Skip to main content

Is this rich enough for you?

As a staff, we've been talking a lot about rich tasks, success criteria, and student-centred learning lately.  For a while now I've been really trying to get away from Socratic lessons, and being the only expert in the room, and got the idea from The Innovator's Mindset to have my students create "X in 60 s" videos.  Long story short, the example in the book came from a biology teacher who returned to school after a leave and didn't want to just reuse the same overhead transparencies again.  She had her students create "Mitosis in 60 s" videos instead, and found that students understood the concepts much better because they'd had to learn it well enough to explain so concisely.

Early in the school year, I tried this with my grade 12 IB biology class, and asked them to produce a video entitled, "Natural Selection in 60 s".  The videos weren't explicitly assessed, and I loved that they didn't all produce the same video or even use the same tools.  The content was assessed as an IB exam-style question, and in general, students answered it well.  I call that a success - with any luck, there will be a question on the May IB exam and my students will rock it.

Moving forward, I decided to try it with my grade 11's, also an IB biology class.  They don't write their IB exam until May 2018, and we're not so focussed on that gigantic exam in this course, so I thought the videos themselves should be assessed (though I'll probably put a question on their January exam).  My student teacher taught the lesson on mitosis, but before we got into Mendelian genetics, they had to know about meiosis, too.  So... "Meiosis in 60 s" was born!  As a group, we co-constructed the assessment criteria using an idea I got here (the pre-calculus example, not the grade 2 writing example).

What did we do?  I found three examples of "Mitosis in 60 s" videos on Youtube.  After the first video, pairs of students made lists of characteristics of a good explanatory video, and then we viewed the second video as a group.  The paired students added to their lists before we viewed the third one.  Larger groups then compiled lists, and by the end, the whole class had decided on "characteristics of a good explanatory video" and created the checklist that would be used to assess them.  Here's a link to the Google Slideshow we used - the slides at the end were used for collaborating on the criterion lists.
The class during different stages of the activity:

Close-up on our criteria:


If I do say so myself... these videos were even better than the first!  If you'd like to see them, I posted links to most of them using the hashtag #ibbiovideos on Twitter.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Has it been 10 days yet?

Yup.  I just counted from my first post, and it was on January 16, making today day 10. I missed a couple of days - both times I had begun writing, but didn't finish or didn't publish the draft - but I also double posted a couple of times, to try and catch up. Still, this is post number 8, on day 10. Not bad for a rookie, right? We started exams today, and since my first class doesn't write until Friday, I'm trying to be productive and mark their major lab reports before I have to start marking their exam papers.  It's going slowly... #BellLetsTalk day is in full swing, making my phone buzz and my computer bong with alerts as people tweet and re-tweet. Yes, I am easily distracted when faced with a task I don't always enjoy.  I also wrote a reference letter for a former student who is applying to the SickKids Summer Research Program , and its deadline is before my mark-entry deadline, so I justified writing it before grading papers, too. Just imagine if ...

No buses... so now what?

For the second time in as many weeks (both Tuesdays, I might add...) we've had buses cancelled due to inclement weather.  Sometimes, these days can be a blessing, as when a number of students are bussed in, we have few in the building and it may be an opportunity to catch up on paperwork, the dreaded grading that we all try to minimize and still manage to collect too much of... but this close to January exams, I'd rather be able to work with my students and help them study and review the semester's content. I had 4 students in my grade 11 class, and we took up the answers to the genetics problems test they wrote last week.  One student in grade 12?  He's taking samples from the lab we set up yesterday ( using dialysis tubing to model the small intestine ) so the next class can use the equipment tomorrow. What about me?  Did I make good use of my time?  I copied my grade 11 exam and delivered it to the main office for safe-keeping until my students write it n...

I missed yesterday...

...but I'm not going to get discouraged. Yesterday, we used the spirometer in class - the one I learned how to use on Monday - and we got decent results.  First, we'd examined respiratory rates (resting, after jumping jacks for a minute, and after a calming breathing exercise) for the whole class.  That in itself was an interesting activity, with 17-year-olds getting very giggly when they were supposed to be following a simple, alternate-nostril breathing exercise.  They also got distracted and asked if I could start a yoga club... but that's typical.  Tangents are the natural order in my classes. For sanitary reasons, we use disposable mouthpieces for the spirometer, so instead of having everyone use it, we usually take a few volunteers, as they are in limited supply.  Rule number one:  don't inhale!  (It's full of water.)  Rule number two:  listen to Ms De Jong!  One of the measurements is actually a two-step process so we can...