biologist's+thoughts+15

It is my intention that I will keep a record of my thoughts after each lesson. Feel free to repsond to anything I have written. Hopefully my thoughts will inspire, motivate and allow you to improve your understanding of biology as well as get the most out of our classes. Link back to inside the mind of the biol guru Link to biologist's thoughts 10 biologist's thoughts 11 biologist's thoughts 12 biologist's thoughts 13 biologist's thoughts 14

**Lesson 80 (Monday 7th September)** It was all about human evolution today. I was quite pleased with the range of activities and stimulus material that I provided the class. Having a set of the "fossilised" skulls really helps too. They were quite enthusiastic about holding them and trying to work out the order from oldest to most recent. The small groups worked well and it allowed for a lot of prior knowldege to be utilised. Before giving them an answer to the order, I showed them a video on human evolution. But this was a little different. It wasn't any flash production just some Professor explaining the story of humankind (in quite a passionate way) in a relatively straightforward way. I am concerned about how the class found it as there was almost complete silence after the video. No pleathora of questions, maybe they made total sense of it. Anyway, I thought it was valuable, they got to here someone else (other than me) explain some biology to them. The intention was that they could compare what their prior knowledge was with that of what they heard. So now they had an opportunity to view the "answer" to the skull sequnece and most groups were pretty accurate. The rest of the lesson was going through my own powerpoint, highlighting the key points in the changes that have occurred and also give them some insight into cultural and technological evolution. It really did bother me that I felt there were many who were passive in the lesson (other than the first 10 min when they really got into examining the skulls). Hmmm....

Today's lesson was really important from my point of view. I needed to help them become familiar with the SAC experiment that they will do next lesson. They only get one shot at doing the gel electrophoresis. They also got to practise pippetting small amounts and there was a fair bit of discussion about the theory behind the experiment. What really impressed me was that the "class" was able to recall terminology and show understanding of the course we did over 6 weeks ago. Fantastic! Anyway the rest of the lesson was devoted to them working through some revision questions on DNA technology. Overall, I think I achieved my goal of refreshing their minds on this section of the course. It's up to them now in making sure they have read the experimental procedure and importantly created their running sheet for homework. In a way the wiki can be really useful in this sort of collaboration prior to the next class. They cannot afford to not know the experimental procedure and just getting them to read through will not be effective enough. Hence the notion of their own running sheet with times/amounts and any other annotations. It will be interesting to see what they come up with and then to see how they cope with the experiment.
 * Lesson 81 (Tuesday 8th September) **

The day of the gel electropherisis experiment. Although I had done the experiment many times before, today was the first attempt at running it in a class myself. I spent two days doing trial experiments just to get an idea of where difficulties might lie and it totally drained me mentally. Anyway, it was great to see them work in their groups, doing real molecular biology that they wouldn't even have done on any excursion that I took them on. The timing and the instructions I gave worked well, I suppose the time I spent preparing paid off in a big way. I think the H/W task also helped because it meant that any instructions I gave would have made more sense. I also think they really enjoyed doing the experiment. Several of them have already mentioned it to me. It was different and if any of them go on and do some molcular biology then I am pretty sure they will think back to this Year 12 Biology lesson. As to their results....well that will be partly known by the end of the day. At least each set up was working from the electricity side of things.
 * Lesson 82 (Friday 11th September) **

**Lesson 83 (Monday 14th September)** Not much to say here. They got to see the results of their electrophoresis experiment. I have to say that they did really well. The experiment was quite complicated and intricate and pretty much all of them would never have done anything like it before. It's probably why they all enjoyed it so much. Anyway, there was plenty of opportunity for discussion and trying to make sense of the results. There were some really good insights and thoughts about the procedure. It is clear that a few of them already have a detailed understanding of what was going on. On the other hand some still were not clear about some of the fine aspects of the procedure. Which off course is only to be expected, although they had a comprehensive set of experimental notes to refer to. I decided that I would give them the first page of the SAC to complete in the last 20min of the lesson. Two reasons. Firstly, due to the intricacy of the experimental procedure, I wanted to give them an opportunity to think about some of the questions overnight. Secondly, I was concerned about the length of the SAC, so I wanted to also give them a headstart. I hope they really do realise that they performed extremely well in carry out the experiment. I am also absolutely certain about doing the same thing again next year and possibly with year 10 students (but a much simpler version of the experiment).

**Lesson 84 (Tuesday 15th September)** They did the SAC today. A couple of positive comments from some of the students, interestingly more to do with the nature of the SAC and the questions asked. It wasn't something I expecting but a couple of students complimented me on the questions. Hmmm... I am not sure how other teachers go about writing questions or creating assessment tasks but I do put an extraordinary amount of thought into the entire task. The order of the questions, the types of questions, the difficulty, the presentation style etc. I also don't think that the students are aware of the thought that goes behind creating any particular assessment task. So, it is satisfying to occasionaly get some positive feedback. At the same time, I am pretty sure I will have challenged their understanding of certain concepts. But they must realise that DNA/gene technology is a large area but it will always be the key points that get asked about. Well, that's it for the term. I have organised one more 90min session in the first week of the break to try and complete the course. I really hope this will be enough. Not long to go.