Abstract:

Projects have been conceived and have been realized and advanced, as part of the planned activities of an innovative italian educational project, called school-work, with the financial support of MIUR. The activities have been targeted in order to enhance Biology learning of a class of 20-25 High School students of 16-17 years old.

For cultivating a welcoming, inclusive classroom environment, one of the simplest strategies I used has been to structure and achieve ways to get to know and call students by their names.

If learning requires that students construct ideas for themselves, then demanding the active participation of every single student in a class is essential to learning because every student in the classroom is an important part of the learning process.

Applying a simple teaching strategy "wait time" for student thinking in order to expand the number of students participating verbally in a biology classroom after asking a question, to give students time to think and talk about biology. In this line I experimented a simple way to increase waiting time and promote student engagement, and participation by obtaining an increases in the length and complexity of the answers that volunteer students have given in replay to a particular question: I used a chalkboard and chalk to write the volunteers' answers.

The use of open-ended questions, which are those questions, having multiple possible response, that cannot be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” or even easily answered with a single word or phrase such that inviting answers from a large group can yield more than an expected set of response can be posed orally to frame a class discussion and followed by a quick write or pair discussion to give students time to consider their responses.

I posed Open-ended questions orally to frame a class discussion followed by a quick write or pair discussion to give students time to consider their responses.

Alternatively, I have planned these questions in advance, so they could be given as brief homework assignments, allowing students time to consider the questions before coming to class.

In some ways, training in asking closed-ended, experimental questions may be at odds with developing skills in open-ended questioning.

I used a variety of active-learning strategies from class session to class session. For each strategy, some students have been in their confort zone and other have been out of their comfort zones. In particular students who may be more reflective in their learning may be most comfortable during reflective writing or thinking about a clicker question. Other students may prefer learning by talking with peers after a clicker question or in a whole class conversation. Still others may prefer the opportunity to evaluate animations and videos or represent their understanding of biology in more visual ways through drawing, concept mapping, or diagramming. One might ask which of these different strategies is the most effective way to teach a given topic, yet this question belies the likely importance of variations in the efficacy of different strategies with different students. There may not ever be a “best” way to teach a particular concept, given the diversity of students in any given classroom.

Most topics in biology can be connected in some way to the lived experiences of students, such as connecting what can be an abstract process of how genes produce fenotipes to the very real and immediate example of the bitter taste.

Keywords:

Problem based Learning, Imaginative teacher, Wait-time teaching strategy, Achieving Effective Learning.