Introduction
St. Georges Technical High School is one of four vocational-technical high schools in New Castle County, Delaware. The 1,119 students enrolled at St. Georges, represent a diverse community – urban Wilmington, suburban Newark, and rural Middletown. Students apply to St. Georges for a variety of reasons: learn a family trade, learn in a safer school environment when compared with a feeder high school, or earn a certification to join the workforce instead of continuing to a post-secondary school. Approximately fifty percent of the graduating class directly joins the workforce, an apprenticeship, or trade school. The remaining fifty percent continue on to college/university, or a branch of the military.
The technical school environment offers students a unique high school experience. Each student earns a certificate or license in their field of study upon graduation. The trades offered to our students are as diverse as the students themselves; ranging from nursing to carpentry, web design to culinary, automotive technology to early childhood education, and a dozen other options. In the school year 2016-2017, out of 802 upperclassmen, 20% study a trade in the Public/Consumer Services cluster, 23% study a Construction trade, 35% study in the Health Career cluster, and 23% study in the Business and Technology cluster.
Although St. Georges is a technical trade school, it is considered a branch of the public school system. Therefore, students have access to their career classes in addition to the academic courses offered within St. Georges. I am one of the science instructors within the building; teaching biology to sophomores, integrated science (earth and space) to juniors, and environmental science to seniors. This unit has been developed for the biology course mandated by the state of Delaware for graduation. All sophomores will take biology, regardless of their trade, however the classes are typically tracked based upon career area. Construction trades students take classes separately from health care trades due to scheduling.
As a fully-inclusive school, students of all ability levels study in the same classroom and therefore it becomes important to differentiate each lesson. Following the blended learning educational model, this unit provides students with several choices in how they learn, express knowledge acquired, the pace at which they learn, and utilize technology to enhance the overall learning experience. Within the blended model, the teacher becomes a facilitator while the student becomes the gatherer and organizer of information. My role as a facilitator is to provide students with appropriate resources to extract information and scaffold the lesson. It is essential that the teacher carefully identifies a limited set of videos, articles, and simulations to provide the students with a choice in gathering information.
The state of Delaware has adopted the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and is currently implementing them into the high schools. The standards are still being shifted between grade levels and therefore, standards once taught in high schools have been moved to middle school. This makes it challenging to assume a level of prior knowledge in order to effectively complete the high school standards. To best meet the new NGSS, the New Castle County Vo-Tech School District has adopted the Science and Global Issues (SGI) textbook and activity kits as the curriculum for the Biology course. This unit is designed to enhance and supplement current topics discussed in the text while creating a greater interactive curriculum.
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