line up exactly like this a second time?".  We then carry out anaphase I and segregate our alleles forming two distinctly different haploid nuclei. 
At this point, I tell them that the smell has become so overwhelming that we will have to find a different strategy to learn about the second division of meiosis, and we switch focus. By combining the visual metaphor with the active manipulation of "chromosomes", this activity helps students to both understand and remember the unique events in meiosis that contribute to variation in a species, namely crossing over, independent assortment, and segregation of alleles.   

Out of curiosity, I Googled this activity ​to see just how different my activity was from its original design.  See for yourself, and thanks again Harry for doing good work and sharing it so that my students could benefit from OUR collective creativity year after year.  After all, "Nothing is original." (Austin Kleon and countless others).

Breaking Away From Content Delivery

The more I research and reflect on how we learn best, the more frustrated I get with programs that essentially require teachers to teach to some form of standardized test in order to ensure the success of students.  Though I believe that IB biology provides a good platform for skill development in higher order thinking skills with lab design and analysis of data, I find the content to be too prescribed in terms of terminology and phrasing.  As a result, a teacher could potentially get great results by simply teaching the test using only a program approved textbook or study guide for teaching resources.  In addition to this, the time requirements for completing the "content delivery" in the higher level course, frequently prevent teachers from using more time-consuming, non-traditional methods such as project-based learning for much of the content. 

Several months ago, I read a great post by Shawn Cornally from his blog "Think, Thank, Thunk".  If you do not follow him, you should definitely add him to your list.  In this post, he made me yearn for a teaching situation in IB biology where I could implement all of the cool strategies I get to use in my 10th grade integrated science class (not bound by a standardized test at the end of two years) such as project-based learning and gamification.   ​The struggle he describes is one that I would love to tackle in my IB biology class.  I wrote to him to ask how he could possibly do all of that in an AP/ IB class (talk about your super teacher). It turns out that his school doesn't have an AP or IB program for biology, though some elect to take the AP Biology exam after taking the course.  I suppose the grass is always greener, but at the same time, I decided to make it my mission this year to find ways to move away from the test and challenge my IB students creatively forcing them to use those higher order thinking skills that we as a school have embraced this year: namely critical thinking, creativity, information fluency, and collaboration. 

My last post is one example of how I have moved away from the lecture model in IB to teach content that is typically delivered old school style.  Today I will explain how I taught cell transport processes using a new tool I discovered called Inklewriter.

It is almost a guarantee that my students will find a question similar to these on their exam in May of their senior year:

1. Describe the process of mineral ion uptake into root.
2. Explain how the structure of the villus in the small intestine is related to its function.​
3. Explain the process of active and passive transport that move materials across a membrane.  ​
4. Explain how a nerve impulse passes along a neuron.​
5. Explain the process of ultrafiltration.  ​

What do all of these have in common?  ​Cell membrane transport.  As a result this is one of the most crucial themes for kids to not only understand but also be able to apply to a myriad of situations. 

​Inklewriter is an online "choose your own adventure" tool.  Though you would typically find uses for this in an English class, I adapted it to address this theme in IB Biology.  Since cell membrane transport is dependent on several variables such as concentration of molecules, size, polarity etc., it reads just like a choose your own adventure story.  If this is the situation does it do this or this?   

Prior to class, I had all students sign up for accounts and familiarize themselves with the instructions on how to create a choose your own adventure story.  Then in class, I paired them up and let them run with it.  The majority of them chose to use a metaphor such as a bouncer (cell membrane) at a party, or Middle Earth (still trying to process all of the weird references in this one).  Others created their own fantasy or went the literal route.  ​

Either way, the entire class was actively engaged in this activity, and I was able to identify any gaps in their understanding of transport by reading their stories.  Since the majority of them also applied their knowledge of transport using a metaphor, they are more likely to remember how this works and be able to apply it to new situations when they learn about the different body processes or transport in plants.  The best part was that we only had to spend one class period working on this. The engagement factor alone motivated my students to devote more time outside of class working on this than they would have if I had simply assigned a reading out of a text for them to memorize. 

Here is a link to the assignment.  ​You can find a more detailed description of this along with a PDF file under the IB Biology Lessons link on this blog.