MY MACUL 2015 EXPERIENCE

During this conference I decided to attend the session “Failure is an Option.” This caught my eye because in society we have been told repeatedly that failure is NOT an option, I was interested to see the perspective of the speaker because this is something that we are trying to get our students comfortable when they fail a quiz and not let this deter them from improving. Mark Dohn from Tilt Shift Education started the session by showing us a video of a girl doing flips…wait for it….on a shower rod! Disclaimer: no one was hurt in the making of the video. He began by asking us what the girls learned from this dangerous activity. As many of us answered, the girls, besides knowing how to flip, not much. This is when he brought up the idea that students need to feel comfortable with failure and know that it is an opportunity for improvement. Mark, who has taught in Los Angeles before, incorporates teaching students the difference between mistakes and failures. Mistakes, as he explains, are instances that occurs “in the moment.” Failure refers to a culmination of many mistakes but overall, students should know that mistakes and failure= lessons to be learned and opportunity for improvement.

One of the biggest obstacles I have faced in placement is students shutting down and giving up when they don’t do as well in assignments or quizzes. I have been working with a student that even when he knows the answer he refrains from participating in class because he feels he “is just going to fail the class.”  One of the points of Mark’s talk was that of allowing students reflect about mistakes and failure by incorporating technology. He showed us a video of one of his students reflecting on his technology project. The student not only reflected on what mistake he did but also what allowed him to move forward and what he had learned from the mistake.  This got me thinking about the students I work with and realized that 1. They are curious every time I set up my camera to record a lesson and 2. That they love being in front of the camera. Students like to pose and talk to the camera, I began thinking why not allow them to do this but using Mark’s strategy?  Students are allowed to retake quizzes before the unit test but they have to conference with me before retaking the quiz, sometimes they might be a bit shy to talk to their teacher as opposed to talking to the camera. I will begin setting up my camera before school and allow those students that would like to do a morning reflection to video record themselves and I can review these recordings  (with consent of course)  to not only allow me to gain data about how to improve lessons but also allow students to reflect. I truly enjoyed attending the talk by Mark that further encouraged technology use in the classroom not only for lessons but also for reflection and ultimately for learning.

The second talk I attended was by no other but by the 2014 Teacher of the Year, Gary Abud. Gary is an instructional coach at Grosse-Pointe. Through his talk, Gary not only had the presentation available online but his presentation was also interactive through GoSoapBox (GSB.) GSB allows questions to be answered as well as allowing the audience to ask questions and vote the questions that majority of them find interesting to move them up the question list. I found this a great tool not only for his presentation but also for use in class, this will allow students that have the similar questions not to feel alone when asking the question. I also learned about how to work with the administration (in my future teaching job) in regard towards teacher evaluation. Gary mentioned that collaboration was essential for this to occur, and talked about the wonders of Google docs for teacher evaluation.

                           Lightning talks!

One of the last talks I attended was the lightning talks and they call them lightning talks for a reason, they are fast! Each speaker has only 5 minutes to give their talk and inspire the audience (at least they inspired me.) A few of them spoke to me in volumes. Staring with Erin Klein, whose main point was to encourage curiosity in the classroom and to allow students to pursue this curiosity. She asked a great question, are you too busy to improve? This not only applied to teachers but also to students. How are teachers working towards improving their teaching? Are the students’ voices being heard? If yeas, how? (Ok the last two questions were crossing my mind I listened to Erin’s talk.) A quote form Erin that spoke volumes to me was, “the best teachers are those that tell you where to look but not what to see.” Guiding students through biology is different than just going through the motions and “feeding” them knowledge. Students need to be allowed to discover biology through experiments and class discussions not just by sitting in a lecture and memorizing terms. Erin’s class did a Class Con (aka educational Comic Con) where students got to interact with each other and discuss different topics of the class and about how to get involved in the community. Her class volunteered in the Battered Women’s Shelter together as a class after a discussion of A Child Called It. This is something that I would like to try in the future, where biology students can collaborate together to help put in the community.

One of the lightning talks that touched me the most in a personal and educational level was that from Trevor Muir from Kent Innovation High School. Trevor told us the story of a female student who could barely stay awake during class, who was passing her classes with a C and who at times looked too tired to function. This story hit close to home for me because through middle school and majority of high school, I was that student. The reason the student was always tired was because she had to go home and take care of her siblings and clean her house while her mother worked and after all this, do her homework. I didn’t go home and take care of my siblings, my older sister did that, I instead had to help my mother at work, selling fruits and vegetables on the side of the road and acting as a translator for those customers who did not speak Spanish as well as those officers who often threatened to send us to court. There was no set schedule for my parents and I in terms of hours or days and my homework schedule got done between times I was not helping and after we went home after sundown. My parents had no days off and in turn, neither did my siblings and I. Weekend mornings were set from picking up the produce for the week and sell through the day and trying to work through a calculus problem that took 30 minutes was nearly impossible when I was interrupted very often. I managed to pass the class first semester with a B but barely passed it with a C the second semester due to my hectic schedule but to me this was a win, because I still managed to pass the class that allowed me to complete my math credits but I can see the disappointment in my teacher’s eyes that I couldn’t focus. What helped me through this was my English teacher that opened his doors early in the morning to let a couple of us finish homework, even if it mean that he had to wake up 30 minutes every day he never let us know, he told us he liked to be at school early to get caught up with things. Trevor mentioned in his story that the girl “conquered algebra by day and struggle by night.” Teachers that are able to recognize this make the different between students giving up or continuing the fight every day even when they are too tired to finish that last problem. I hope that in the future I will be someone that will help students through this struggle in the smallest ways possible just like Mr. Hoy was for me because like the quote at the end of the conference, “this conference is not for us but for the students…”

(Image obtained from Google Images)

Tech in Teach! How Tech Helped Students Through a Protein Synthesis Adventure....

                  In class we learned about the variety of tech uses in the classroom to improve student learning. One of the conflicts with teaching molecular biology is that students cannot physically hold the different components of DNA due to their micro size. I understand their frustration because I had the same issue when I was first learning about DNA replication and protein synthesis I wanted a model that I could hold. Unfortunately the school I attended did not have sufficient funds to obtain the necessary materials, bummer! I wanted my students to get the opportunity to actually “build” their own proteins and I knew that technology could make this possible!

                 Students in my honors biology classes had just recently build DNA models using Twizzlers and gummy bears but unfortunately there are not enough gummy bears to code for the different amino acids. Instead I decided to take students to the computer lab where they will work through building their own protein. 

                        I recognize that some students might work faster than others, so I differentiated the lesson. Note: my differentiated lesson allowed for those students that worked at a faster pace (Tier 3)  to have supplemental websites to more complex explanations to protein synthesis after completing the base module. Those students that learn at a slower pace (Tier 2) were given sufficient time to complete the base module that included the content that was to be learned from the lesson. For those students that learn at an “average” pace (Tier 1), they were to complete the base module and could move on to the next websites. This differentiated lesson allowed all students to go through the base module that contained the content taught during the lesson and work at their own pace.

                     Before going to the computer lab, I explained this to the students before heading to the computer lab. I was worried that students would receive this as being grouped in different intelligence levels, but instead they surprised me because I saw how many of them felt relieved that the entire class didn’t have to be working on the same thing at the same time! Below, I will walk you through the adventure my students took to build their own protein.

                    Thanks to the University of Utah for creating this great website where students can immerse themselves in transcribing and translating the message for making a protein. In this website, students are given the starting DNA sequence and they have to transcribe the mRNA sequence. The students then had to “decode” the message to figure out what amino acid to drag into the sequence and see their protein being built before their eyes! They first had to find the RNA sequence AUG, this is also known as the starting codon. Once the students found the start codon (the program did not let students move on with building their protein before finding the start codon) they began decoding the rest of the sequence to build their protein. At the end they received a picture of the protein they built!

            The learning goal of this computer lab activity was for students to be able to identify the mRNA sequence form a given DNA sequence and be able to identify the amino acids coded by that mRNA to build a protein. This computer lab activity was a supplemental to the in-class worksheet that students that finished the base module moved on to the following modules to see enzymes in action and a more complex look into DNA replication, transcription and translation. To see a copy of the worksheet that students were given click below:

                                  Tech in Teach- Protein Folding Worksheet

           Although this activity could be done (and was done prior to the computer lab activity) without technology, it was more organized for the students to have their own computer and work through the problem alone. I felt that using technology enhanced student understanding due to the responses I received in their post computer lab worksheet. This helped us teachers (my mentor teacher and I) because we did not have to obtain materials for the entire 90 students we have in total. This also allowed for students to work on their own as opposed to having to be in groups and having to all share the material and not each getting the opportunity to build their own.  Technology also allowed me to use resources from other institutions (University of Utah) to improve student learning. Having technology facilitated the differentiated  lesson I had plan for my students. Incorporating technology into the science classroom has facilitated student learning through not only providing students with a visual representation of what occurs in the molecular level but also through providing students with an opportunity to explore the different processes involved in protein folding.