Chris Meyer, York Mills Collegiate Institute
christopher.meyer@tdsb.on.ca

What happens when you let a physicist teach biology? This is the second part of an article where I explore the design of a biology unit for grade 10 science. You can find the first part here. The big design ideas are these: use observations and questions to drive our inquiry narrative, observe realistic evidence just like historical scientists, allow students to explore and find patterns before teaching the names of things, and use the science of learning to improve the “stickiness” of the ideas in students’ minds. The previous article left off with an examination of how our brains structure knowledge as webs of connections, and the process of learning as an attempt to make connections between new and old knowledge networks. Now we are ready to summarize what teaching really is! Read More...

Tags: History, Pedagogy

Chris Meyer, York Mills Collegiate Institute
christopher.meyer@tdsb.on.ca

Here there be dragons
What happens when you let a physicist teach biology? Science, that’s what! Well, not at first. I still have my science teaching notes (in the form of overheads) from 25 years ago and at the time, I taught the biology unit of grade 10 science in a very traditional way. Fast forward 22 years and I found myself teaching grade 10 science again, now with a very different perspective on learning. As part of my redesign of our school’s grade 10 science course, I needed to build a biology unit from scratch. I have absolutely no university training in anything remotely biological, so I felt ready to give it a go! For me it was terra incognita, unknown country. As my guide, all I had were the learning principles I chose for the grade 10 course: questioning and scientific observation. When I described to my colleagues what I was doing, they thought it crazy. But fools rush in… Read More...

Tags: History, Pedagogy