Strategies
Strategies for this unit will include teacher-directed classroom instruction, student readings, small scale experiments, student group work and collaboration both inside and outside the classroom, classroom question and discussion, and student projects. Student assessment will consist of small repetitive quizzes on important topics like the function and placement of components of the circulatory system. Additional assessment will take place during in class discussion and with a final group project.
Effective lesson construction requires a rational delineation of content objectives, a logical sequence of instruction, a process of ongoing evaluation of student learning during the process, flexibility to adjust to the results of the ongoing evaluation, a means of final evaluation, and finally the often neglected appreciation of the psychology of students and their personal strategies that might work in opposition to the lesson's goals.
Student group work is at the heart of all of the strategies used for this unit. The smallest form of this group work will be a pairing of one student from each of the A and B groups. A two person group forces communication between the members. Larger groups lend themselves to having some members on the outside of a primary subgroup.
If left to their own devices, even in a group of two, one member will tend toward dominance. The disparity of confidence, maturity, knowledge, and academic ability built into these groups will acerbate these tendencies. In fact if left to their own devices, there is a realistic possibility that the A group student would do all of the work with complete acquiescence from the B group student because both might conclude that this strategy would produce the best result to present to a teacher in the shortest time.
To combat this tendency, which might leave the B student learning nothing but how to freeload, I can take a cue from medicine to construct a more effective strategy to foster a fully functioning group. A child born with one weak or wandering eye faces the possibility that his brain will shut off that eye so that the dominant eye can perform its duties without confusing competition from the other eye. While this is nature's optimal short term solution, the child becomes an adult who is blind in one eye and thus lacks depth perception. To fight this natural tendency, a doctor may intentionally weaken the stronger eye by putting a patch over it so that the brain must depend on it and thus must keep it functioning. While patching the strong eye is not optimal for the child's vision in the short run, it does produce a better long term result because the ultimate goal is to have an adult where both eyes work in concert. Following this idea, I want to structure the group to weaken the A group member's participation in order to keep the B group member functioning.
One strategy in this vein that I will use is to value the response of the B group members higher than that of the A group members. I will make students aware of this procedure. For example, when I pose a question to the group, if an A group member answers correctly, it is worth one point, but if the B group member answers correctly, it is worth five points. With this structure, the A group member may know the material, but will have an incentive to teach the B group member ahead of time, because it is more valuable to the group's grade.
Group work will also be the strategy for teaching this class insofar as there will be a teacher of the B group students who will work with me, the Calculus teacher, to present this unit. As classes are constructed, the two target groups would not normally be together. To facilitate this mixing, students from a support teacher whose classes meet at the same time would come to my Calculus class. This requires that I teach the co-teacher the substance of the unit so that he or she can add value as well in teaching the unit to the students.
Because I am teaching mathematics, the general class curriculum does not support the scientific inquiry and instruction necessary for the unit without laying some specific groundwork. Establishing this foundation will take more time than can be spared directly in class. To gain this additional time, students will do a large portion of their inquiry outside of class. To give students the time that they will need to absorb and comprehend the fruits of their research, the unit will stretch longitudinally with the ten days of actual classroom instruction and discussion spread through the semester, rather than being clustered as two consecutive weeks.
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