Rationale
I am a high school science teacher at a small magnet school in New Haven, Connecticut. Our magnet theme of health science and sports medicine aims to provide students with the background knowledge necessary to pursue careers in the medical and health fields. Many of our students take multiple science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) based classes each year to prepare themselves for post-secondary career choices.
I teach a health science course in which each student steps into the role of various medical professionals to diagnose patients based off of their medical files. Students study the body systems through the lens of a doctor attempting to diagnose and treat their patient. As a result, students need to learn what does and does not constitute “normal” within the human body and how a change can create problems. However, students are uniformed about how the body is able to maintain homeostasis. They understand that there is a basic regulatory system but are unable to describe how it works.
Students have difficulty explaining how a change in this regulatory system can result in disease. The course I currently teach focuses on the human body and basic physiology. In this course, there is an unclear description of the layout of endocrine glands in the body and how negative and positive feedback loops occur. Students study only the insulin-glucagon-sugar feedback loop as a model of negative feedback. However, the truth of this system is much more complex. While I do not aim to grant a full mastery over the endocrine system—there are entire courses of study dedicated to studying this material—I do want students to understand the robust control mechanisms at play in their bodies.
This unit supplements the current endocrinology micro-unit that I teach. I will accomplish this by teaching students how the body is able to maintain homeostasis through chemical signals. I want students to understand the basic principle behind how hormones work to affect changes in the body and how they are able to “turn themselves off” or “amp themselves up” in a form of self-regulation. The concept of negative and positive feedback loops are crucial to understanding how the body maintains its internal environment within a very narrow physiological range, even when the outside environment changes. Even so, this concept is difficult for students to grasp, especially when different feedback loops are interconnected.
At the end of this unit, students will explain how the body uses hormones to maintain homeostasis. Students will describe the location and the function of endocrine glands, the hormones they release, and how those hormones interact with their target tissues through negative and positive feedback loops. Students will learn about different diseases that stem from an endocrine-related malfunction. Finally, students will develop a project demonstrating how humans have “hacked” the endocrine system to either help fix a problem or to exploit it.
Comments: