NABT (National Association of Biology Teachers) Professional Development Conference. Day 1

Exhibition

Paul Andersen www.bozemanscience.com

This year, the conference is held at Atlanta in the Hyatt Regency. The hotel is relatively new and located in the city itself. It reminds me of the Oriental hotel back in Singapore. I missed the opening session because I only arrived at 10am, but I did manage to catch a "celebrity" teacher by the name of Paul Andersen. He was featured on TED and has been posting biology lesson videos on the website: www.bozemanscience.com. No prizes for guessing where he's teaching. He shared mostly from his life and how he evolved as a biology teacher. He has been working on using the blended learning approach with his students (using a blend of online videos he made, face to face lessons and classroom assignments) - the latest trend in classroom pedagogy. However, something he said resonates with what I believe about blended learning. His experience showed that teachers cannot just give students a video and expect them to learn automatically. He has been trying what he termed the blended learning cycle (catch his video here) in which he scaffolds the entire learning journey for the students telling them which links to go to and what to look out for so that students know what to do and how to learn. He also mentioned that it would be very challenging to use these methods with unmotivated students

I attended many other breakout sessions - some more useful than others - and I learnt quite a few interesting ideas. 

The 5 practices (actually 7)

This is a framework to help teachers plan lessons so that students can benefit from discussions in the classroom.

A: Setting Goals (process and content goals)

B: Selecting or designing tasks
- should have multiple approaches
- should allow students to collaborate
- should require critical thinking

1: Anticipating students' thinking
- possible misconceptions
- possible student approaches to the problem

2: monitoring students work
- watch and listen
- document student artifacts - a form to capture some details

3: selecting examples of student work
4: sequencing the examples
5: connecting the ideas across examples 

I think this is a good framework - not that we don't do it but it is just a way of describing what we do and putting words in a certain order that makes sense. But I am a bit curious as to why we need to select examples of student work to share - maybe it is due to a lack of time but I thought we should give every student opportunity to share and learn from one another. 

Know what they know, engaging hands-on formative assessment

Another interesting session was about using games to engage students. A majority of it are simple to play - using homemade cards to play matching games, or "Quiz, Quiz, Trade" having cards with a question and an answer and students pair up and quiz each other before switching cards and finding other partners. I think the main idea is that the students must take the time to discuss the reasons before their answers and ideas. Another one I liked was this "I have, who has" cards. Imagine a card with 2 columns, a "I have" box which gives a term and a "Who has" box that has a description. The idea is students have to find a corresponding "I have" to their own "Who has" box. And eventually the whole class will be "linked" in this way. Teachers can have competitions between classes to see which class or group can link up the fastest. There was another find a corner game as well. Students are given cards with certain descriptions on it and are tasked to find the "corner" of the class that fits that description or word. After that they then share with the other students in the corner justifying why they belong there. Fun things to do.

Exhibition

The exhibition was fun too. I just visited a few booths today and some of them were very interesting. There was a product that is a handheld photospectrometer - costs only US$50 - and it is calibrated to read the concentration of certain concentration of ions in water. It needs to reagent to bring out the color of the ions in the first place but I thought it will give students a nice way to collect data in the field. Unfortunately it is not connected to any mobile device so students will have to manually transcribe the data. But still interesting.

There was another product that allowed students to transform bacteria and they can design the gene sequences in the plasmid. Of course the gene sequence are harmless sequences that expresses colored proteins in the E.Coli. Students can determine which genes are attached and in what sequence so that when they grow out the bacteria, different results can be seen. I was thrilled at seeing such technology being used in class. Of course it was not cheap - US$400 a kit which will allow 15 groups of students to work on something but I think it's an interesting idea. Most of the stages of transformation are chemically mediated so there is no need for expensive equipment - only the incubator to grow the bacteria. Well, maybe we can find some money to do this...

NABT Professional Development Conference

The Hyatt Regency