Lessons from lessons. They all come together to help us grow in our ability to best serve our students and help them walk away with engaged, applied understanding of what we're trying to convey to them. Though it's not my capstone, all of my planning for our Trees unit is giving me ideas upon ideas as I move forward into planning for our Evolution unit. I certainly didn't expect to be planning Biology full time yet, but I don't mind, and in truth, I'm the one who took the initiative to start doing so, and my CT has supported me. This is experience that I'm very happy to be getting as the official Capstone and Lead Teach assignments loom closer, because it makes me feel more confident in my ability to create a good product in my Lesson plans that accurately reflects and predicts the best ways to teach the material to my students.
The Evolution unit is going to have us start off learning about a girl named Addie. She's a real person, who unfortunately picked up a strain of MRSA in her environment, possibly the playground, and it entered her body through scabs she'd been picking. Her body almost entirely shut down and they had to put her on an ECMO machine to keep her alive. Eventually her mother was able to fight to get her a double lung transplant, since that was where the bacteria had settled. She has since died, three years ago, after her body started to reject the lungs and she declined another transplant. The unit begins its focus on Addie, because the bacteria in her body is an example of how we can see evolution at work in our lives. Bacteria everyday are becoming more resistant to our treatments and thus, more dangerous and deadly to us. We're also going to be exploring how scientists are trying to counteract these fast evolutions. This is where the standard HS-LS4-4: Construct an explanation based on evidence for how natural selection leads to adaptations of populations comes in. Students will have to understand at a Level 2 of skills and concepts by taking information and explaining the relationships through creating at a Level 3 of strategic reasoning and thinking. Students will have to understand that humans are working against natural selection within the bacterial world that is selecting for the stronger, more resistant bacteria all the time, realizing that sometimes the adaptations of one population can come at the detriment of another.
This unit will require listening and speaking within a group and classroom discussion model, which gives students the opportunity to hear and respond to their peers in their own understanding level. Students will also have to read information and write out explanations and other answers along the way. My students work well in whole class discussion and within groups, offering out suggestions that advance the group thinking and understanding constantly. Again the connections of my previous lesson planning to my future lesson planning coming into play. I want to be able to help these students feel like scientists, because that is something that the Quarter 3 units have been sorely lacking. I want them to get connected to this unit both through feeling like scientists and also through understanding that the evolution of MRSA and other antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria can affect any one of us, helping them be more mindful of the way they move in the world and do things like take medications. I want them to be able to talk, read, write, and listen like scientists, in ways that allow the language domains to occur naturally and give all the students a chance to understand the things I'm trying to convey.
Some resources I plan to use for my lesson planning and for helping the students feel engaged are this website:
which I think will help me find new and different ways to get kids feeling like they are in the role of a scientist. I also plan to have them watch Hunting The Nightmare Bacteria.
This movie is a great way for them to get perspective on both how fast something could happen and the fact that resistant bacterial strains are everywhere in the world and affect all people.