Professional Development- Learning from Colleagues

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to attend a professional development conference that was a wonderful opportunity to learn from my colleagues.  The conference was a summit for high school biology teachers from all around our county to collaborate, discuss shared successes and challenges, and share ideas for great ways to engage our students in our biology content.  One challenge we all face is the Pennsylvania Keystone Exam, which all of our biology students must take at the end of our course and then re-take if they fail to perform at a proficient level.  Much of our discussion centered on how we can help our students to be successful on this exam, but we also all share a deep desire to make the biology content meaningful for our students beyond the exam (and perhaps despite of it!).

Two adjectives I might use to describe my time at the summit are inspiring and invigorating.  I loved getting to hear from other teachers about how they deal with challenges, how they teach various concepts, how they pace themselves through the curriculum, how they differentiate lessons, how they remediate struggling students, and much more!  I was amazed at how dedicated, creative, and talented my fellow biology teachers are and was so encouraged at everyone's willingness to talk and share throughout the various sessions of the day.  I guess it makes sense, since we all have pretty much the same job, but we all just seemed to "click."  I was honored to be a part of the day.

The day was organized as an "Edcamp."  We began the day by individually jotting down post-it notes of topics we were interested in discussing more with our colleagues.  The post-its were categorized by the facilitators and overarching topics were developed for small group discussion sessions.  We then had a choice between three different discussion groups for each of our four sessions throughout the day.  Each group would meet in a different area of the large room, discussing our topic (or anything else that came up related to the topic) for about 45 minutes.  We took notes and shared documents on a shared Google doc.  Our only break was a luxurious one hour!! lunch at the cafe.  The summit took place at our county's technical school, and our delicious lunch was prepared and served by the culinary arts students at the school, which was amazing.

For me, the major benefit of the day, apart from being inspired by my colleagues, was that I was exposed to many different ideas for teaching various topics.  I heard some great ideas about teaching vocabulary, engaging students in summarizing their learning, and relating difficult biology concepts to topics students will be able to identify with.  I hope to be able to implement many of these ideas throughout the course of this school year and in future school years. 

Microscopes!

Lately we have been getting a lot of use out of one of the most important tools in biology- the microscope!  We talked about why microscopes are used, identified the names and functions of the important parts of the compound light microscope, discussed different types of microscopes and their advantages/disadvantages, and got LOTS of practice using the microscopes!  Students spent a few days working their way through eight different introductory microscope lab stations in which they practiced various microscope skills, including positioning, making a wet mount slide, and staining a specimen.

At this station, students tried various actions with the microscope to see what would happen to the images they were viewing.

At this station, students viewed a small section of potato unstained, and then stained the specimen and viewed it.

After this, students used their newly refreshed microscope skills to complete a lab that had three parts.  Part 1 was an opportunity to look at animal cells- their own!  Students scraped the inside of their cheek (gently) with a toothpick to loosen some cheek cells onto the toothpick.  They then scraped the toothpick onto a microscope slide and stained the cells with methylene blue stain.  Students put the slide onto the microscope and viewed their own cells!

 A sample of student cheek cells viewed at 100x magnification under the microscope (stained).

Students use microscopes to view their own cheek cells!

During the second part of the lab, students made slides of plant cells to view.  Students were given a section of thin onion skin, which they used to make a wet mount slide and stained with iodine.  

Students view and draw onion skin cells.

A sample of onion skin cells viewed at 100x magnification (stained).

For the third part of this lab, I went out to the wetland on our campus and collected some pond water.  Students took samples of the pond water and viewed them under the microscope with the hope of finding some critters moving around in the water.  Some were more successful than others!  Many of the little organisms that live in the water move so quickly that it is hard to get them in the field of view long enough to see them, but we did our best.  We did see a few really cool and creepy looking organisms!

What are we looking at?!

One of our pond water specimens!