Dear jossychina,
I answered your question as quickly as circumstances allowed. I hope
this answer reaches you in time for you to make use of it. Although you
encouraged Researchers to post a partial answer, I am generally reluctant
to do so, and in this particular case I found it much easier to work on
all four parts simultaneously. They are so thoroughly intertwined that
no single part was finished before I completed the whole.
As a prelude to presenting each of the four parts in order, let me remind
you that what I offer here is not a ready-made project. These materials
are not fit for submission as coursework, nor should you represent them
as your work in any context. You may use them as guidance and inspiration
in preparing your own project. Also bear in mind that my work on this
question is not finished until you are completely satisfied. I am ready
to assist you further, should you so desire, in any reasonable fashion.
1. All physical facilities required to teach biology, both naturally
and exam-specified
In its purest form, biology instruction requires little more than a
gathering place for students. To allow them to record the teacher's words,
they should ideally be equipped with notepads and writing instruments. The
teacher may furthermore convey ideas in pictorial form with the assistance
of a large writing and drawing surface such as a blackboard, whiteboard,
jumbo notepad, transparency projector, or digital projector.
Instruction can take place in a lecture hall, a laboratory, or in the
field. The first setting is best suited to addressing a large audience and
imparting the theoretical foundations of biology. Students are generally
seated close together, whether in rows of tables, at individual desks,
or in the seats of an amphitheater. The lecturer or instructor may stand
on a rostrum for the sake of visibility and acoustic projection. A lectern
may also be desired to store and support lecture notes. When addressing
a very large audience, a microphone and speaker system may be required
to amplify the lecturer's voice.
When instruction takes place in a laboratory, whether due to the space
constraints of the institution or because demonstrations and experiments
are to take place, the primary emphasis should be on safety. The
prevalence of noxious chemicals and hazardous machines poses risks that
must be countered by preventive safeguards and response mechanisms. At
a minimum, the laboratory should place at the students' disposal a
first-aid kit, an eye-rinsing station, an emergency shower, and a fire
extinguisher. Depending on circumstances, it may also be wise to equip
the laboratory with an overhead sprinkler system and radiation shielding.
A laboratory must furthermore be supplied with the apparatus necessary
to perform the demonstrations and experiments called for by the
curriculum. The complexity and expense of such apparatus will depend on
the age of the students being taught. In an elementary-school classroom,
practical work is usually limited to botanical experimentation such as
growing sprouts in egg cartons. For such purposes, ordinary gardening
supplies suffice. Students in middle school will be asked to view
biological samples under magnification. In addition to a number of
microscopes, the laboratory will require slides, scraping instruments
such as spatulas, and storage for the materials from which samples are to
be taken. High-school students are almost invariably expected to perform
dissection in biology class. Cutting instruments as well as basins and
protective gloves are required for this exercise, not to mention a supply
of frogs, mice, or grasshoppers.
Finally, a biology class may be held in the field, where direct
observation takes the place of experimentation as the means by which
students gather data for later analysis or to confirm theoretical
knowledge. Such excursions may require, in addition to transportation
to and from the site, field glasses, collection implements such as nets
and jars, and clothing appropriate to the terrain and weather.
At least as important as lecture attendance and practical work is the
students' private reading, whether in preparation for lectures or as a
way of refreshing past material before an exam. To this end, students
will require one or more textbooks stipulated by the curriculum. In
the high-tech classroom, students may also be expected to make use of
multimedia resources found on the web, which implies that the institution
grants some degree of networking infrastructure to all students, including
those enrolled in biology.
Much useful instructional material is now available online. For example,
students may perform virtual frog dissection on sites such as the
following.
Curry School of Education: Net Frog
http://curry.edschool.virginia.edu/go/frog/Frog2/
Complete courses in biology have been published online by reputable
sources. The author of the standard textbook Biology, John W. Kimball,
maintains an extended version of his textbook material on the following
website.
Kimball's Biology Pages: Table of Contents
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/T/TOC.html
Nonetheless, in biology education as in business, bricks-and-mortar
infrastructure remain the foundation of the enterprise.
2. Facilities in schools for teaching biology
We discussed above the physical apparatus that is potentially involved
in a course of study in biology. It is impossible to make a decisive
assessment without considering the scope of a biology course and the
resources of the institution supporting it. A classical curriculum may
leave a small financial footprint by emphasizing intellectual rigor
over hands-on experience. The lectures that make up the better part of
post-secondary instruction in biology require very little equipment,
the chief difficulty and expenditure residing in the procurement of the
instructor. There need be nothing modest about the ambitions of a course
of study lacking in a princely budget.
The most humbly furnished rural schoolhouse can offer a fine education
in biology as long as the teacher's aptitudes and energy are adequate to
the task. The surrounding fields and forests offer the greatest possible
laboratory of biology, for nature herself is at play here. The students of
such an institution may be invited to take part in the scientific process
by isolating flora or capturing fauna from the natural world and taking
them indoors for close study. A kit consisting of nets and specimen jars
is readily assembled from the kitchen materials of a rural housewife. The
famous invertebrate biologist Libby Hyman, to cite but one example, was a
farm girl whose early instruction took place in mean surroundings of this
kind, yet it was not evident later that she had suffered any disadvantage.
Schools that have the budget to equip proper laboratories encounter a new
set of pedagogical problems peculiar to biology instruction. Without
beating around the bush, let us call the bugaboo by its name:
dissection. The practice of bissecting animals in high-school biology
class has not only been a standard part of the curriculum, it is almost
the entire raison d'etre for biology laboratories in schools. Without the
need for sinks, scalpels, forceps, blood basins, specimen refrigerators,
and the other paraphernalia of dissection, the facilities required
for instruction would be sharply reduced. Elementary genetics can be
taught on the blackboard, after all, and molecular interactions cannot
be observed satisfactorily in the classroom anyway.
The Humane Society of the United States has been agitating against the
practice of animal dissection in biology instruction. Their campaign
describes the cost benefits of abstaining from this practice and proposes
human alternatives to it.
Humane Society of the United States: Animals in Research: Animals in
Education: Dissection Campaign Packet
http://www.hsus.org/ace/11369
What the Humane Society fails to mention is one of the primary obstacles
to dissection in the classroom, namely the nauseating sensation it
produces in students of delicate disposition. Yet in the act of cutting
open an animal and peering into its innards lies one of the most intimate
pedagogical experiences. To cut open a frog is to confront in the most
intimate manner the biological workings of an animal and therefore
of ourselves.
The National Association of Biology Teachers pays careful attention
to the problem of outfitting laboratories suitably for a full-spectrum
education in biology. Anyone concerned with the planning or construction
of such facilities would do well to heed the NABT's advice.
"In a laboratory or field learning environment, students work individually
or in small groups on a question, problem or hypothesis; they use the
processes and materials of science to construct their own explanation of
biological phenomena. They will often observe, collect data and interpret
data of life processes, living organisms, and/or simulations of living
phenomena. The distinction between laboratory or field learning and
traditional classroom learning is that activities are student-centered,
with students actively engaged in hands-on, minds-on activities using
laboratory or field materials and techniques. [...] The laboratory and
field components of biology instruction should provide experiences for
direct student involvement which emphasize the above process skills and
the tentative nature of science; knowledge is gained by observing cause
and effect relationships among variables. It is essential for students
to be provided opportunities for questioning, hypothesis formulation,
experimental design, and data analysis."
National Association of Biology Teachers: Role of Laboratory and Field
Instruction in Biology Education
http://www.nabt.org/sub/position_statements/laboratory.asp
Under the right circumstances, then, a well-equipped laboratory offers
a wider range of useful stimulus to the young minds being trained in
biology than does a conventional classroom.
3. Teacher's role in the teaching of biology
The crucial element of biology instruction, in the single-room prairie
schoolhouse as in the lavishly provisioned private-school laboratory,
is the teacher. A poor teacher can put paid to the students' hopes of
profiting from their time in the classroom. A teacher's performance is
measured most clearly by his success in transmitting knowledge to his
charges. His ability to do so relies, first of all, on his technical
knowledge. A biology teacher should have impeccable academic credentials
attesting to his expertise in the field of biology. Further assets are
specialized training in pedagogy and juvenile psychology.
A teacher must be able to speak clearly and continuously for prolonged
periods, but also in a lively fashion. Above all, a teacher must show
enthusiasm. If he fails to animate to classroom, the students may as well
stick to their textbooks. The systematic presentation of exhaustive fact
is the duty of a textbook writer, not of one who speaks at the front of
the classroom. The teacher should not be a lump of organic matter like
something we press onto a slide and inspect under the microscope. He
should, rather, bring the material to life by force of enunciation,
by colorful example, and as far as possible by Socratic dialogue with
his students.
The skills required for lecturing may be decomposed essentially into
three constituent parts. First, the teacher must have the gift of
projection. This refers not necessarily to the strength of his voice,
for many of the best teachers are soft-spoken. He must nonetheless be
able to capture the students' attention and beam his thoughts with as
little interference as possible into their minds. There is a kind of
impersonal magnetism at play in the work of the best teachers that is
peculiar to the classroom and does not necessarily extend to their social
of professional relations outside it. This is a subjective quality not
easily described, and best learned by imitation.
The second attribute of a good classroom orator is that of discernment,
which implies competence in a gamut of technical and literary tasks. A
teacher is said to discern his subject properly if he is able to pick out
from the vast expanse of a textbook what is essential to the curriculum
and what is not. He must recognize which subjects demand elaborate
explanation and which are easily recapitulated with a few words. In
the home stretch leading up to an examination, the good teacher herds
his students toward the most important portions of the material without
giving away the contents of the exam.
Thirdly, the teacher must be responsive. There is good reason, after
all, why we put a live human being at the front of a classroom rather
than a monitor showing a recorded lecture. To most effectively guide the
students in their study, a teacher must to some extent take direction from
them. He must be sympathetic to those who pose the most naive questions
and set them right without subjecting them to humiliation. He must also
be equipped to field the most challenging questions posed by advanced
students without straying into irrelevant subject matter. He must know
when to stop a line of inquiry and move on with the main thread of
a lecture. Perhaps he will adapt the coverage of later portions of a
course in response to the interests expressed by his brightest students.
There has been a recent trend in recent years toward shifting the emphasis
in the classroom from the teacher to the student. A teacher who adheres
to the so-called student-centered pegagogical method strives to stay out
of the spotlight and to function instead as an auxiliary in the students'
investigations of course material.
North Carolina State Instruction: Richard M. Felder and Rebecca Brent:
Navigating the Bumpy Road to Student-Centered Instruction
http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Papers/Resist.html
While there are dubious aspects to student-centered instruction, it does
remind us of the importance of practical work in the classroom. Here,
the teacher's role is indeed that of a facilitator rather than an
instructor. When students prepare to get their hands dirty in the
laboratory, the teacher gives lucid instructions for the task they
are to accomplish and gives demonstrations with verve and skill. The
National Association of Biology Teachers provides a number of resources
for teachers intending to promote their students' facility for hands-on
work, including teaching guides and on-line materials.
National Association of Biology Teachers: Education & Professional Development
http://www.nabt.org/sup/education/
We must not neglect the importance of paperwork in the teaching role. By
this we mean not the bureaucratic duties of the job, but the writing, both
creative and tedious, required for pedagogical purposes. This includes
grading assignments and exams. Speaking of exams, their composition is
a further responsibility of the teacher. He must select questions so
as to probe the depth of each student's knowledge, then formulate them
succinctly and unambiguously. There must be easy questions to establish
a baseline, difficult ones to challenge the best students, and medium
ones to assess range and consistency. Today, it is often the case
thatteachers are expected to maintain a course website containing
curriculum
information as well as a helpful collection of external links.
4. The relevance of visual aids in the teaching and learning process
of biology
Biology is one of the most visually vivid of school subjects. Compared to
the other natural sciences, many more mechanisms of biology are visible to
the naked eye. Where the most spectacular effects of chemistry involve a
change of color in a test tube or an effervescing liquid, biology offers
the gloriously gruesome revelation of animal viscera. The reflected light
beams and falling spheres of physics are dry academic illustrations next
to the very practical and complex beauty of growing plants. Yet the very
visual character of biology is what makes it all the more important to
employ good pictorial representation in the classroom.
The most primitive means of doing so, yet potentially one of the most
effective, is the blackboard at the front of the classroom. A skillful
teacher will make spontaneous use of it to depict in graphical form the
principles of genetic combination and the structure of monocellular life,
for example. As an alternative to the blackboard, a chemical whiteboard
or a projection system may be used, but the principle is the same. With
the use of chalk, pen, or other writing implement, the teacher can
illustrate on an impromptu basis the content of his lectures and of
answers to student questions.
Among the ready-made two-dimensional visual aids that may be employed in
a classroom, the most significant are photographs, diagrams, and posters
lining the wall of the classroom. The classic example of a biology poster
is the one showing taxonomic categories, with an interesting selection
of genuses and species. The arborescent structure of taxonomy is not
easily conveyed in any way beside the graphical one. In a well-equipped
classroom, a student's wandering eyes may also alight on such salutary
material as an illustration of the ecological cycle, or a photo series
of the fruit fly's mutations.
The Creative Process: Educational Posters & Charts: Biology
http://www.creativeprocess.net/moreposters/science/biology.html
German Hollywood: Biology Posters
http://www.germanhollywood.com/posters/biology/12242-1.html
Increasingly common in today's biology instruction are interactive
visual aids such as CD-ROM lessons and computerized testing. While these
media are no substitute for intent reading of instructional texts,
they can supplement the enlivening role of the teacher, especially
in cases where face time is limited due to short classroom periods or
large enrollment. It is especially useful for those students who are
preparing for standardized biology tests such as the SAT II and AP to
have at their disposal visually faithful renditions of these exams.
Spelman College: CD-ROM Catalogue
http://www.spelman.edu/~biology/resources/cdcat.html
Even without considering the materials of classroom demonstration and
experimentation as visual aids per se, we must acknowledge the important
visual role of live biological mechanisms. Some of the most attractive and
instructive apparatus in a classroom consists of actual flora and fauna,
such as caged rodents, aquariums of the freshwater or saltwater variety,
animal farms, exotic plants such as venus flytraps, and so on. They
enliven the atmosphere and serve to remind students that even in the
thick of the most abstruse study, they are discovering the secrets of
the living world.
I have enjoyed addressing this question on your behalf. If you feel that
any part of my answer is unclear or incorrect, please inform me through
a Clarification Request so that I have the opportunity to fully meet
your needs.
Regards,
leapinglizard
Search Queries:
biology teaching
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=biology+teaching
biology instruction
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=biology+instruction |
