Strategies
The standards or expectations we hold for our students are ever-changing. With the current CA State Science Standards and the upcoming Common Core Standards, one thing is similar. 43 44 Teach students to think and apply their understanding of the content taught in your class. Maintaining student's interest in the lesson, giving them opportunities to be creative, and expecting a high level of rigor is the best way to keep students in engaged in class. The strategies and activities of this curriculum unit are designed to address these goals and to provide students with a variety of learning experiences.
Like many high school students, students at Mt. Pleasant High School are exceedingly gregarious. This is their strength and their weakness, which I hope to direct to better use than talking in the hallways of our school. Beyond the normal lectures (direct instruction), students will engage in multiple learning modalities. These will include a mixture of indirect instruction and interactive instruction.
Indirect Instruction
Each Monday, most science teachers at Mt. Pleasant High School focus on increasing literacy in the subject area. To do so, students will be given guided readings of the textbook and non-fiction text from a variety of science article sources. For example, historical excerpts regarding the influenza virus, chapter readings on the physiology, and science magazine articles regarding immunity and bacterial/viral infectious diseases. In order to help them attain concepts from their reading, they will take part in reflective discussions which will help to first summarize their understanding but also pose questions. The questions generated by students will then be used in the overall class discussion regarding the particular reading.
Another learning strategy students will take part in will be to create a short story describing the Immune System and its function. In crafting and creating their own stories, students not only have to show their mastery of the content they have learned, but have to apply their learning in order to inform others. The creation of this unit will force students to work collaboratively, to practice their writing in an order logical and organize matter, and to write concisely while retaining all the pertinent facts needed to convey their message. 45 This activity is further discussed in the activities section of this unit.
Interactive Instruction
As mentioned, students at Mt. Pleasant love to interact with one another. The challenge I have is to structure their interactions. Thus, in this unit, I will engage my students in multiple interactive learning experiences. Early in the unit students will be asked to brainstorm on the antimicrobial products. This will lead into a discussion on whether antimicrobial products should be widely used. Students will then formulate their own positions into a clear and concise statement which will be revisited once the unit has concluded.
A second interactive experience students will participate in is a sing-off. I have found that if my students can relate a musical experience to a topic they have to learn, they are more than likely to retain the information they were asked to learn. In the past, students have created rap-songs and rhymes about hypertension. While doing these activities, they were clearly engaged and were willing to share their song with anyone who would listen. For this unit, students will be modifying or writing their own songs about the immune system.
Experiential learning
In order to foster self-learning and students ability to analyze and apply their learning, students will be asked to create public service announcements highlighting an issue important to them. This issue will be generated from students own analysis of the overuse of antimicrobial products. It is my hope that my students will inform each other of the dangers of overuse but I would like for them to formulate their own reasons why. The culminating public service announcement project mentioned in the classroom activities section describes the details of this project.
Beyond the direct instruction, interactive, and experiential learning students will be exposed, practiced, and become comfortable users of technology. Since incorporating technology use is a major goal for me as a teacher, I embed tech use throughout this unit. This is an important task because it makes word processing programs, presentation programs, media creation programs far more significant to my students.
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