Mr. B's class tackles difficult material with teamwork.
In connection with the human body focus the class will be doing an actual cloning experiment. They will take the gene for Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) from a jelly fish, make 10's thousands of copies of it with the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) then insert that gene into living bacteria with a plasmid.
Obviously this requires an enormous amount of knowledge that most 5th/6th grade students don't have (like high school and college biology). Even reading the experiment description and student manual was difficult because it is full of terms, concepts and methods that they don't know. I took this as an opportunity to suggest strategies for tackling difficult material including summarizing and outlining.
The entire class is now sharing a google document that they can all edit in real time. Each student took responsibility for a few paragraphs. After reading their section many times they are writing a summary in the co-authored outline on google docs.
No comments:
Post a Comment