Best topics for student to learn on thier own.

[Paula]

Hello Everyone,
I am so grateful for this site. I have appreciated all of the discussions and was hoping some of you would give a future AP bio teacher some advice. I am creating my syllabus/audit. I only have 45 minute periods 5 days aweek, no lab or double periods. So students are going to have to do alot more on thier own. Any suggestions? What topics have you found that students are able to learn with minimal teacher direction. These are 12th graders with a general biology and chem background .
Thanks!!

[Jessi Van Der Volgen]

Paula -- I can definitely empathize with this!! I also have 45 minute periods, and it is definitely a challenge. Is your class period at the beginning of the day, on either side of lunch, or at the end, by any chance? My summer assignment is usually the intro chemistry and intro ecology and animal behavior that they seem to do well with without me. I'll send you my syllabus/audit tomorrow from school, but I wish you luck!!

[Paula]

Oh- you are the best ever. The students tend to have religion/gym before and AP Gov. after. I was able to get them out of gym this past semester for the Enzyme and Bacteria transformation lab but I kind of get the feeling I can only do that max. two time per year. I also found it a challenge just to get to the point in the lecture where connections can be made. It is so short of a time, and if there are questions especially ones I need to look up later, it takes even longer to fiinsh a concept. Thanks again!!!!

[Ellena Bethea]

We have a similar schedule, and had it not been for so many "special schedules" or freak weather incidents on that caused us to miss school, I think I would have made it through some of the material in more depth. We also have a freaky rotating schedule that makes it hard to schedule things during lunch and after school. In the end, we only had about 145 (out of 160) "teaching" days before the exam. We ended up doing a few saturday sessions in the spring, to complete AP Labs 5, 6, and 12 and do review for the exam.

If you go to Kim Foglia's site (www.explorebiology.com/APaudit), she has at few syllabi that were approved for classes that meet one period 4-5 days a week.

What worked for us as "independent" topics:

- Intro chemistry & some biochemistry: We have a physics first curriculum, so those students who hadn't had AP Chem just finished regular chem the year before. We spent class time designing and performing experiments to learn about their characteristics, and they learned the material at home.

- Natural Selection: This chapter was my summer assignment, along with a dozen recent pop science articles that involved evolution in the literal or figurative sense. I feel that it was very successful as a summer assignment, but not as "bulky" as others I have seen. It was a good foundation for the year's curriculum.

- Diversity of Life: This was out of scheduling necessity, but I did this as a winter break assignment. Each student did an overview of all of the kingdoms, and then each did a wiki on a specific kingdom. They did presentations when we came back from break, and continued to update it as we studied animal systems. It was pretty successful.

- Ecology: Again, out of necessity, it was mostly self-study. The vast majority of my kids didn't have regular bio, so I have moved a good bit of this to the summer assignment. They can certainly do AP Lab 11 from home.

For other topics, due to time, it simply wasn't practical to "lecture" topics in most cases, so the students were expected to read the material we were going to discuss, and we'd go over any confusion they had, and make connections to topics we saw before, and major themes. This left time to do labs, or talk about how we'd design experiments to answer questions. This worked extremely well first semester.

Second semester, we lost so many days, we adopted Thinkwell Biology as a supplement. The students loved it! I don't know how we would have made it through all of plants & ecology this year without it! They also used it as a review of first semester topics, which saved us some review time.

I would highly recommend Thinkwell Biology as a supplement or (if you have a class set of texts) a replacement for your text. It frees up class time to make higher-level connections, analyze misconceptions in depth, discuss relevant current events, and gives you all more time to actually "do" science.

[Jen]

Ellena,
I would be interested in seeing how you structured the wiki for the diversity topics/kingdoms. Could you send me or post the link? I really like the idea of doing that - as that particular area seems somewhat tedious (at least to me....). Thanks!!
Jen

[Colin Matheson]

What I did was to use their freshman biology book for independent assignments. I know we are supposed to expose students to a college level text and I do that when I can facilitate their learning. However, when asked to do independent work, the level of the text needs to be much more simplified. The kids also loved the nostalgia ("I remember that picture!") and even liked being asked to do simple rote bio 1 worksheets ("It was relaxing.")
I do feel that if a student had strong grasp of the material in Miller/Levine (our Bio 1 book) she will pass the AP test. Sometimes my students get so distracted with the depth in Campbell that they lose the essential concepts.

As for independent topics: No summer assignment, Ecology over winter break and the phyla throughout the year as group wikis. Each quarter, groups have to add to the wiki (invertebrates, plants/fungi/protists, vertebrates).

[Jen]

Colin -
Same question that I posed to Ellena - do you have the link? I would like to see how you structured the wiki for the phyla. Thanks!
Jen

[Colin Matheson]

It took me awhile, but here are links to one set of wikis. The different groups can be accessed via the drop down on the upper right.
http://moodle.carmelunified.org/mod/wiki/view.php?id=362

Another year
http://moodle.carmelunified.org/mod/wiki/view.php?id=3348

We also tried wikispaces

http://sharkclan.wikispaces.com/

http://tigerclan.wikispaces.com/

http://biodragonclan.wikispaces.com/

http://goldenmonkeyclan.wikispaces.com/

[Jen]

Colin -
Thanks for the links :) Now - the next question - do you have any guidelines or student instructions/rubrics that you are also willing to share? I JUST got a class set of laptops, so life will be a little easier, and I would very much like to incorporate this type of project. So, any help in how to guide/structure this to maximize time would be fantastic! Thanks again!
Jen

[David Title]

Hello

If they have a good chem background, they can easily do chapters 1-4 over the summer with a few study guides. you can review study guides & test by second class, then start rolling into chapter 5. You can also assign a winter beak assignment of the ecology unit, chapters 50, and 52-55. Same pattern as summer break, review then test. That's two units right there.

[Jen]

This is kind of for all - I am catching up on my journal reading, and the April 2009 issue of ABT from NABT had a "quick fix" for improving the time required for gel electrophoresis. The main switch was changing the buffer to a 20X SBE - it runs at a higher voltage in about 15 minutes vs. 30-40 min with TAE or TBE. The author said they run the gels at 250V and get equivalent banding to the longer runs. Just an idea for a time saver - I'm going to try it this year and see how it goes :)
SBE "recipe"
Dissolve 8g NaOH + 47g boric acid in water for a total volume of 1000mL - or pre-made from Innovita (http://www.labsupplymall.com)
Has anyone tried this with success at the high school level? This was written be a college prof - so I'm also thinking he *might* have better equipment than those of us at the high school level! Jennifer