Science classrooms are just so good. Human skeletons and muscle systems and sinks and some sort of heater (cooler?) to do who knows what. An eye wash station, models of kidneys, some antlers the teacher probably found up on the mountain.
Earlier I was in an English class with a good dose of current events and politics. Now I’m in a biology class starting with a poem. Good crossover today! The poem has five verses. Students are supposed to identify factors affecting the formation of a biome in the first verse. In the rest of the verses they are to identify which biome is formed.
Where heat and rain together play,
They craft the Earth in their own way.
Warmth stirs life, and water flows,
Each land is shaped by what it knows.
That’s the first verse. We’re talking about the Big Blue Marble, our planet. Adam starts leading the conversation, here in a biology course of the International Baccalaureate, using the following verses. Deserts, glaciers, temperate and tropical forests … A nice warm up, with an assist from ChatGPT, the modernist poet. (How much of the poem did AI write, I ask Adam. “All of it.”)
… In warmth and wetness, life expands,
A vibrant pulse across the lands.
Maybe not the greatest poem, but not bad, really, and it sure provided a nice opener for class, right after lunch, when energy could be low. The rapport is so good, a poem as a hook to get things started must be just one of many tricks Adam has to connect with his students.
And as if reading my thoughts, he pulls up a crowd pleaser – a Quizlet Live with the students working in groups. “Why the look?” he says to one student, who isn’t enthused about the group work. “You’ve got to be able to work with a group, too.” They’ve had this conversation before, they smile at each other and the student teams start identifying biomes.
Biome, though you were not asking, is formed from the Greek bios (life) and -ome, which according to Entymonline is an Anglification of the Greek -(o)ma, and biome as a whole was “probably coined by U. S. ecologist Frederic E. Clements.” Clements studied and taught at the University of Nebraska and my alma mater, the University of Minnesota, as well as other places. Thank you, Wikipedia.
Students are moving onto a third activity, I don’t know when we moved from opener to lesson, but it doesn’t matter. We had a hook, then some group work, and now students are individually describing a randomly assigned biome, on individual cards, and I’m pretty sure they’ll use them as a group to take one more pass through all the biomes they’ve been talking about. Clements would be pleased. I’m pleased, as I think about sharing this progression of activities with the adult students I work with, the ones earning their US teaching licenses. A gamified lesson, with multiple iterations of the content to reinforce the learning, done individually, in small groups, and as a whole, all in a comfortable environment with easy relations between teacher and students, students and students. Plus, I believe there are only one or two native speakers of English among the students. While not intentionally practicing English, they are. See the vocabulary, write the vocabulary, discuss using the vocabulary. An integrated, content-based lesson. Sometimes sitting, sometimes standing, moving about the room, as they are doing now, as they share the descriptions of their biomes.
It makes me wonder a little how an early-career teacher evolves into a master teacher. Time spent teaching, for sure. Lots and lots of lessons that were not so smooth, lots of social interactions that were perhaps not so great for building rapport. I work a lot with standards for teachers, which can be helpful, but which will never answer how one becomes an expert. There is a difference between mechanically giving attention to a set of standards and the easy flow of a good lesson.
Just now, for example, it was getting a little boisterous. Adam had started a fourth activity, using something called climographs (it’s a real treat here today for linguists who like to think about new blended words: biomes, climographs. I might add biofun and teachrapport, but I doubt they’d catch on.) Anyway, Adam’s classroom management was this: Hands in pockets, he said, “This is actually supposed to be done quietly,’ and he turned his back and walked the few steps to his computer. The room grew quiet. He expected it to happen so it did. This must look like absolute magic to a young teacher struggling with classroom management. It also must look downright trivial to casual, non-teacher observers. They would have no idea how much skill and attention to classroom culture – over time – one has to have to lead this way.
When the room starts to feel done with the fourth activity, when the students are starting to get restive, Adam gets their attention and debriefs for just a bit. Then he encourages them to finish up so there’s time for a Kahoot or a Blooket, two more apps that, like Quizlet, gamify a review. If Adam uses one of those he will have used, in a 55-minute class, at least five tech tools (ChatGPT, Quizlet, Kahoot, Google slides, and Google classroom) as well as a paper and pencil exercise.
No time to put your head on the desk, to let your thoughts wander off, to cause trouble. He sets up the Kahoot. It’s about climographs, he’s made the quiz himself. If this is a bribe, a prize that they earned, it’s pretty clever. Just another iteration of the target content, one more way to work their knowledge of biomes. And they are all interested, all debriefing together after each answer is revealed.
Maybe biofun could catch on, now that I think of it. These students would understand it.