Biology In Elementary Schools students create a new worldwide education resource

Expanded Web version
By Mark Tarnacki

In Declan McCabe’s new “Biology in Elementary Schools” course, Saint Michael’s education majors design imaginative hands-on science lessons, then visit local grade schools or invite children to campus to try them out.

Soon children in Africa, South America or Asia may be trying those same lessons since the class has developed a “wiki” Web site to share their ideas with teachers around the world for free, placing the college in the forefront of a promising new teaching-technology initiative.

Biology Professor McCabe says “a light bulb went off” last year as he thought about two things: The time he spends doing science demos for Burlington-area kids whenever he’s asked, and the several courses he teaches for non-science majors. Seeing a natural nexus and opportunity for aspiring teachers, he wrote a course proposal that education professors liked.

“This seemed to be a way these education majors can get their science lab requirement and in the end have something they can put in their teaching portfolios, which states require to become licensed,” he said.

The Web site project emerged almost by accident. McCabe had used wiki for group projects in prior classes since its simple templates are user-friendly and allow accurate tracking of individual contributions to group projects. But commercial wikis became more trouble than they were worth with too much unbidden advertising clutter, he said. Ready to drop the whole idea, he came upon WikiEducator, a community resource supported by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) for the development of free educational content. COL is an intergovernmental organization created by Commonwealth Heads of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open learning and distance education knowledge, resources and technologies.

The name “wiki” was chosen by Ward Cunningham — the creator of the first wiki. It is a shortened form of “wiki-wiki,” the Hawaiian word for quick. A wiki is a web site that is generally editable by anyone with a computer, a web browser, and an internet connection. Wikis use a quick and easy syntax to allow users to apply formatting to text and create links between pages. This simplicity means that authors no longer need to learn complex programming codes to create web content. The main strength of a wiki is that it gives people the ability to work collaboratively on the same document. The only software needed is an Internet browser. If you make a mistake, it’s easy to revert back to an earlier version of the document.

Road Show

One week in April McCabe’s students were at Barnes Elementary in Burlington’s old North End working with first and second-graders on Wednesday, then at Edmunds Elementary on Friday with a group of third and fourth graders.

At Barnes with the younger kids, one group experimented with sound waves by observing how it travels better though string than air; a different group looked at chemical reactions with vinegar and baking soda, while another made sugar crystals through a super-saturated solution which, after sitting on a window ledge a few days, makes rock candy for kids.

McCabe’s two sections of his Biology for Educators class contain 36 aspiring teachers, all women. “We made it clear we would only accept education majors in the course,” the professor said. “Since they’re dedicated to the idea of being teachers, we end up with better quality teaching experiences since these people are serious. When students are prepared to do extra work in lab as we’ve been seeing, that’s always a good sign.” For a lesson to be deemed road-worthy, he said, “there has to be some hypothesis testing and they have to translate the process for little kids.”

“The main consideration is that the lessons relate somehow to the state science standards,” he said. “Specifically, we ask the hosting teacher to give us some learning objectives and we try to teach those.” The Saint Michael’s students then come up with ideas. “They’ll troll the Internet, maybe find ideas others have used, and then everybody brings them in and each group will debate them and decide which they’re going to go with.”

No road trip so far has taught lessons to higher than fourth grade, but eventually McCabe would like to expand to higher grades. He first began creating lessons for elementary students when his son’s Cub Scout troop came around the college for some activities in recent years. Saint Michael’s biology majors volunteered to run some lessons that they had developed for the Scouts.

Before the wiki idea struck, McCabe thought he would just bind together written versions of the lessons that students created into a volume, but he was skeptical that anyone might actually use such a thing. “So I thought, “let’s get it on a web site,’” he said. Once he found the COL wiki, the problem was solved. “We’re just piggybacking on it, providing some materials,” McCabe said.

Currently, anything appearing on COL’s site under the heading “basic biology” was put together by Saint Michael’s students. (See link at end of article). Each group of three women from the class came up with three lessons for the semester, then taught each one out in the field, modifying it based on reflection and sometimes trying the reworked version again with a different grade if time permitted.

The group also did lessons with Mater Christi students at Cheray Science Hall this past year since McCabe’s children attend the school and several Saint Michael’s education graduates teach there creating a natural collaboration pipeline.

. McCabe said he and his students learn a lot from the professionals with whom they work. For instance, Barnes has many international immigrant students and a wide socio-economic represented in its population. When the Saint Michael’s teams visited there, one young boy from Ghana who spoke virtually no English was able to draw his observations in a lesson instead of writing about it with the help of his regular teachers. “These are things I can learn from a grade-school teacher that I would never dream up on my own,” McCabe said. “That’s what makes it a partnership. I pick brains wherever I can.”

At Edmunds on the rainy morning of April 11, the Saint Michael’s “guest teachers” arrived in force at 9 a.m. toting boxes filled with all kinds of gadgets, toys, candy, balloons, test-tubes and beakers, flowers, buckets, corn starch, crystals, books, worksheets, clothes pins, and even a sheep heart and sheep lungs (lacquer-finished for safe handling but still gross enough to delight this day’s student age-group.)

Nobody among the student-teachers had any complaints of the early-morning duty. As one put it, “If we’re going to be teachers, we’d better get used to it.”

The two third-fourth-grade teachers who’d extended the invitation to McCabe — Mr. Houchen and Mrs. Ross – along with about 40 students, sat atop desks waiting in excited anticipation for the Saint Michael’s group to arrive with their boxes of props to take up position in two classrooms on the schools second floor. Mr. Houchen explained they had until 10:30 a.m. to rotate through six stations, three in each room, with a different lesson at each stop.

As students at the station for learning about crystals put on safety goggles, one giggled, “We look like nerds!”

“We ARE nerds – we’re doing science!” answered the Saint Michael’s student directing the activity, which got some laughs.

Besides crystal-making, activities in Mr. Houchen’s room included an activity to observe and think about heart rates that had students taking their pulses, doing exercises, resting, laying on the floor and charting their readings (“I don’t have a pulse!” one student could be heard exclaiming); next to that, students place pieces of colored candy into various shades of Jell-O that filled the bottom of clear plastic sandwich containers, helping them to understand cell structures. The youngsters then labeled the parts. McCabe said this was an adaptation of a time-tested classic demonstration called “Cell-O.” Sophomore Gabrielle Mailloux had remembered the activity from when she was in sixth grade and proposed it for her group.

“It’s more content-oriented, while some are more hypothesis-driven,” McCabe explained, adding that for the most part, the student-teachers only get to try an activity once in a school. Whenever they got the chance to try one again, however, the improvements after they’d ironed out any kinks from the first time were most noticeable.

In Mrs. Ross’s room, connected by an open door, a group looked at flowers and labeled the parts, as the group next to them measured lung capacity using pink balloons and an odd improvised contraption that the Saint Michael’s mentors had built and brought. While waiting to measure their own breathing capacity, children passed around the sheep lung to understand their own lungs better. As with other groups, they carefully charted their data.

“One thing we can do as a college is bring specimens that might not survive too long in an elementary school like the sheep lung,” McCabe said. A third group in Mrs. Ross’s room made a happy mess on a tarp-covered section of floor as they played with an otherworldly gooey substance made from corn starch and water that had properties of both liquid and solid.

Mrs. Ross looked on approvingly, observing, “Several of the activities in this room started with prediction, instruction and then ID,” in keeping with state standards for science instruction. The Edmunds principal, Guy Egri, walked between the rooms observing and taking some notes and interacting with both learners and teachers, frequently smiling at what he saw going on.

In a private conversation with McCabe while the activities unfolded around them, Mr. Houchen said he was impressed by the Saint Michael’s students’ confidence and ability to hit the ground running compared to some student teachers he’d seen through his career.

By 10:35, with everything cleaned up from the visit, McCabe gathered the group around him before they departed to share how impressed Principal Egri had been with their professionalism, energy and ability to engage students for an hour and a half. The Saint Michael’s student-teachers said they enjoyed how polite and engaged the students were, with several confirming that they like working with a slightly older age group. It was useful self-understanding to glean as they thought about their own careers.

Answering the Call – of the world

The next week, both sections of McCabe’s class gathered in a crowded Cheray science room, a laptop computer before each student, as they processed their experiences by groups. After everybody had enough time to update their wiki sites with reflections from the recent school visits, McCabe placed a conference call to Wayne MacKintosh in Vancouver in Canada.

MacKintsh is an educator who runs the COL wiki site. Students and McCabe took turns asking him about the site and telling about their experiences. The amiable MacKintosh described the big challenges his organization faces in developing and expanding the world’s access to technology for education.

Wiki Educator has become a valuable tool to develop content and smart ways to use computers in the developing world particularly, he said, telling the group that he felt the lessons posted by Saint Michel’s students will be very usable and adaptable around the world. “This is the power and wonder of the wiki” he said. McCabe explained to him how well what he is doing fits with the mission of Saint Michael’s with its emphasis on serving others.

MacKintosh said the project was a “win-win project” since the Saint Michael’s classes developed real content that can be used for the wiki site while at the same time giving valuable experience to the student-teachers in lesson planning.

“We may be the biggest wiki on the planet – it’s something you can tell your grandkids,” he said.

Here are the links to view the wiki sites describing lessons designed and tested by Saint Michael’s students in McCabe’s class:

http://www.wikieducator.org/Biology_in_elementary_schools

Here is a particularly nice one with some video involved: http://www.wikieducator.org/Opening_Our_Minds

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