Teaching a reading lesson on Mutations...

Ed 620 Framing Our Reading Mod 5

Yetunde and I stayed with genetics this week choosing an article linked here https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170419091616.htm from the website www.sciencedaily.com. The article is very interesting. The headline is an attention grabber, certainly in the all-boys school I am in. The word mutant is going to grab their attention. The overall concept throughout the article is good too. On initial reading, students might just get stuck on the idea that we can manipulate DNA in wasps, but there is the underlying idea which can be drawn from them - If this works there are endless possibilities with the CRISPR technology.

There are many attractive things about the article. It does give the teacher an opportunity to review or teach about the life cycle of insects to some extent. An easy conversation would be why lots of these type of experiments are done on insects. You would expect to hear about cost and accessibility, but you could have chats on short lifespan, or the time between generations and link the genetics to heredity and continuation of species. I feel like explicitly reminding students of this link that what we experience and what we are studying is important. They are not isolated phenomena! The teacher could also talk about the mentioned link in the article between insect association with many diseases and their transfer. This is certainly an area where the article can really generate some curiosity, questioning and further investigation.

What is described above is what I experienced reading the article. The title whet my appetite, and I dove in looking to answer the questions the title had made me think of. I found my mind moving away in tangents as I was going through the material, generating questions, theories and inferences. I should practice verbalizing this as explaining my experience, verbalizing my thoughts and naming the strategies I use as I navigate the text is what I should be modeling to my students to help their close reading skills and metacognition (McLaughlin, 2015)(Cortright, na).    

The text is not too difficult as the article is quoting only one person. Many of the words which may cause difficulty are words students may well have seen before in Biology classes. Words like mutant are widely known, if maybe by a Hollywood definition rather than a properly scientific one, but it would not cause too much difficulty. Pigmentation, parasitic, pupa and embryo are likely words that will have been heard in middle school classes and will offer good opportunities to review and generate discussion. CRISPR will likely be a new concept but it is central to the article and does offer some description in the text. I think the complexity lies in where this article can lead. There are many ideas which can lead the students to start asking questions. Why do they want red eyes on wasps? Why are they doing it to show they can? How will they apply this practice and techniques? What are the possibilities with such technology? And my favorite question with such an idea, should we do all this? Regular conversations of what is possible with modern technology, certainly in genetics, will really make the students think about how Science will affect their futures, even if they are not in the science field. As I often remind the students they will likely vote for candidates who stand with or against technologies that we talk about in our class.    

Yetunde asked me to use deductive reasoning in the classroom for this article. Deductive reasoning involves using known premises to come to a new conclusion. For example you could say “I know that apples are fruits”, and I know “Golden Delicious are apples” and therefore we know Golden Delicious are fruits. By knowing that the first two statements are correct the third must also be correct (Factcourad, 2007). I really like this idea. There are too many times, and I often return to this point, that students neglect to apply the axioms they already know, and treat things as if they are in isolation. Using this strategy more frequently and getting students to recall and apply concepts facts and knowledge in which they are comfortable, would really move them down the road to being independent learners (Snowman & McCown, 2015). I am currently teaching Stoichiometry and when I analyze the questions that will be asked, you can easily trace the separate parts of the questions back to each of the last five chapters we have covered. I found myself in front of the board saying, “we spent two weeks learning this and two weeks learning this” but putting the knowledge together has been a struggle.

In the case of teaching this article, I could get the students to write two sentences they know to be true from the text and then write something which links the two and is also true. This exercise could work on many different levels. I think the students would benefit from me modeling an example and they then could work in groups to come up with more. These assertions could be written on the board and could form a class discussion. If it is working well and there is engagement, it is a topic that would lend itself to stretching a little further. Students are likely to start with safe conclusions, but we could ask the class to move beyond into less grounded inferences. The students could search the text to try and come up with proof from the text. This could start the students thinking about the big picture possibilities even if they struggle to back up with data from this text. We need people thinking outside the box in order for us to progress, and our students will be charged with that before long. A stimulated class could move on to find other texts on the same topic area as we are making assertions about and investigate if they are in fact feasible. Any lesson where the students close read an article which generates group work, discussion and further research would be a good day.

Thanks  

 

McLaughlin, M. (2015). Content Area Reading: Teaching and Learning for College and Career Readiness.    

                Boston, MA: Pearson

McCown, R. & Snowman, J. (2015). Psychology Applied to Teaching (14th ed.). Stamford,

            Connecticut: Cengage Learning.

Factcouraud. (2007, May 22). Inductive and Deductive Reasoning. Retrieved January 08, 2011, from Free                                                              Online Course Materials — USU OpenCourseWare Web site: http://ocw.usu.edu/English/introduction-to-writing-academic-prose/inductive-and-deductive-reasoning.html.

Cortright, D. (n.d.). Making Science Relevant with Current Events. Retrieved from

                https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/teaching-science-with-current-events#