Endless Forms Most Beautiful



Fennec Fox



I found an exceptional blog from a high school biology teacher, Stacy Baker, who first developed this blog to share class information. Baker saw the potential for the blog and decided to make it more interactive and have her students participate and even direct the conversation. This blog is called Extreme Biology and can be found at:

missbakersbiologyclass.com/blog/      

Biology is one subject that I am interested in teaching and using a blog like Baker’s would be an incredibly valuable to tool to encourage and foster a student’s interests in biology and science. Baker seems to take a democratic approach in having her students blog on topics that they are interested in. Baker and her students were featured in The Scientist magazine and below are a couple quotes from their interview:

 "My duty as a teacher isn't just teaching them stuff," Baker said. "It's how to analyze information rather than just memorize it."

The students can write about anything and everything, as long as it's biology-related, explained Baker. "I don't like assigning them specific topics," she said. "I want them ideally looking into subjects that they're interested in or passionate about."

Read the entire article: Blogging biology - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences http://classic.the-scientist.com/news/display/55349/

Myanmar Pug Monkey

Another interesting feature of this blog is the range of topics that are discussed. These topics include Animal Behavior, Ecology, Evolution, Genetics, and Medicine. While exploring this blog I found a section under the Topics We Cover header called EFMB which stands for Endless Forms Most Beautiful. I immediately saw two posts, which caught my attention mainly because of their pictures, titled Bless You, Myanmar Pug Monkey! and Are Fennecs Foxes? This blog also features guests who have been invited to blog on topics in which they are experts in.

I may use this blog as a model to help provoke enthusiasm, participation, and understanding in whatever I may teach. The flow of information should not be unidirectional and with the Extreme Biology blog it cycles around from teacher to student, or vice versa, and back again. This blog is an example of how a teacher can use technology to communicate to students by engaging and making them excited to learn. EFMB can also be a celebration of each student's potential.

So why blog to learn about science? Baker’s students answered that question in the following video:

Confluency

This week I realized that learning in the classroom may be more fruitful if it is made a social experience. John Dewey, an American education philosopher, has indicated that we are social individuals and the classroom serves as one place where society starts to form. Of course the development of society has its beginnings at home but the classroom gives some structure to society as a whole.

Some of Dewey’s ideas seem to be more evident in elementary education with social learning. It is at these lower grade levels that interaction in the classroom seems to be more prevalent. Different hands-on activities give students experience that help in their learning process. I believe that this interaction loses its emphasis when one gets to the secondary level and passive learning out weighs active especially when it comes to core subjects.

As educators we are entrusted to foster the interests and powers of our students and guide them to realizing what they may be capable of doing for themselves and society. Interaction in the classroom between the student and teacher and among students is crucial to building a strong foundation for society.

I view healthy social interaction as cells growing in a cell culture dish. Cells grow better when they are near or surrounded by other healthy cells while single cells that grow independently can be more vulnerable and less reliable in experimental use. Confluency is a term in biology that describes the coverage of cells on a surface area and the more coverage there is the higher the confluency and growth. There is also confluency in the classroom where learning and ideas should flow together, merge and blend like tributaries flowing into the same stream of social consciousness. Students can grow alongside their peers, with the direction of the educator, and build upon each others experiences.

It seems that the learning process of students should be cultivated in an active environment so that interests can form capabilities that coalesce to form an individual with social awareness.

The Central Dogma

Welcome to my inaugural blog post which will begin a discussion on the development of my personal philosophy of education. I am planning on teaching science and/or history to 7^th through 12^th grade students and this chronicling of my beliefs about teaching and learning is an attempt to help me better understand what I want to achieve as a teacher.

So to become an effective and competent educator I have to learn the best approach(s) in transferring what I have learned and know to my future students.

What is education? Education, as I view it, is the flow of information from one source to another.

Since science is what I intend to teach I will use the central dogma of molecular biology as an analogy to explain the process of how I want to transfer knowledge. First the central dogma explains that DNA undergoes transcription to RNA which undergoes translation to form proteins. That’s the simple definition.

DNA is what I have already learned, and will still learn, and I have to determine how to transcribe that information in ways that would be best for my students. So the result is what I will end up teaching or RNA, which is similar to DNA but is best for the translation to form proteins. The crucial part of this process is making sure to translate what I teach to gain meaningful results.

DNA à What I have learned

Transcription to

RNA à What I will teach

Translation to

Proteins à What the students will learn and use

Just as the central dogma isn’t entirely unidirectional I fully intend on receiving feedback from my students, the most valuable feedback an educator can get. One goal, if not the main one, is to help develop and add to a student’s powers. Receiving an education makes a person more and more powerful and with that power anything is possible.