Reflections On My First Biology Modeling Course

It's hard to believe I'm through with biology for the year!  The main indicator of how successful this course has been will be my students' EOC scores, both their individual scores and their growth scores based on their last science exam (middle school).

My general impression of the AMTA biology curriculum is positive overall.  Breaking it down further:

The Good

• Class periods seemed to fly by for both me and the students.  The majority of days, my students were working right up to the bell.
• Engagement was higher overall:  I had no students completely disengage and check out for any period of time, as I have in years past.  Everyone participated on some level every day, even if their greatest contribution for the day was writing on the white board in pretty colors.  It was rare for me to have to pry heads off desks or deal with students refusing to work.  Attitudes were generally better than average.
• I truly liked the sequence and how the curriculum told a story.  The units built upon each other in a logical manner, so we rarely left a topic completely behind to begin a new one.  I found the sequence far superior to how our biology textbooks and state standards are organized, which basically divides biology into three or four major chunks that don't feel connected at all.
• I also loved the lab first/inquiry format.  It made our labs a lot more meaningful.
• While still heavy on the worksheets, the exercises really forced students to think.  They couldn't just jump around and answer the easy questions, nor did they have those random "critical thinking" questions that you see on traditional textbook worksheets-- I despise those things.
• My socratic questioning skills have greatly improved-- that shows in my administrator evaluations.  I was scoring 4s and 5s out of 5 in questioning, where in previous years I was scoring 3s at best.
• I do feel like many of my students have improved their scientific reasoning skills and have a better grasp on biology as a whole than in years past.
• My students also seemed more comfortable about speaking up in class (although this was occasionally to my own detriment, ha!).
• I also feel like I covered my state standards better than I ever have in the past.  Although I don't know if that's a function of the modeling curriculum, or just general experience with teaching biology for several years now.  Ecology, testing for macromolecules, and dihybrid crosses were the only things that I needed to add to the existing AMTA lesson plans.  I did more justice to some standards that I have frequently glossed over (cough cough evolution).  

The Bad

• I had an achievement gap all year that I could not close for the life of me.  The majority of my students excelled, but some could not grasp anything we were doing (evident in the MBCI results for my standard biology class). Those students continued to fall further and further behind.  What is even more frustrating for me is that several of the students on the wrong side of the achievement gap were trying very hard-- most of them weren't your unmotivated slackers who have given up on school.  They were doing assignments, they were participating-- they just weren't improving AT ALL.  I have never experienced this problem to this degree.  I usually pride myself on being able to teach something to everyone.
• Along the same lines, I had more course failures this semester than I have ever had for biology.  Out of 58 students, I had 3 failures.  While that number isn't excessive per se, it is higher than usual for my classes.  Also, all of those failing students were female, which really has me scratching my head and wondering if there was a connection.
• I'm worried about my EOC scores.  Even my honors students thought the test was really hard.  My students in years past also have always thought the test was hard, yet did fine when their scores came back.  I guess I won't know until I see their quick scores in January.
• There was NOT enough rigor for honors.  Part of this is my lack of experience with honors:  I'm still trying to figure out how best to differentiate my standard and honors curriculum.  About half my honors students have 100% averages this semester, which is a little bit embarrassing.
• My classroom is usually a bit chaotic and informal-- that's just my personality.  The atmosphere of my classroom was even more chaotic and informal this year.  Usually, I don't mind so long as the students are on-task and learning.  But the chaos became a bit of a problem towards the end of the semester, when my students suddenly seemed to regress into elementary school behavior with the holiday break approaching.  To be quite frank, they have downright ticked me off over the past couple weeks with their immaturity.  I want them to enjoy learning and be comfortable enough to take risks in the classroom, but I also want them to know how to conduct themselves in college or a workplace.

Improvements to be made

• Pacing!  Now that I've done it once, I know that I really need to pick and choose activities at the beginning of the year.  I would rather have the time to do some of the more in depth reinforcement/model deployment activities in units 5-7 than waste so much time on units 1-3.
• Along with the pacing, I am still struggling to find a good balance for board meeting discussions.  They often got cut short by the bell, or drug on FOREVER in the case of my large class.  Board meetings became boring meetings many times, with students only talking when they were directly questioned.  In my ideal classroom, the board meetings would hopefully become more student-driven.
• I didn't assign textbooks this semester and I feel like I should have.  I go back and forth every year about assigning textbooks.  I don't have a classroom, so I can't just keep a classroom set handy.  This year, I had a cart with books that I brought to class when I planned on using them.  I don't rely on the textbook heavily, but I do think it would have been helpful for my lower achieving students to have it as a resource (or at least address the excuse, "I couldn't do the homework because you didn't give us a book!).  The problem with assigning textbooks is that the students conveniently never bring them to class when they need them.
• I feel like I needed more assessment-- exit tickets, more repetitive questioning, individual grill & drill practice, etc.  Don't get me wrong, I thought the included exercises were very strong, and all of the questioning and discussion gave me tons of opportunities for formative assessment.  I also included weekly quizzes and daily bell ringers.  But with so much group work and collaboration, my weaker students kept managing to trick me into thinking that they were improving when test results said again and again that they truly weren't.  After every test, I was at least partially surprised by the number of failures.
• I loved the interactive lab notebooks, but they needed more structure. I'm thinking maybe a vocab or concept check list given at the beginning of each unit to match up to what they're writing in their notebook??
• I need to figure out a way to best incorporate the concept of "the model" for biology.  I fell back into the PowerPoint trap a lot in the middle of the year.  This may be slightly easier for most topics in chemistry.

It is going to be really interesting with chemistry next semester:  I had very respectful and mature students this semester.  They were "game" to work and generally well behaved.  Next semester, I unfortunately already know of a lot of the students in my classes... let's just say I don't exactly have the cream of the crop.  On my roster there are a lot of students with regular disciplinary problems, a lot of truancy, and a lot of students with history of failure.  It's going to be a different classroom culture than this semester.  At the same time, I have several students that I also taught for biology last year with the traditional lecture/lab pedagogy.  Some were good students, some were dreadful students. I'm curious to see how they will react to the modeling curriculum and if it is reflected in their EOC and ACT scores.