Students will be arranged by the teacher into learning teams
of 3-4 students. These learning
teams will be permanent teams for the duration of the course.
The model for our class learning will be based on the Harvard
Business School model (Harvard Model) and the
Team Based Learning Collaborative (www.teambasedlearning.org). At the beginning of the course we
will develop a set of norms that all class members will be expected to operate
by. The purpose of establishing
norms is to create a safe, collaborative, and intellectually nourishing
environment in which students will be free to make mistakes and challenge their
misconceptions in order to grow as active learners with a strong intellectual
character. The use of learning teams will enhance …
- The
creation of a student-centered classroom versus a teacher-centered classroom. Students will learn to take control of
their own learning and how to track and monitor their learning throughout the
year. Our future will
require students to be life-long learners, therefore students will need to
develop the skills and intellectual flexibility necessary to adapt and change
to a rapidly changing world.
- The
students’ abilities to access information from multiple sources, evaluate the
quality of the information they are looking at, and evaluate the reliability of
the sources from which they are pulling their information. Biology is a rapidly
changing field of science; we cannot possibly keep up with all of our gains in
knowledge, so we must develop the tools necessary for accessing information
when it becomes relevant to our lives.
- Students using
information, skills, and knowledge to create products that reflect their
understanding of the key concepts being studied and how they might be applied
to real world situations versus memorizing information solely for the purpose
of a traditional test. Science
(biology) is NOT a stagnant body of knowledge that is intended to be memorized;
rather science is an active and collaborative process of solving problems and
answering questions. Over the year
students, working in their learning teams, will learn to develop their own
questions for investigation, to design experimental procedures to tests their
proposed answers to their questions, to analyze data to either support or
reject their hypotheses.
Learning Teams
will work collaboratively on … - laboratory based activities
- creating presentations of experimental results
- case studies
- Process Oriented Guided Inquiry (POGIL) activities
- interactive online lessons from sources such as HHMI
that are grounded in the current research
- creating and presenting multi-media presentations on
biology related content
- selected formative and summative assessments (Note: formative assessments track students’
current understanding and are typically not figured into the student’s grade,
summative assessments are more like your traditional quizzes and tests and will
impact the student’s grade.)
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