Strategies and Activities
Recently my school has adopted a program called Constructing Meaning (CM) published by E.L. Achieve. The program is designed for long term English Language Learners and is applicable for any student not yet proficient in English. It helps teachers design scaffolds to make explicit the academic language demands of their content lessons. I have included these scaffolds in my resources section. My activities take place after the students have learned about evolution and natural selection. They have also learned about genetics and standard inheritance and about the structure of DNA. Without having this background knowledge it would be hard for them to access and understand the activities that follow.
Activity 1: Individual research, reading and note-taking
Before the students start their individual research they will have some instruction about the three topics so they know what they are and can make a more informed choice. The first activity that the students will do is some research about one of three topics: genetically modified organisms, designer babies and genetically engineered mosquitoes. I will let the students choose or gently nudge them to split the class into even groups. They will do some guided research on the internet and I will have a couple of readings on each topic at different reading levels. I have such a wide range of reading levels among my students so I have to provide more than one source for each topic. The articles will have the same basic information, they may have slightly different examples and the higher- level readings will go more in depth. All students will have a chance to learn about each other’s articles in activity 3 and 4. They will take Cornell notes on their article(s), marking the text as necessary. These articles are annotated in the bibliography and are included in the resources section. I will give a short presentation on CRISPR-Cas 9 technology so they know the basics of how it works and also I will explain gene drives so they understand how it is different from standard Mendelian inheritance. Some diagrams are provided in the resources to help.
Activity 2: Partner sharing
After the students do some individual research they will partner up with someone who read the same article and have a discussion to share ideas about what they thought the article was about and what they thought were the most salient points. I will give them an “Academic Discussion” sheet I created for them that has sentence starters and response starters that will help them use phrases commonly found in academic discussions. I got this idea from an online class I took from Prof. Jeff Zwiers of Stanford University called Constructive Conversations. Before doing this activity you should make sure to model and have students practice using these phrases if this is the first time using the Academic Discussion sheet. The modeling and practice does not need to be about the content you are covering but can be on something more immediately accessible to the students.
Activity 3:Group Sharing
The partners from activity 2 will now join with other students in groups of about four that read a different article on the same topic to discuss what they understand from their articles. They can also bring in any other information that they gathered about their topic from their individual research. They may gain further insight to their topic and learn about the other articles’ content without having to read it. It allows the students to learn from each other and to practice using academic language in a discussion and to prepare for the next activity.
Activity 4: Socratic Seminar
The students will now participate in a Socratic Seminar group by group. They have all had practice using the academic starters and responses and have had a chance to hear a few ideas and opinions about the topic. The students in the middle will have a larger discussion about whether the humans should genetically engineer organisms, what are the ethical considerations, and what they think are the potential effects on the evolution of populations. There also may be some discussion about gene drives and CRISPR-Cas9 technology specifically. The students sitting on the outside will not know the specifics about that particular topic but will have the same themes and questions. This gives the students a chance to hear more about genetic engineering and how it is being applied in a specific situation. The students on the outside will take notes about what they observe the students on the inside doing. I will have them focus on which arguments or evidence were stronger to try to get them to think more meta-cognitively about what makes a statement more effective. Make sure that they look for arguments that don’t necessarily agree with their position because they will have to include that in their argumentative paper in Activity 5. They will be able to give feedback to the students that were in the middle so they know as well what other people understood from their discussion. This will be repeated two more times for the other groups.
Activity 5: Argumentative paper
The final activity is for the students to write an argument style paper using the information that they gathered from activities 1-4. I talked to the two of the six 8th grade humanities teachers at my school to align how I organize the paper to what they do in their classrooms. We also discussed potentially collaborating together on the writing portion of this unit which I am very excited about but have not worked out the details. I have included a scaffold of an outline of an argument style paper in the resources.
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