I privilege experiential learning. Having students explore different topics with hands on activities and labs can be very rewarding and help to maintain student engagement. This can also be challenging, however, because students sometimes have trouble connecting abstract concepts to the activities that they are doing in class. This was something that I struggled with in high school- having lots of activities but not connecting them to the major concepts.
One important connection, which I have actually recently come across in my inquiry class, is the use of a graphic organizer that centers around the unit's big ideas and how different activities relate to each other and the big idea. I think that this would be important in lesson planning and backwards design because the instructor would need to have a firm grasp on what the unit as a whole will look like and the interplay between activities and concepts, or the know and the show, as it might also be known as.
One of the goals/ learning objectives that I am planning for the upcoming ecology unit is "I can use a case study to evaluate and analyze how changes to an ecosystem affect populations." This can be done in a variety of ways, but one of the ways to connect this to my students would be to have one or more case study that features organisms that my students may already be familiar with. For example, I could utilize case studies from Colorado or within the geographic region. I could also feature case studies from countries that some of my students may be from, such as Mexico and Venezuela.
This would most likely be assessed informally such as formative assessment via exit ticket or worksheet. The overall unit would have a summative assessment that is a combination of exam and project. The language demands would be primarily reading and writing, though this could also be done via listening/ watching videos. The cognitive demand would probably be low to medium, more towards the understanding level of the Hess Cognitive Rigor Matrix. The standard that this would connect to would be: MS-LS2-4. Construct an argument supported by empirical evidence that changes to physical or biological components of an ecosystem affect populations. For me, it would be important to consider for unit planning ways to be sure that students can get out of their seats and participate with their peers. This also connects to the unit planning because that would affect the individual lessons.
