Sarah's Team

Sara- I'm in the same boat in terms of budgeting time for activities in class. I'm curious about the directed paraphrase activity: do you use actually news pieces or do you give them a hypothetical one to make it more applicable to the material covered?

Chris - I ended up using the Human Microbiome FAQ from ASM for them to paraphrase. I have just gotten done reading through their responses, and they were good. I would prefer to give them actual news articles or even primary literature if possible, but I am not against a hypothetical.

Sara-I teach micro as well and students really love the topic of the human microbiome. I like your mix of media (readings, lectures, videos). I concur with your struggle to give them appropriate data/research to analyze/interpret. I have worked on this a little bit...I have some short activities I use during class. I can always share! -angela

Hi Team,
Sara - I agree with ahartsock & like your use of multiple info sources. I just moved from MWF to TTh classes. Seeing your alignment grid for what can (& can't) be done in 1hr15m is very useful. I have never done directed paraphrase, but I really like that activity!! This limits the submission of scientific terminology madlibs

The course I was working on at the Institute isn't until the Spring, and I am thinking about how I will develop everything. I'm working with a partner on creating a course-long theme of Information/Scientific Literacy, and I will have Assignment 3 up by the end of next week!

In the meantime, I've found the skills we learned very useful. I'm teaching a First year seminar, and I shared my castle top with my students for the first few weeks of class. They really liked it and said that it helped them with course organization. Does anyone else show this to the students?

Hi all,
I'm looking forward to hearing how things are going.

Zakiya, I haven't shown my castletop to students but that is usually because I tend to adapt things on the fly and worry that the students won't understand when I go "off the grid". However, if you are pretty sure of the timing for things, there is no reason to keep it from them. As your students said, it helped them understand your course - similar to how it helps you. No reason that I see to hide the organization from the students. The castletop gives them a framework to hang information on.

Sara, thanks for sharing your work. It sounds like your microbiome unit is coming together. It is hard to implement everything at once. It also can be hard to figure out the timing of things until you are in the thick of it. It sounds like you are doing well with adapting on the fly and figuring out how to implement things in the next go-round of the course. While the semester is going on, I try to write down in central location everything that didn't quite work, things I want to change, and thoughts on how to fix things. Then I can go back when I have the time to make the changes - I usually plan on doing this right at the end of the semester but inevitably it ends up being right before I go to teach the class again. If I don't write it down, I find myself thinking that I know there was something wrong with the unit but I can't remember exactly what I wanted to change.

Cheers all,
Sarah

Hi Sara,

Thanks for posting your reflection. Sounds like a busy semester. Not to worry about not implementing all that you had planned. You can give it a try in the future. Here is an idea for teaching primary literature. I write up guides for papers that we read in a seminar that I teach. I have some sophomore science students who haven't seen a scientific paper before. I write guiding questions for each section of the paper. I use some straightforward questions like what is the main question/hypothesis that the authors are addressing? for the introduction. I also pull out terms that they might not fully understand that are critical for understanding the paper like "what is meant by a bacteristatic vs bacterilytic antibiotic?". For each figure and Table I ask what experiment was done to give the data, what question/hypothesis was the experiment addressing, and what were the results. I have the students annotate the figures noting which lines are which strain, etc.and not the controls. For the discussion you can ask them to summarize the major conclusions. I find that the guides help the students focus on the key pieces of information rather than getting lost in the details. Hope this helps! I'm happy to send an example if you want. edited 15:45, 29 Jan 2016

Hi all! I have been thinking about next year, and I am trying to incorporate more of the formative assessments in my teaching, as well as not cover material that the students can easily get by reading the text. I want to focus on addressing misconceptions and going deeper into concepts during the lecture time. I am also a reader for the secondary education students Teaching Events, and one made use of a list of common misconceptions from AAAS. She used a justified true/false assessment as a pre- and post- test of the student's understanding. I looked at the AAAS site for common misconceptions more focused on microbiology, but there wasn't as much there as I'd like to see, and it was more geared toward middle school and high school age learners. Is there such a resource for college-level microbiology? I am planning to go through my lecture materials and assignments to identify misconceptions I encounter, but it would be really helpful to have a list of common misconceptions to draw from!