FINAL POSTER

TE 804

Purpose: the purpose of this assignment is to create an opportunity for you to polish some artifacts from a teaching cycle for inclusion in your portfolio. There will be four artifacts, one from each stage of ONE teaching cycle. Each entry should be roughly one single-spaced page, certainly not more than two. You will get feedback from your peers on this project.

Unit Title:

Course and grade:

I. Unit Planning

You will represent your large scale, unit planning with your synthesized unit objectives and Big ideas/ Content Statements.

  • Synthesized Unit Objectives – A bulleted list of your objectives for this unit + references to any national, state, or district objectives that you used for guidance. For example:
  • Describe specific mechanical waves in terms of wavelength, amplitude, frequency, and speed. (MI P4.4A)
  • Describe the motion of particles in the medium through which a mechanical wave travels. (Modified from MI P4.5B)
  • Identify everyday examples of transverse and compression waves and how they transfer energy. (MI P4.4B and P4.5A)
  • Big Ideas/ Content Statements – A paragraph explaining the big ideas, NOT the objectives and NOT the activities. For example, “waves (mechanical and electromagnetic) are described by their wavelength, amplitude, frequency, and speed.” (MI High School Science Content Expectations) In transverse waves, the periodic changes or movements are perpendicular to the direction of motion. In compression waves, the periodic changes or movements are in the direction of motion. Waves are created by an energy transformation and transmit energy to anything that absorbs them. For example, in order for a drum to make a sound, the drummer flexes the drumhead which moves the air around it as it vibrates. When you are standing near the drum and the sound hits you, you may actually feel the sound move you. In this example the mechanical energy in the drummers hand and in the drumstick is transferred to the drum head, then to the air, and finally to you.
  • Annotation – A few sentences explaining how you would make this material interesting to your students. Another way to think of this is as a description of the experiences in your EPE table that appeal to and understandable by your students. For example, I will make this material interesting to students by focusing on music – the instruments they play, the music they listen to, and the energy in loud music (car woofers and sopranos breaking glasses).

II. Lesson plans for 2 – 4 days (approximately 1 objective)

Don’t use your complete lesson plans. Include only the following.

  • Objective – restate one of your unit objectives.
  • Major activities – A bulleted list of major activities in the order in which you would did them. For each activity, give the activity a name and describe it in a few sentences. For example, Genetic Counselor Activity – students take on the role genetic counselors in training. They are preparing to meet their first two clients – two young women with different types of multiple sclerosis who want to know the likelihood of their children being affected.
  • Annotation –A few sentences explaining the role of each activity and how each activity builds on previous activities. For example, the Genetic Counselor Activity establishes a problem, the need to be able to interpret genetic family histories in order to counsel real people. This is followed by Pedigree Training Activity which models how to identify and interpret patterns in pedigrees. In this activity students use what they learned in the previous activity cycle about Mendel’s work.

III. Analysis of student work (from the above activity cycle)

For each activity in the above activity cycle that included some embedded assessment, include the following. Each entry bullet (except for the name) should be a few sentences.

  • Activity Name
  • Summary of the ideas that students did understand at that point
  • Summary of the ideas that students were still confused about
  • Explanation of the results

Here’s an example. Pedigree Training Activity – Most students were able to read the pedigrees properly. That is they could properly identify relatives and whether or not they had or carried the disease. Most students identified all of the patterns in the sample pedigree of a recessive disease. For the sample pedigree of the dominant disease, they only said that in order for someone to have the disease, at least one parent had to have had the disease and there were more colored symbols on this pedigree than with the recessive disease. They did not note that the disease did not skip generations. I was puzzled by this omission, because skipping generations was something we emphasized when we looked at Mendel’s data. Maybe students were treating the disease differently, because it something where there aren’t 2 phenotypes like yellow and green, just disease or no disease.

IV. How I adjusted my lesson.

For each entry in the section above, explain how you adjusted the lesson. Adjustments can include any combination of the following: adjustment to the assessment, because you needed more info about Ss’ thinking, adjustments to subsequent lessons to help students with problems you identified, or adjustments to this activity in other hours. You may choose to combine this section with section III. Here’s an example. Pedigree Training Activity – Because I was concerned that students weren’t transferring what they learned from looking at Mendel’s data to the pedigrees, I added a Pedigree Training Certification Exam. It was 3 quick Qs asking students to equate Mendel’s data on pea seed color with one of the sample pedigrees and to put the data in a pea pedigree. Students were initially confused, but then caught on – overall results were good.