Classroom Strategies & Activities
Our school will begin the fall of 2020 with distance/virtual learning. Since our district will be fully distance learning during the fall of 2020, it is imperative that teachers learn new tools to engage students within the digital platform. The classroom strategies and tools I intend to use will need to be accessible to all students and abilities through this medium. I will employ several applications including Jamboard and Ed-Puzzle to gauge student understanding while delivering content through the Zoom video conferencing tool. In addition, I will utilize the Argument Driven Inquiry as a framework to guide my students through laboratory investigations. Like all teachers through the summer of 2020 I will be looking at virtual ways to engage my students while finding a balance in maintaining rigor in the virtual classroom and creating equitable class settings.
Introductory Lesson
As an introduction to my unit, students will use the application Jamboard to collaborate with one another in the initial lesson. Shown to Yale National Initiative fellows by Zachary Meyers during the 2020 Intensive Session, Jamboard allows students and teachers to collaborate with one another using a virtual whiteboard. This application, allows teams to create Post-its, draw, insert images, create mind maps that can all be captured digitally. Through this application students will generate words, insert images, draw related graphics or text to the images provided on their boards. The images I will use will relate the major themes of this unit which are land-use changes in the Amazon, mass agriculture, and coronavirus.
Throughout the distance learning period, students will enter the Zoom video teleconferencing application for all class sessions. Initially, students are introduced to the application and given a brief demonstration regarding the functionality of Zoom and another online tool- Jamboard. To facilitate discussions for this unit, students will be placed into breakout rooms within Zoom. Students will then be sent to their respective rooms to generate their thoughts and ideas about the first image on their Jamboards. This first image will be of the Amazon rainforest. Given a time limit of 5 minutes, student groups will generate the first words and images that come to mind as they view the rainforest. Within their board, they will add text and drawings to their board. Once the 5 minutes is complete, the same student group will turn to their next board with an image of mass agriculture and logging. Students will also be given the same 5 minutes to add their thoughts about the image to their second board. The third and final image on their third board will pictures of the 2020 coronavirus. After the last 5 minutes, students will be instructed to share their boards with the larger class, choosing their top 3 words/images from each of their boards. Once shared, students will be prompted to consider the connections between the three and thus allow me as their instructor, to gauge their level of knowledge prior to delving into the larger unit. The use of Jamboard is an effective interactive tool that allows teachers to assign students roles within groups, provide opportunities for student leadership, and structured collaboration. In this matter, the online session can be shifted to a more student focus lesson rather than instructor focused.
Middle of the Unit Lesson
After the introductory lesson, and student readings both web-based and textbook based, students will use a second application called Ed-Puzzle. Ed-Puzzle allows teachers to generate videos with questions. Ed-Puzzle is useful to check for understanding and gauge which areas of the lesson students are struggling to comprehend. For the purpose of this unit, a PowerPoint presentation with a voice-over recording on the topic of coronavirus will be shown to students. Throughout the presentation students will be asked comprehension questions like: what is the purpose of spike proteins, how does the virus use the host cell to replicate, which type of respiratory cells are damaged, and describe a cytokine storm. Ed-Puzzle allows students re-watch portions of the lesson they did not comprehend the first time around, this data can be seen their instructor along with other data points that show the length of time students spent watching the video, the questions students repeatedly answered incorrectly. Another useful aspect of the application is that teachers can allow their students to re-watch and re-take the questions to improve their grade. In using this tool, teachers can spend less time repeating the lecture material, and can save time from having teaching material already understood by the whole class. The results of the Ed-Puzzle scores, allow teachers to focus on topics that are the most troublesome for students to grasp.
Student Online Investigation Lesson
Our district is exploring pedagogical tools that increase students’ Depth of Knowledge to at least a level 3, “Strategic thinking and reasoning” or higher. By training teachers in Argument Driven Inquiry (ADI) teachers are able to model a systematic approach to write and defend a scientific argument based on scientific principles and evidence.37 Through the ADI model, teachers instruct students to craft their own scientific argument through online examples and investigations. This model encourages students to engage in a critical thinking at multiple points throughout an online investigation. ADI also provides guidelines for teachers to engage students in drafting argument statements based on their observations of a phenomena in a video or demonstration.
In this unit, student will use the ADI model to look at data regarding country’s rate of habitat loss. Students will collect images, maps, or other web-based resources to investigate their assigned countries habitat change and rate of emerging infectious disease. Having been exposed to content building lessons on examples of deforestation, mass agriculture, and an exemplar zoonotic disease, students will participate in their own mini investigation of an assigned country. Countries may include Peru, Malaysia, and Borneo among others where land-use has increased significantly in the last 20 to 50 years.
At this point in the unit, students will have had a chance to watch several videos, read articles, and completed web-based check point questions through Ed Puzzle. With their assigned countries students are prompted with the question, “Should (country) tighten their land-use policies and restrict habitat clearing?” Students will spend offline non-class time gathering data to then share within their group when class returns. Within their small groups, students formulate an initial statement of argument, and support that argument with the data they’ve collected. This is then followed by a review by other groups in a double-blind manner. Students will then reflect on the comments from their peers and generate a second revised argument statement. This new statement will be presented in a small group setting and members of that group will then attempt to repeat what the students’ argument and evidence basis in order for the original author of the argument to see the weakness or strength of their argument. In doing this reciprocal teaching activity, students not only practice listening skills, speaking skills, but also focuses them to write and state a succinct argument based on fact.
The conclusion of this lesson will be students presenting their findings in a two-minute mini-presentation regarding the original prompt, “Should (assigned country) tighten their land-use policies and restrict habitat clearing?” At the end of the unit, it is my hope that students not only have increase their awareness of the consequences of earth’s growing habitat loss but also recognize that these losses are primarily driven by our choice to convert the land for farming, logging, or housing. In addition, I hope students will articulate how emerging diseases have increased with habitat loss and the potential reasons for it including zoonotic jumps. Finally, I believe this unit will solidify my students’ basic understanding of the coronavirus and how it can cause systems wide damage to the human body.
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