UbD Chapter 13: Yes, but...

In this final chapter of UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN, the authors explicitly address the three biggest objections they have faced with the UbD approach: namely, the need to "teach to the test", the excess of content that must be taught, and the lack of teacher time to implement these plans.

They answer all of these objections ably. While they are realistic about the pressures that teachers are under to perform, they are also brutally honest about the present state of affairs: they point out, for instance, that the schools that perform the best on standardized tests aren't the ones that spend endless hours training students to take tests. They also address one of the concerns that I had about the UbD approach: namely, schools that implement it do see a rise in test scores among their students. It is possible to teach for understanding and still reap a "fringe benefit" of improved performance in standardized assessments.

One part of this chapter that I found interesting was the reference to a collaborative curriculum-planning community called UbD Exchange. Apparently there are teachers all over the country who are using UbD and making their lesson and unit plans available over a shared website. I'll need to find out how we can access this service, because it would be a huge help to me in my ongoing lesson planning -- especially when I get ready to teach physics in the spring semester.

UbD Chapter 12: UbD as Curriculum Framework

In this chapter the authors attempt to expand the concept of UbD planning to the broader sphere of entire curricula and programs. This is something that ARISE is already doing, attempting to unite all of the classes faced by each grade level under a common set of essential questions. In the case of my 9th graders, as mentioned before, these questions are: Who am I? Where are we going? What are the tools that will help us get there?

I like the idea of organizing the curriculum this way, and it has certainly helped me to better arrange my content in a way that will be engaging (I hope) for my students. As the authors point out, the logical order in which one might lay out a summary of the knowledge in a given field is not usually the best order in which to present that material to a novice. This is something I already knew on some level -- witness my rejection of the cell-first approach to teaching biology that has been used in so many courses and textbooks. However, the order that I had first planned on presenting the material -- focusing on ecology, then physiology, then evolution -- may have been appropriate for a storytelling-based approach to biology, but it wasn't the best approach for a bunch of 9th graders who are primarily interested in what's happening to their own bodies.

I found this chapter to be a lot harder to get through than most of the previous chapters. The authors, having made their central points in the earlier portions of the book, seem to be flailing around at this point, presenting their ideas in a haphazard way and delving too far into extraneous details. The three-page recapitulation of a rubric for scientific inquiry was almost ridiculously excessive, and probably should have been relegated to an appendix; they talk at great length about "scope and sequence" curriculum planning without ever defining it; and most of the ideas presented in the chapter have been adequately addressed earlier in the book.

That said, there are some good points in here. One that jumped out at me was the example of software manuals: Most complex software programs come with "Getting Started" guides to get people working on the basics quickly and tutorials to walk them through more complex features; the reference manual, if it exists at all, is a separate document designed to be called upon only when needed. (Most programs nowadays, in fact, eschew reference manuals entirely in favor of complex Help menus.) As the authors point out, many elementary students are able to master quite complex software using this approach, while high school students are baffled by the linear, fact-driven presentation of science and history.

It's an important lesson, and one that already has me thinking about the 10th-grade physics class that I'll be teaching next semester. The focus of that class is on Newtonian mechanics, simple machines, and thermodynamics, and I'm beginning to think it might be wise to have the students discover Newton's laws by observation and measurement before having them described. The tricky part will be figuring out how to allow them to explore those laws, given the messy and complicated systems that are available to us in the real world. Hmm ... I wonder how much an air track costs...

UbD Chapter 11: The Design Process

This chapter reviews a number of ways to practically apply the concepts presented earlier in the book, taking into account that many teachers will be approaching the UbD process with lessons and units already planned out. I count myself fortunate that I was exposed to UbD at the beginning of my teaching career, but I can still draw a number of helpful tips from this chapter, particularly since certain elements of our course design are mandatory and I need to figure out how to incorporate them most effectively within an understanding-based framework.

One point that the authors give extensive time to is the idea of compromises and dilemmas in teaching. They warn against relying too much on process and losing touch with what's going on with your students:

"Too much reliance on a recipe leads to other problems. It can close off thoughtful responsiveness of the teacher-designer -- empathy! -- in the false belief that any well-thought-out plan must, of necessity, work, and if it doesn't, it must be the students' fault." (p. 267)

I probably narrowly missed falling into this trap myself, to be honest: my "xenobiology expedition" idea would have been great for students of a certain stripe, but it just isn't likely to work with students who are as grounded in the brutal realities of inner-city life as mine are going to be. I'll have to meet them where they're at and do my best to make the content as relevant as possible -- and, even then, keep in mind the need to keep getting feedback and making adjustments on the fly. As the authors make clear throughout the chapter, good design is an ongoing, iterative process -- one that's never really finished, because each crop of students is different.

UbD Chapter 10: Teaching for Understanding

This chapter was chock-full of good advice, even if it was necessarily general. I was somewhat relieved to find that the authors came out in defense of direct instruction, reaffirming its necessary place alongside exploratory and constructivist approaches to education. Certainly I couldn't imagine teaching science without a combination of these methods; after all, if men as brilliant as Aristotle or Hippocrates had so many mistaken ideas about biology even after a lifetime of study, we can hardly expect students to "construct" correct understandings without some essential underpinnings.

Still, this chapter had a whimsical but sobering reminder in it: To whatever extent you're inclined to do something, you're probably going to overdo it to that extent.

Teachers who love to lecture do too much of it; teachers who resist it do too little. Teachers who love ambiguity make discussions needlessly confusing. Teachers who are linear and task-oriented often intervene too much in a seminar and can cut off fruitful inquiry. Teachers who love to coach sometimes do too many drills and overlook transfer. Teachers who love the big picture often do a poor job of developing core skills and competence. The upshot? Beware of self-deception! (p. 242)

For myself, I know that I'm both a big-picture thinker and a lecturer: I like imaginative tangible projects, and I also like to hear myself talk. I have to be careful throughout the coming year to save the talking for where it will do the most good, and to teach the skills necessary for the students to do the tasks I want them to do -- something that Victoria already warned me about. Happily, our 45-minute lessons on Wednesdays give me a nice time block when I can focus on skill-oriented instruction; it's too short a period for any but the simplest experiments and demonstrations, but it's a good length for introducing concepts like, say, the scientific method, or how to conduct an interview for the students' ecological awareness project.

UbD Chapter 9: Planning for Learning

The first chapter of Stage 3 -- developing a learning plan -- was a massive barrage of new content spread over 35 pages (which is a lot when you're talking about information-dense textbook reading). I'm still assimilating it all, and I think it may be a while before I feel like I'm actually "getting" everything in here. As I've noted before, straight reading is not my most efficient means of taking in new information, and there was enough here to make my eyes cross.

The basic concept is that a lesson plan should be designed with seven criteria or stages in mind, represented by the acronym WHERETO:

W = Where is the content headed? Where are the students coming from?
H = Hooking the students: how do we get them engaged with the material? How do we hold onto them once we've got them?
E = Explore and Experience, Enable and Equip: Students need to have experiences that will help them explore the Big Ideas of the unit. We also need to Equip them with the tools they'll need to perform well in the assessments and demonstrate understanding of the material.
R = Revise and Reflect: Return to the same questions and problems again and again. Challenge initial assumptions. Make the students think again about their first instincts, and see how their inferences change in the light of new knowledge. This mirrors what Howard Gardner said about "going deep": you have to stay with a topic long enough to get down to the student's essential misconceptions and dispel them before new understanding can take root.
E = Evaluate work and progress: This refers to letting the students evaluate their progress, not just the teacher. These is where strategies like the "1-minute essay" become invaluable. Give the students opportunities for constant reflection.
T = Tailor and personalize the work: I really, really appreciate what the authors say about this one -- namely, that a "diverse" student body is not merely one that is composed of minority groups. Every student body is diverse because all students come to the class with different strengths, weaknesses, prior knowledge, learning styles, interests, and preferences. (The use of "diverse" as a euphemism to describe members of racial minorities has always struck me as deeply offensive for this very reason.) It's important to keep pursuing the same Goals and Desired Results while making room for students to explore the content in different ways, as befits their strengths.
O = Organize for optimal effectiveness: It's important to present the material in a way that will generate the most interest and maintain that interest throughout the unit. Marching in a straight line through the content is bad for understanding on several levels -- it lowers interest in the material, which causes students to disengage, and also prevents students from going back to Reflect and Evaluate on previous content. I particularly liked the analogy here to soccer training: teach discrete skills, then build up to more sophisticated drills, then "play the game" (which would probably equate to the Performance Task Assessment we constructed in the last chapter).

In between pulling my focus back to the material of the chapter -- did I mention this was a LOT of reading? -- I've been brainstorming about "hooks" to get the students engaged early. That, in turn, has led me back to the xenobiology theme that I came up with earlier in the design process. What if, instead of just making the xenobiology presentation the big end-of-the-year class project, I build that concept of exploring an alien world into many of the projects throughout the year? I could present the students with "messages" and "log entries" from the captain of a new colony mission that has landed on an alien world; the colonists are running into various problems with the local flora and fauna, and the captain has turned to his team of xenobiologists (the students) to figure out what's going wrong and how to fix it. Our class can then turn to considering different real-world situations and extracting the necessary Understandings to make sense of the problems being faced by the space colonists.

This suggests a structure for the overall unit: Begin by explaining the role that the students are playing and presenting a message from the captain, describing a mysterious problem with the local ecology and asking for their help. I can start out with a pre-assessment where the students guess at possible causes of the problem, which should reveal which ones have some prior understanding of ecology. We can then return to the colonists' dilemma throughout the unit as we uncover new understandings and new knowledge; through written responses and class discussions, the students can refine their previous thinking about the situation, until they finally arrive at the actual cause and a recommended solution at the unit's end. The two subsequent units can feature similar biological "mysteries" for the students to solve in the areas of homeostasis and evolution.

I think this will be a fun hook for the students; the idea of learning from Earth's biology to answer questions about an alien world inherently embodies the idea of "transfer", which is one of the true marks of understanding. It also creates a theme that I can draw on in activities and assessments throughout the rest of the unit.

Stage 2 Summary

After reading through the additional examples in the workbook, I believe I have come up with an effective rubric for my Amazon Basin Brochure. The students will be graded on two separate scales:

Understanding (65%):

4 - The brochure clearly and accurately identifies all of the major reasons why slash-and-burn agriculture is destructive and ultimately counterproductive. The brochure shows sensitivity to the Amazonian farmers' difficult situation and clearly presents the benefits of shade-grown crops as an alternative. There are no misunderstandings of key concepts.

3 - The brochure correctly identifies at least two of the major reasons why slash-and-burn agriculture is destructive and counterproductive. The benefits of shade-grown crops may be presented somewhat glibly, without full acknowledgment of the farmers' concerns. Any misunderstandings are minor and do not affect the central argument.

2 - The brochure only correctly identifies one of the major reasons why slash-and-burn agriculture is destructive or counterproductive. The concerns of the Amazonian farmers are not explicitly addressed and/or the reasons for switching to shade-grown crops are not properly explained. There may be evidence of misunderstandings that affect the central argument.

1 - The brochure shows little apparent understanding of the relevant ideas and issues. Phrases may be repeated verbatim from reference materials without proper understanding of their meaning or their relationship to each other. The arguments used against slash-and-burn agriculture and in favor of shade-grown crops are inadequate and do not address either the lasting effects of deforestation and/or the benefits of shade-grown alternatives. The document reveals major misunderstandings of key ideas.

0 - Assignment was not completed; no assessment can be made.

Performance (35%):

4 - The brochure is presented eloquently and powerfully. It is well-organized and lays out its argument in a logical, engaging and persuasive way, mindful of the audience, context, and purpose. There is unusual craftsmanship in the final product.

3 - The brochure is presented effectively. The argument is presented in a clear and thorough manner, showing awareness of the audience, context and purpose.

2 - The brochure is presented in a somewhat effective manner. There are problems with organization, clarity, thoroughness, and polish. It is unclear whether the audience, context and purpose of the project have been considered.

1 - The brochure is presented ineffectively. It is unpolished, with little evidence of prior planning or consideration of its purpose and audience, OR it is so unclear and confusing that it is difficult to determine whether the key points have been covered.

0 - Assignment was not completed; no assessment can be made.

On the whole, I think this stage has been very helpful in sharpening my ideas about how to assess understanding of the ideas and concepts established in Stage 1. My conversation with Page yesterday was particularly helpful; it got me thinking about all of the tangential skills and abilities that are necessary for students to successfully complete the tasks we give them, and the importance of making sure that the students are prepared to use those skills as well as the explicit content that we want them to learn. Even when we're not "teaching the test," we never quite escape the challenge of teaching students how to perform the assessments we intend to use.

In any event, all of this work on assessments has made me eager to get into the question of how to present the material we're going to be assessing. It's time for Stage 3: planning the lessons and activities that I'll be using to help the students learn about ecology.

UbD Chapter 8: Criteria and Validity

In this second half of their discussion of Stage 2 (Assessments), the authors turn their attention to vetting the assessments we brainstormed about in Chapter 7. An assessment activity may be interesting and creative, but that's not enough; it also has to measure whether the key understandings, knowledge and skills have been attained, and it must do so in a manner that will reliably gauge the student's capabilities.

Here the authors delve into the topic of rubrics -- which, in educator-speak, specifically refers to scoring guides that list the criteria that a student's assignment must aim to reach. These are new territory for me, though I understand the logic behind them; happily, coach Page Tompkins has directed me to RubiStar, a free online service to help teachers develop quality rubrics. I'm sure I'll be making use of it as my design work progresses.

Page and I had a great conversation this afternoon, and together we separated out my various formative assessment projects from the summative assessment at the end of the unit. I hadn't distinguished between them when I was brainstorming, but as we talked it over I realized that two of my ideas were best suited to use as a summative assessment to round out the unit. One of these was the "invasive species report" that I mentioned in my previous blog post -- a truly complex task that would require a lot of prep work to make sure that the students understood what was needed. The other idea was to have the students design a brochure aimed at Amazon Basin farmers, explaining to them why trading slash-and-burn agriculture for shade-grown crops is in their own best interest.

While I like the idea of the invasive species report, it's probably better-suited to an entire class on ecology. It would require teaching the students how to perform research, weigh the validity of sources, and write a detailed paper with references. All of those are valuable scientific skills, but the project would assess those skills at least as much as the actual content of the unit. I'm more concerned at this point with establishing that the students have grasped the basics of how ecological communities work; a Scientific Skills course is better aimed at students who actually want to go into the sciences, not a survey course like freshman biology.

(Come to think of it, Scientific Skills might be a great summer elective course. I'll have to talk to Romeo and Laura about that...)

In contrast, the Amazon brochure requires fewer technical skills but more understanding of the Big Ideas of ecology: the interconnectedness of species (removing the trees destroys the "keystone" that hold the local community together), the cycling and flow of resources (the poor soils of the Amazon can't hold nutrients on their own, so without the trees the land soon becomes unproductive), and the effects of disturbance on ecological balance (the species removal and habitat destruction cause permanent shifts in the local ecology from high to low biodiversity). Presenting the argument to the farmers will also require the students to engage multiple Facets of Understanding, including Explanation, Application, Perspective, and Empathy (since they need to see the problem from the farmers' point of view -- they're just trying to feed their families, and many of the products they produce are driven to artificially-low prices by market forces that favor short-term exploitation over long-term resource management).

The brochure project can be combined with other, more traditional forms of assessment to test the students' knowledge and understanding of other aspects of the material. A test with a mixture of multiple-choice, short-answer and short-essay questions should help to cover the gaps, along with the formative assessment projects that I'll be using throughout the unit.

Now that I've chosen my end-of-unit assessment project, I'll need to come up with a rubric that is suitable for it. The two metrics suggested by the UbD authors -- Understanding and Performance -- seem like a good place to start. Proficient "Understanding", in this case, would mean that the students demonstrate a grasp of the ecological issues at play in the Amazon Basin and the negative effects of slash-and-burn agriculture; proficient "Performance" means presenting a clear and persuasive argument that acknowledges the farmers' situation while offering a better alternative. This project will also give the students a chance to engage their creative sides, if they so choose, which will probably help keep the artsy types engaged.

Time to start digging into this and get a good rubric in place.

UbD Chapter 7: Thinking Like An Assessor

In this first chapter of Stage 2 of the UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN process, the authors focus in on the idea of designing assessments before getting into the details of content. Before you can figure out what to teach, you have to figure out how you're going to measure attainment of the goals laid out in Stage 1. The analogy used is one of the justice system: we have to gather sufficient evidence to “convict” the students of having learned the material -- a humorous but perhaps somewhat insulting analogy. :)

This chapter was full of great ideas. I love the concept behind the GRASPS model of assessment (Goal, Role, Audience, Situation, Product/Performance/Purpose, Standards/Criteria for Success): posing a problem for the students to solve that mirrors a real-world situation. The big end-of-semester project that I envisioned earlier, in which the students play the role of xenobiologists reporting on an alien world, closely mirrors the GRASPS ideal, even if the sci-fi spin gives it a more whimsical feel than a “real” real-world scenario. This reassures me that my thinking has been on the right track.

I've also come up with an idea for a GRASPS project to close out the ecology unit: Have the students research an exotic species that has been introduced to California, determine whether it has become invasive, and then play the role of researchers recommending to the appropriate government agency what steps (if any) should be taken to control the species – and what will probably happen if the agency doesn't act. I'm hoping to bring in one of my former colleagues from UCSC to talk to the students about her research on invasive species, so the students can get a feel for how this sort of research is done.

I was also heartened to find that this chapter reaffirms the need for a wide variety of assessment methods, including old-fashioned tests and quizzes. I know that there is a lot of resistance to these methods in the progressive education community, but they remain an effective way of testing for knowledge of basic facts and skills.

Another trick that this chapter mentioned that seems very valuable is the “one-minute essay”: at the end of class, have the students write down (1) the big point that they learned in class today, and (2) the main unanswered question that they're leaving class with. This is such a simple, elegant way of checking the students' learning that I couldn't keep from grinning when I read it. I'm going to be sure to implement this system from the very beginning; the ritual of filling out these essay cards at the end of class, then discussing them at the beginning of the next class, should help to introduce some valuable structure and rhythm into the class.

One question that lingers in the back of my mind is whether I should implement these GRASPS projects as solo efforts or group assignments. On the one hand, having each student complete the project for themselves allows me to check each student's understanding individually; on the other hand, students who have difficulty writing in English may not be able to present everything that they understand. Perhaps I could have each student turn in their own project, but allow them to compare notes and collaborate with each other during class to check their comprehension and reasoning? Any advice or suggestions that others might have on how to deal with this problem would be appreciated.

Stage 1 Summary

Stage 1 Summary:

After completing the Stage 1 section of UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN, I feel much more confident that I'll be able to present the material to my students in a way that is both engaging and relevant. The trickiest part, I think, was distilling out the “Big Ideas” of the material and devising the essential questions that would tie in to those ideas. The process is very logical, on the whole; it just takes some practice to get used to designing a curriculum this way.

The biggest concerns I have now are practical ones: how to introduce this material to my particular crop of students. As Page noted in response to my last blog post, these students are likely to speak a language other than English at home and may be behind grade level in their English reading skills. I'm not sure yet how I'm going to present this complex and challenging material in a way that will ensure these students are able to keep up. I'll have to review the articles on dealing with English Language Learners and ask some of my fellow science teachers for ideas. Right now I'm reminding myself of what George Leonard said in MASTERY – to embrace the process of gradual improvement. I know I'm not going to do this perfectly right out of the gate, and trying to go from Zero to Master instantaneously would kill me. I'm going to do the best I can, leaning on the wisdom and experience of those around me, and revise and refine my methods as I go on. I have no doubt that my second semester of teaching this class will go more smoothly than the first, and next year I'll do better yet – assuming I haven't hit one of Leonard's plateaus by then. :)

Very well, then. Onward to Stage 2.

Unpacking Goals

After working through Chapter 6 and looking at the content standards again, I've taken another look at my big ideas, the stated or implied real-world performances that go with the standards, and the essential questions that fit best with the standards.

BIG IDEAS:

1. Interconnections between species
2. The flow and cycling of resources (energy and nutrients) in ecosystems
3. Ecosystem responses to disturbance

REAL-WORLD PERFORMANCES:

Students should be able to...

• ANALYZE changes in an ecosystem.
• REPRESENT energy flow through an ecosystem, as in an energy pyramid.
• DISTINGUISH accommodation within individuals from genetic adaptation in a population. (I'm saving this for Unit 3 when we get into evolution.)
• DETERMINE the fluctuations in population size caused by birth, immigration, emigration, and death.

UNDERSTANDINGS:

Students should understand that...

• Ecosystems include a variety of different roles that can interact in complex ways. (Big Idea #1)
• Both negative interactions (competition, predation) and positive interactions (cooperation, mutualism) are important in shaping the structure of ecological communities. (#1)
• Different species use different survival strategies, which can be successful in very different ways (e.g., r-selection vs. K-selection; Type I, II and III survival curves).
• Species' populations can be regulated from the "bottom up" (by resource limitation) or from the "top down" (by predation and disease). (#1, #2)
• Nutrients cycle within the biosphere: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and water are reused again and again, with little "new" input or loss (though human CO2 production is a major exception!). (#2)
• Ecosystems are open-ended with respect to energy: producers obtain it from one source (almost always the sun) and pass it up the food chain, losing some energy to heat at every step. (#2)
• Some ecosystems depend on "keystone species", and that threatening these species threatens the entire structure of the community. (#3)
• Outside disturbance can upset the balance of an ecosystem, and that the degree of upset depends on both the magnitude of the disturbance and the robustness of the ecosystem. (#3)

ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS:

• How are different species dependent on each other?
• Why is preserving biodiversity important?
• What makes an ecosystem stable or vulnerable?
• How do resource needs constrain the structure of ecological communities?
• How can we protect ecosystems from damage, and when should we do so?

PERFORMANCE TASK IDEAS:

• Have students plot the flow of resources and/or interaction webs in sample ecosystems.
• Write the "biography of a nitrogen atom" (or a carbon atom, etc.) as it journeys through its nutrient cycle.
• Examine population data to determine if a species is at its carrying capacity in a particular ecosystem.
• Identify populations that are under "bottom-up" or "top-down" regulation.
• Study real-world systems where dramatic shifts have occurred in community structure, and identify likely causes for the change.
• Research an exotic species that has been introduced to California (chosen from a list) and present a report explaining whether it has become invasive, how they can tell, and what is being done to combat it (if anything).

At this point I think my Stage 1 picture looks pretty clear. Assuming that my coaches agree, I'll be ready to jump into Stage 2: designing the assessments that will allow my students to demonstrate their understanding of the material.

UbD Chapter 6: Crafting Understandings

In this chapter of UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN we delved into what we specifically mean by "understandings" and how to craft useful ones for our classes. I feel pretty comfortable with this concept now; the idea that "knowledge" refers to discrete facts that can be taken as givens, while "understanding" refers to the theory or inference that we make from those facts, is one that meshes well with my experience in scientific research. Looking at the list of sample understandings that are commonly mistaken for bare facts (pp. 136 & 138), I was somewhat surprised that any educated person would be willing to accept these deep concepts on mere authoritative fiat.

Then again, that got me thinking about my own response to concepts in geometry like the Pythagorean Theorem. I was never all that interested in mathematical proofs when I was in school, and I remember being annoyed that my textbook spent so much time proving ideas that were so easy to remember. As long as I could remember the formula and knew when and how to use it, I didn't care to know the gory details for how mathematicians proved such things. In retrospect, it's obvious to me that I didn't understand (heh) the distinction between knowledge and understanding, nor the need to "construct" understanding of deductive theorems.

Constructing inductive understanding was always pretty easy for me to wrap my brain around, perhaps because that's the way science works. It's easy to understand why you have to use speculation, testing and reasoning to come up with a theory for how something generally works when all you have to work with are a few specific data points. Deduction, to me, always felt like working backwards: if you've set your axioms right, there's only one possible conclusion you can reach -- but who's to say whether your axioms are right? Even something as seemingly solid as geometry is ultimately rooted in a fairly arbitrary set of rules; once you change those rules, your whole system of deductive consequences is changed as well. Even more disturbing, there is no one "true" set of geometric rules that applies in all situations; Euclid's system works well for most common circumstances, but when you start getting into the far-flung corners of physics, they're no longer applicable.

I suspect that this lack of congruence between math and reality is part of why I've always found math irritating, even when I was good at it. It always seemed to me that math ought to be "true": that it should remain consistent with reality in all circumstances, without resorting to apparent "cheats" like imaginary numbers and non-Euclidean geometries. (The existence of pi still creeps me out when I think about it too much. I'm surrounded by circles, spheres and cylinders of quite obvious solidity, and yet their areas and volumes can never be precisely known because they are dependent on a number with an infinite number of digits!) The notion that new maths had to be invented in order to describe quantum mechanics is deeply distasteful to me, on a level that I'm not sure I can really explain even today. I suppose I have to look at "ordinary" math the way that I look at Newtonian mechanics: a useful approximation of reality that works for most practical purposes.

My own struggle with truly understanding math is a useful reminder of the struggles faced by my students:

"...experts frequently find it difficult to have empathy for the novice, even when they try. That's why teaching is hard, especially for the expert in the field who is a novice teacher. Expressed positively, we must strive unendingly as educators to be empathetic with the learner's conceptual struggles if we are to succeed." (p. 139)

I'll have to stay aware of the fact that many of the biological principles that I'm teaching these young people will be just as baffling to them as the paradoxes of mathematics are to me.

Hmm ... maybe I should put a giant pi symbol over my desk as a reminder.

UbD Chapter 5: Essential Questions

In this chapter of UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN, the authors delved into the topic of Essential Questions -- questions that encourage a deeper exploration of the material rather than mere pat answers that can easily be memorized. These questions can be specific to the topic at hand or more overarching, and they can also be open-ended (questions that have no generally agreed-upon "right" answer) or guided (questions that do have have agreed-upon answers, but not ones that would be readily available to the students, and which point to key understandings that the teacher is attempting to convey).

While I was reading about the different kinds of Essential Questions, I started scribbling notes in the margins of the book about possible Essential Questions for my Ecology unit:

OPEN-ENDED, OVERARCHING:

• What is "life"?
• Why should we care about biodiversity?
• What makes an ecosystem desirable? Why should we care about protecting it?

OPEN-ENDED, TOPICAL:

• Are ecosystems driven more by negative interactions between organisms -- "nature red in tooth and claw", competition and predation -- or by positive interactions, such as cooperation and mutualism?
• What makes an ecosystem stable or vulnerable?
• Why is the world green? (I.e., why is so much biomass tied up in producers rather than consumers?)
• Are species' populations limited more by "bottom up" effects (food supply, available habitat) or by "top down" effects (predation)?

GUIDED:

• Where does the rain go after it falls?
• Where does the oxygen we breathe come from?
• In what ways do humans alter the environment around them?
• What happens to a body after it rots? Where do its components go?
• Why are decomposers important?
• Why are primary consumers (herbivores) important?
• Why are predators important?
• What traits might indicate that a species is more likely to survive disruptions in its habitat?

This may be too many essential questions for one unit, so I'll have to figure out which ones are most important to focus on. I'm very fond of the "Why is the world green" question -- both because of its deceptively simple phrasing and because it opens up the opportunity to explore a number of interconnected ideas about the roles of species in a community and the differences between top-down and bottom-up regulation. (The current working theory is that the world is green because predators keep herbivore populations below their carrying capacity, which prevents the herbivores from stripping the ecosystem of every available scrap of foliage. This is in marked contrast to the situation in most oceanic ecosystems, where primary producers -- algae -- are quickly eaten by primary consumers, which are in turn quickly eaten by the secondary and tertiary consumers who make up most of the system's standing biomass.)

This may be one of the most useful chapters to date, because it provides a methodology for getting at one of my chief objectives: getting students to think.

"Our students need a curriculum that treats them more like potential performers than sideline observers. They need to experience how their own inquiries and discussions are 'essentially' parallel to those of experts, and how even key agreed-upon understandings can change over time as a result of ongoing inquiry. In this way, they come to more deeply understand knowledge as the result of inquiries as opposed to disembodied 'truths' that are just 'out there' to be learned from teachers and texts." (p. 122)

Not coincidentally, I was also inspired today to put out feelers to several of my former associates among the graduate students and faculty of UC-Santa Cruz. Hopefully some of them will be able to come out and talk to my students about their research, so as to help them get a better feel for what it's like to be on the cutting edge of scientific inquiry.

Understanding By Design-Templates

The first 57 pages of the UbD Professional Development Workbook introduce three different templates for "backward design" of an instructional unit: a brief 1-page template, a somewhat more detailed 2-page version, and a very detailed 6-page breakdown that gets into the details of day-by-day lesson planning. The remaining pages are mostly taken up by examples of unit plans in everything from science to history to English.

After looking through the different designs, I've decided to go with the 2-page version for planning my ecology unit. It gives a bit more space to describe different portions of the unit than the 1-page version, especially for the Stage 3 tasks and lessons. The 6-page version looks too detailed and complex for my first attempt at unit design; I don't want to fall into "paralysis by analysis." I'll stick with the 2-pager for now and expand my ideas as necessary once I have a basic framework in place.

UbD Chapter 3: Gaining Clarity on our Goals

"...a big idea is not 'big' merely by virtue of its intellectual scope. It has to have pedagogical power: It must enable the learner to make sense of what has come before; and, most notably, be helpful in making new, unfamiliar ideas seem more familiar." (Understanding by Design, 2nd Ed., p.70)

This chapter took a closer look at the so-called "Stage 1" concepts for unit planning: key questions, key understandings, big ideas, and core tasks. All of these are related, though not synonymous, and they're all different ways of getting at the heart of the question: what do I want my students to understand, know, and be able to do when they complete this unit?

The chapter is full of a lot of good advice on how to screen through lists of material -- whether a textbook or a set of state-imposed content standards -- and filter out the big ideas and core tasks from among the less-crucial concepts. The models presented here help to distinguish the crucial from the important, and the important from the incidental, and the incidental from the trivial. It's something I'm going to have to put into use for myself as I screen through the California science standards to figure out which points are most important for my students to understand.

Reading through chapter 3 inspired a number of thoughts about the "big ideas" of ecology, the first unit for my upcoming biology course. The book points out that big ideas are usually counter-intuitive and susceptible to misunderstanding. This got me thinking about food webs, nutrient cycles and energy flow in ecosystems, all of which involve the central "big idea" that thermodynamics limit the possibilities in biological systems. But the first law of thermodynamics -- the law of conservation of energy -- can easily be misunderstood by students in this context, because energy is constantly being lost from the ecosystem in the form of heat. Energy isn't being destroyed, but it's no longer in a useful form. Likewise, the second law -- the law of increasing universal entropy -- often seems like it's being violated by living systems, in which organisms that are higher on the food chain often appear more "advanced" or complex than the creatures they feed on. Yet the constraints placed on ecosystems by thermodynamics -- a fixed amount of energy entering the system (1st law), and every energy transfer leading to a loss of energy to heat (2nd law) -- are essential to grasping why ecological communities are structured the way that they are. The key misconception is that students might be fooled into thinking that the biosphere is a closed system, energetically speaking. It isn't; it's a closed system for nutrients, which is why we speak of nutrient cycling, but it's an open system for energy, which is why we speak of energy flow.

I think I have a good way of modeling energy flow for the students: an analogy to money. Suppose American shoppers buy products from Company A, leading to a gross income for the company. The money flowing into Company A from the shoppers represents the maximum amount of money available in the "system;" the Company has no other way of acquiring more money. The Company then pays its employees, but it can't pay them everything that it got from the shoppers; it has to pay for the electricity, the water, maintenance of the equipment, the raw materials to make its products, and various regulatory costs in the form of taxes. Only a small portion of its gross income gets passed on to the employees. Employee B thus gets a small fraction of the money Company A had; that's his gross income. But that isn't pure profit, either; he has to pay for upkeep on his house, gas for his car, food for himself and his family, and his own income taxes. Only a little bit of money is left over for the next step in the monetary "food chain": his kids. Child C gets an allowance that is only a tiny fraction of what Employee B got; it's such a small amount, in fact, that the child doesn't have enough money to support anyone "higher" on the chain.

By the same token, the "gross income" of an ecosystem from the sun leads to a lot of energy going through the producers (A), with less being passed on to the primary consumers (B) and still less going to the secondary consumers (C). My students will probably find the analogy of themselves as "apex predators" to be an amusing one -- though perhaps "parasite" would be a more accurate analogy. ;-)

I think this will be a good way to explain energy flow, but I'm having more trouble finding a way to explain nutrient cycling. I need something to represent a commodity that can be passed around from one group to another, modified repeatedly into different forms but ultimately recycled back to the beginning again, unchanged in what it essentially is. The carbon, nitrogen and water cycles are key examples, all important for illustrating how ecosystems function -- but I'm having a hard time finding something similar to compare to that these students would be familiar with. I thought about the example of a commodity (such as a bicycle or a CD) being passed around from one person to another, but that analogy misses one of the key elements (no pun intended) of nutrient cycling: that these basic nutrients are often repackaged in radically different forms and used for very different purposes as they make their way around the ecosystem. The sugar made by the plant, the fat stored in the human, the carbon dioxide breathed out when the human exercises -- all of these contain the same carbon atoms, passed on from one place to the next but showing up in very different chemical forms.

I'd love to hear if anyone has any suggestions on a better analogy for this difficult concept. I recognize that this is only one example among several "big ideas" that I'll have to tackle in this unit, but it's one that I'm going to have to wrestle with soon enough, and I think it's a useful "field test" of the UbD process to start thinking about this now.

UbD Chapter 2: Understanding Understanding

"Zathras understand. ... No. Zathras not understand, but Zathras do. Zathras good at doings, not understandings." --Zathras, Babylon 5

This chapter brought to light a depressing fact about modern education: most students who are "good at doings", as Zathras would say, are not "good at understandings." They have collected facts in their heads, but they don't know what they mean, and questions that present them with the opportunity to use their facts and skills in novel ways often leave them staring blankly at the page. The emphasis on loading students' brains with as many facts as possible only makes the situation worse. "Teaching to the test" can help students to regurgitate the right answers on command, but only if the questions that they face on the test are exactly like the questions they've seen before. This is why so many students hate story problems: they point out the fact that the student never understood what he thought he knew.

The listing of common misunderstandings in this chapter was somewhat unsettling for me, because it revealed some of my own misconceptions. I'd had no idea that Impressionism was an attempt to be more realistic, to convey the raw sensory impact of a thing rather than the emotional or mental response that the thing engendered in the artist. I've often thought that history classes were almost useless because they consisted of bombarding students with an endless procession of facts, which could easily be looked up in an encyclopedia if they were actually needed. The idea of historian as "storyteller," putting events into any of several possible narratives that might "explain" these events, is one that runs rather contrary to my instinct that there should be one "true" reason or explanation for why things happened. I can only imagine how many similar misconceptions people in other fields must have about my area of study.

The one part of the chapter that jumped out at me the most, though, was the section about understanding the phenomenon of misunderstanding:

"Misunderstanding is not ignorance, therefore. It is the mapping of a working idea in a plausible but incorrect way in a new situation. ... Paradoxically, you have to have knowledge and the ability to transfer [i.e., to apply it in new situations] in order to misunderstand things. Thus evidence of misunderstanding is incredibly valuable to teachers, not a mere mistake to be corrected. It signifies an attempted and plausible but unsuccessful transfer. The challenge is to reward the try without reinforcing the mistake or dampening future transfer attempts." (p. 51)

This section was a wake-up call for me, because I used to get very frustrated at my college students who would return garbled and nonsensical answers to my quiz questions. "They soak up all of this information and then spit it back out like a random comment generator," I would sometimes complain to my fellow TAs. "They just aren't thinking about what they're saying!" The irony, of course, is that they were thinking, but they hadn't arranged the facts into the correct framework. Like a Rube Goldberg machine with the parts in the wrong order, they were failing to get the desired output, but it wasn't for lack of trying. It's a distinction that I'm going to have to be more aware of when I teach my 9th graders -- and I'll have to be patient with them, to acknowledge and refine what George Leonard calls "the approximations of the correct technique", while helping them to make the necessary adjustments to their thinking.

Understanding by Design, Introduction & Chapter 1: Backward Design

In our primary textbook for the summer coursework, Understanding by Design, we're at last getting into the details of how an instructional unit should be organized. The basic idea behind the UbD process is simple: (1) Identify desired results, (2) Determine acceptable evidence that those results have been achieved, and (3) Plan the learning experiences and instructional elements that will allow the students to reach those goals. It's beautifully logical, but unfortunately it is a practice that is rarely followed in traditional classrooms:

"You probably know the saying, 'If you don't know exactly where you are headed, then any road will get you there.' Alas, the point is a serious one in education. We are quick to say what things we like to teach, what activities we will do, and what kinds of resources we will use; but without clarifying the desired results of our teaching, how will we ever know whether our designs are appropriate or arbitrary? How will we distinguish merely interesting learning from effective learning? More pointedly, how will we ever meet content standards or arrive at hard-won student understandings unless we think through what those goals imply for the learner's activities and achievements?" (p.14)

The UbD system provides a template for a better alternative, in which both the teacher and the students understand why the students are learning what they're learning and how those specific activities are going to tie in to the bigger picture.

I'm already thinking about my goals for the first unit of my biology course. There are a lot of different ways you can go about teaching biology. The most common seems to be starting with the basic processes of the cell and then working up through tissues, organs, organ systems, and different types of organisms; then focusing on development and evolution; then, if there's time, getting into ecology and environmental protection at the end. The problem with this, I think, is that students don't see the "big picture" until the end of the year, when they're already thinking about summer break more than their classes. Keeping in mind what Howard Gardner said about training people to think like scientists, geometers, historians, etc. -- as well as the UbD focus on "big ideas" -- I think this approach is backwards, at least for the high school level. If I want students to understand how the ecosystem functions -- and how the things humans do can disrupt that functionality -- then it's essential to start with the big picture.

The first unit, I think, should focus on ecology: What makes something alive? What roles do living organisms play in their environment (producers, primary consumers, secondary consumers, etc.)? How do these different organisms interact with each other, and how do nutrients and energy flow through the system? These are questions that students can tackle without understanding the nitty-gritty details of how organisms are put together, and having this "big picture" in place will make things easier when I get to the other big topics that I want to cover, homeostasis (how do organisms maintain themselves within their specific niche?) and evolution (how do species change in response to changes in their environment and its available niches?). It may well be that, as Theodosius Dobzhansky said, nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution; however, in terms of putting information about biological systems into a "big picture" narrative that the students can grasp, it is equally true that nothing makes sense except in light of ecology. I look forward to continuing to develop my plans for this first unit as I delve further into the details of the UbD process.

THE DISCIPLINED MIND, by Howard Gardner

Howard Gardner is a developmental psychologist who is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences -- the idea that there are at least seven or eight different metrics for intellect, and that a person who is strong in one area (such as logical reasoning) may be weak in others (such as musical aptitude or interpersonal awareness). Gardner has long been a critic of education systems that treat "IQ" (logical/mathematical intelligence) as the be-all and end-all of human thinking, and has called for educators to look for opportunities to engage students' other types of intelligence in order to keep them interested, active, and (most importantly) learning.

In The Disciplined Mind, though, Gardner only touches lightly on his multiple-intelligence theory; this time he has other fish to fry. His target is the mainstream education system and its obsession with coverage -- the idea that students have to accumulate a certain number of facts, about everything from the Mayflower to mitochondria, and be able to regurgitate them on command in a standardized test. This, according to mainstream thought, is what it means to be "educated" -- and Gardner calls B.S. on the whole notion.

The problem with education in this country isn't that we don't have enough facts. 21st-century humanity is inundated with facts; thanks to the Internet, we are essentially drowning in a sea of data. The problem is that, as my own history professor once said, "Facts without theory are trivia." If students cram their heads full of information but never learn how to process it properly -- how to think critically and sort good data from bad -- they'll never be able to use that information in any practical way. And when humans are faced with a bunch of facts they can't interpret, they'll usually throw up their hands and "go with their gut" -- falling back on the same flawed premises and mistaken notions that they formed in their early childhood. This is why an examination of MIT physics grads found that, just one year after graduation, they were no better at solving basic physics problems than a group of younger students who had never even taken a physics course.

Gardner proposes a better way: instead of focusing on "covering" topics, teachers should focus on un-covering the modes of thought that are necessary to interpret data correctly. By focusing on a small number of topics and going into them deeply, teachers can help their students to understand how to think like a scientist, or a mathematician, or a historian, or an art critic. Going deeply into a topic is the only way to expose the flawed thinking that lies deep in the student's mind -- at which point it can be replaced with something better.

"Better", in Gardner's way of thinking, means helping students to discern between accurate information and false information, to recognize and appreciate beauty, and to build a moral compass that will distinguish between ethical and unethical behavior. Gardner summarizes these objectives as the pursuit of "the true, the beautiful and the good." A student who learns how to recognize truth (and falsehood), beauty (and ugliness), and goodness (and evil) will have the necessary mental tools to deal with any data set that he or she may encounter. Once you've learned what it means to think like a scientist, for example, you can apply the same tools whether you're studying biology, chemistry, physics, etc. The same goes for appreciating art or interpreting historical events: the details change, but the disciplines themselves are consistent.

This is an extraordinary book. While Gardner's writing style is dense to the point of being baroque, the principles that he puts forward are ones that I think every educator (and every lawmaker) needs to grasp. He has put his finger on exactly the problem that made me so discontented with aspects of my own undergraduate education. The course that I found least satisfying (Genetics) was a barrage of facts and trivia with little to interconnect them; the professor covered many topics in only enough detail to let us answer questions on the GRE standardized test, without bothering to explain their deeper significance. I did well in the class, but only because of my own talent for storing large amounts of trivial data; I didn't actually understand much more after leaving the class than I did when I first entered it. By contrast, my organic chemistry professor focused on teaching mechanisms and processes; while there was a lot of memorization, it all fit together into a larger conceptual framework, and even years later I can still recognize the different types of reactions that he taught us to look for, even if the precise reactants in question are new to me.

Gardner is less than enthusiastic about the idea of charter schools -- he would prefer to see a nationwide education system that used his technique, or a small number of competing national programs that put their emphasis on different styles of teaching. (Given his own fascination with evolution, perhaps he is hoping that his "discipline-focused" schools will eventually achieve dominance through natural selection, while the coverage-obsessed schools go"extinct.") Still, he does acknowledge that charter schools have the opportunity to experiment with new techniques and methodologies. Hopefully ARISE High School can serve as a model for how a "disciplined" education can be successful.. The strategies and ideals Gardner espouses are right in line with the sort of education that I hope to give my students; I look forward to the opportunity to teach them the path of "the true, the beautiful and the good."

MASTERY, by George Leonard

One of our two required "leadership readings" for the Reach Pre-Service Summer Coursework, Mastery is a short and elegantly-written book in which George Leonard -- former Army Air Force flight instructor and Aikido master -- puts forth a set of deceptively simple rules on how to live your life. He points out that most people, upon trying to learn a new skill, fall into one of three categories:

1. The Dabbler: Jumps into a new venture with great enthusiasm, but loses interest when he soon hits a "plateau" of acheivement. Discouraged, he abandons the enterprise, only to jump into the next thing that strikes his fancy and repeat the process.
2. The Obsessive: Impatient with the "plateaus" of achievement, the Obsessive pushes herself night and day in an effort to recapture the sudden burst of growth that she first experienced. Her performance becomes erratic as she tries to rush the process of improvement, until eventually she burns out -- physically, emotionally, or both.
3. The Hacker: The Hacker doesn't care about pursuing excellence; he just wants to play around with the skill. Unlike the Dabbler, he doesn't get discouraged when he hits a plateau, but he doesn't push himself keep learning and growing either; beyond a certain point, his performance remains flat. He may only practice his skills occasionally, enough to maintain that plateau where he leveled off but not enough to press onward. He's content to "know enough to be dangerous" without going deeper into the pursuit in question.

Leonard puts forth an alternative to all of these paths: the path of Mastery. The Master sets up a regular practice in the skill in question and pursues that practice for its own sake. The discipline itself becomes its own reward. Along the way, the Master encounters bursts of measurable improvement followed by long periods on the plateaus; but rather than give up, obsess over continued improvement, or become content with mediocrity, the Master continues the regular, steady discipline, embracing growth when it occurs but also embracing the periods of apparent stagnation (which are actually the points when you're integrating everything you've learned to the point where it becomes second nature -- an essential step on the road to further improvement).

As Leonard points out, you can apply these different "paths" to any pursuit in life, and you needn't follow the same path in everything. Looking at my own life, I can see that I've been a Dabbler at art and a Hacker at guitar-playing. I'd like to say I've approached my writing in accordance with the path of mastery, but I've been a bit too erratic in my writing schedule for that to be strictly true; I think I alternate between periods of Mastery and Hackerdom where writing is concerned. The important thing is to recognize the pursuits that you really care about being better at and then pursuing the path of mastery in those disciplines, because that's the only way to keep improving over long periods of time without getting burned out.

One of the most eye-opening parts of the book was chapter three, "America's War Against Mastery." Leonard pointed out that our entire popular culture is based around a value system that scorns the path of mastery. This is particularly obvious in commercial advertisements and television shows:

"Keep watcing, and an underlying pattern will emerge. About half of the commercials, whatever the subject mater, are based on a climactic moment: The cake has already been baked; the family and guests, their faces all aglow, are gathered around to watch an adorable three-year-old blow out the candles. The race is run and won; beautiful young people jump up and down in ecstasy as they reach for frosted cans of diet cola. Men are shown working at their jobs for all of a second and a half, then it's Miller time. Life at its best, these commercials teach, is an endless series of climactic moments.
"...In all of this, the specific content isn't nearly as destructive to mastery as is the rhythm. One epiphany follows another. One fantasy is crowded out by the next. Climax is piled upon climax. There's no plateau." (pp. 23-29)

This fantasy of endless upward progress is insidious because it doesn't match up with the way things actually work in reality. Driven to find the sort of life that we see on TV, we either work ourselves to exhaustion or seek shortcuts to excellence. The recent steroid scandal in baseball and the collapse of the mortgage industry are both examples of what can happen when people follow the siren song of Better, Faster, More!

I found this book greatly inspiring because of the firm but gentle way it encourages the reader to get on the path to mastery and stay on it. The acknowledgement that we can't (and won't) keep growing in a steady upward rise is refreshing and liberating; it's right and natural to find yourself "stuck on the plateau." The admonishment to keep pressing onward, to find your rewards in the daily practice of your craft rather than losing heart or obsessing over the next burst of improvement, is a lesson that can be applied to any area of life. It's a lesson that I plan to embrace as I move forward with my career as a teacher.

Off to start my new life...

As I sit here, nearly all of my worldly goods are packed up in my car and trailer, awaiting transport to California. Tomorrow morning I set out for Chicago, my first stop, where I'll be visiting with two of my fellow podcasters. Subsequent stops will take me to Springfield (MO), Denver, Albuquerque, and Phoenix, before finally arriving in the Bay Area on July 31st.

I've been busy over the last week and a half working on the reading for my REACH Pre-Service program. Last Saturday I finished The Disciplined Mind, which is an excellent book that I heartily recommend to anyone interested in education. I'll post my thoughts on the book in more detail in a later post. Right now I'm working on Mastery, a book written by a former Army Air Force pilot and aikido instructor -- the premise of which is that there is a distinct path to self-improvement that requires us to love the process of self-improvement. We have to embrace the journey even when we're not seeing results, because the practice itself is its own reward. I can speak to the truth of this on a number of levels, particularly in playing guitar and writing fiction. I'm a bit more than a third of the way through the book and greatly enjoying it; I look forward to continuing to digest it over the course of my travels.

Once I arrive in Cali I'll be staying with a friend in Palo Alto until my room in Berkeley becomes available on August 4th. Her house is quiet and beautiful and has a lot of space in which to work, which will give me a great opportunity to focus in on my remaining coursework and crank through it quickly and steadily. I haven't been able to spend as much time on the coursework as I would have liked to thus far -- my previous day job, which ended yesterday, and the work of getting ready to move cross-country have utterly devoured my time -- so I'm looking forward to the chance to be alone with the books, with no greater responsibility than to absorb this material and prepare for the career that awaits me.

My ideal biology class...

I spent the weekend working on my elective book from the annotated book list: The Disciplined Mind, by Howard Gardner. I'm about halfway through it now -- it's dense but scintillating reading, and he's definitely captured my loyalty with his call to teach students "the true, the beautiful and the good."

One of the things Gardner points out is that it's impossible to cover everything that there is to know about any field of study, so any approach to teaching that is based ultimately on hitting a certain number of content-based guideposts is falling short of its potential. Facts leak out of students' ears as soon as they take the test; the real challenge is to confront and correct underlying misconceptions in thinking, to teach people to think like scientists (or geometers, or historians, or what have you). He draws comparison to athletics and music: it's not so important that the student of these disciplines be able to describe a particular football play in detail or play an exact copy of a master's performance of a given piece, but that they learn the underlying techniques, concepts and skills that will allow them to tackle a wide variety of possible situations. Breadth of coverage is not as important as depth, because it is only by sinking deeply into a subject that you will discover your flawed thinking and be able to correct it.

To that end, Gardner and his colleagues recommend projects in which learning, presentation of understanding, and assessment are all rolled together. There are no secret tests at the end of the unit, but rather students are coached throughout the course in the preparation of a presentation that will demonstrate what they have learned. Along the way they have the opportunity to ask questions and receive clarification, and the teachers can work with the students to expand their thinking and point out the misconceptions when they crop up. The final presentation is a source of pride for the students, rather than a source of apprehension. (I should note that this somewhat mimics my experience in grad school: my thinking was corrected along the way by my thesis committee, and the day when I stood before my classmates and teachers and presented the results of my research was the proudest day of my academic career.) Most importantly, the students should be able to take the concepts that they have learned and apply them to a new situation; this is the true assessment of whether learning has taken place.

As I was pondering these things, an idea for a biology curriculum came to me: Organize the entire semester around the theme of an alien world, being explored by humans for the first time. Students would be divided into teams, and at the end of the year each team would present information about a species that they had invented to inhabit this world. The students would play the role of the xenobiologists exploring this world, giving their reports the people of Earth on what they've found.

Each species would have a specific ecological niche, key adaptations that allowed it to exploit that niche, and an interaction web with the other species. (Who eats whom? Which species compete with each other, and how? Are any of them keystone species, and why?) I would give the students some basic information about the world for starters: key biomes and the producers found there, key environmental challenges found in the different biomes (which the animals would have to adapt to), and key species found in the fossil record (from which our various modern species would be descended). The students would have to demonstrate how the different species might be related, and which adaptations arose when. (If three species have eyestalks of the same general configuration, do they all come from the same ancestor? What role did the eyestalks serve for that ancestor? Do they serve the same role now, or have the species adapted that trait to serve other purposes?)

As the piece de resistance, the students would have to confront ecological questions about this alien world. If human colonists cut down the chuwumba trees for building materials, how will that affect the other species in the ecosystem? If they discover that the pink-toed crinklehump is good for eating, what other predators that feed on the crinklehumps might be affected? If humans accidentally bring rats with them on the colony ship, what native species might be endangered by this invasive species? The answers that the students give to these questions will demonstrate what they have learned about the concepts they have studied.

For this to work, the students will have to learn the basic concepts of three major areas of biology: homeostasis (how animals stay alive), evolution (how populations change in response to changes in their environment), and ecology (how organisms in a system interact with each other). The students will study specific examples in each of these areas of focus and use them to think about their hypothetical alien species. By the end of the course, the students should be well-versed enough in the concepts driving each of these areas to be able to construct their alien world -- and the presentation at the end will be a great way to show off to the parents and the other students what these kids have learned.

So, what do you all think? Am I on the right track here?