Strategies
Students participate in my Forensics course as though they are newly recruited investigators under my employment. All students are expected to be functional members of the class, and I use an invented wage and currency system (“Forensic Funds”), as an extra incentive. Forensic Funds can be earned by performing: extra tasks (extra lab set up, lab clean up, general housekeeping around the classroom); exceptional depth of thought; maintenance of difficult team behaviors or problems; and extending knowledge to others outside of the classroom. All students serve one of four roles in their assigned teams that are rotated every grading period (six weeks). These roles are Manager, Assistant, Technician, and Facilitator. The manager is expected to compile and examine each member’s work for accuracy before submitting it to me. The assistant retrieves and returns materials as needed, typically for labs or worksheets. The technician follows lab guides to prepare stations and takes photos as needed. The facilitator monitors behavior of the team. When selecting the first facilitators at the start of the school year, I tend to assign this role to the most energetic student so that it begins with self-management.
My teaching strategies emphasize a recurring weekly structure in order to encourage students to plan responsibly. Students take guided two-column notes on Mondays (or any otherwise first day of the week, such as if a holiday falls on the Monday). Tuesdays and Wednesdays involve laboratory and field activities to encourage cooperation, skills building, and effective interaction among peers. Thursdays tend to be reading days, for which students complete “text rendering” assignments. Text rendering is a reading strategy that helps students quickly retrieve the main content by identifying all names/people, locations, and numbers within articles, described fully in Appendix 1. On Fridays, students take a short quiz (as formative assessment) that emphasizes vocabulary, events of pertinent legal cases, and key methods of analysis for the week’s topics. After the quiz, students practice an oral review of providing an expert witness testimony as if they are testifying in court on Fridays. An agenda log is collected, reviewed, and submitted to me by each team’s manager every two weeks. Students take a midterm and a cumulative final exam each semester.
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