Anatomy and Physiology

I chose to join this course, mainly because I want to be a high school biology teacher in the future. Next school year I will teach the seventh-grade student biology, and a lot of the content is about human anatomy and physiology. So I really want to learn a little more in advance to prepare myself in this area. After the course began, I realized that most of the learning should be done through reading by myself. Since I don't have a solid foundation in this area, and my vocabulary is relatively limited. When I first started reading these texts directly, I felt struggled and exhausted.

After I read the entire chapter of the textbook in the first week, I was able to understand most of the content, but the speed was very slow. So it took me a whole week to finish reading the one chapter that I am assigned for designing a lesson plan. I realized it was going to cause me failing in finishing the assignments. Later, I learned how to use the combination of online reading and online quizzes, which improved my learning efficiency drastically.

Repeatedly answering online questions inspired my understanding of the keywords. The most significant benefit is letting me know which parts of the textbook can be used to find the answers. My knowledge of anatomy and physiology did increase, but it was more like a bubble burst. My understanding of the content is not so thorough, and often the relationship between them is not clear. In order to complete these online exercises, I spent a lot of time, however it reduced the time for me to participate in class discussions and read other people's lesson plans carefully. It feels like I originally wanted to make a 10 cm tall cake, but it turned into a pile of 30 cm high cream. It seems that I have done a lot, but I am worried that my future students will find it is empty.

This makes me reflect on my own teaching style. In my classes, do I want the students to complete the exercises or really master the knowledge. This seems to be a paradox for teachers. We need some data that can be evaluated, then you have to quantify the problem to see how much each student has done. On the other hand, we attach great importance to the learning process. I hope that completing the exercises is not the end of learning. How can I prevent my students from learning just to pass the exam?

I know that another focus of this course is to combine the design of science classes with NGSS. I have only heard of it before, knowing that it is popular in the United States, but I was not sure about the details. By watching the videos and doing the search online, I got a taste of it and understand the three components of NGSS. I believe the method of refining the cross concepts in different subjects is preferable. Learning should not be limited to the content of one course. To apply what you have learned, you also need to combine what you have learned with design and engineering. It’s a pity to hear that some teachers said they were still not clear about how to operate after developing several lesson plans using 5E model. I also felt that NGSS is somewhat general, as if you can get a little bit of it anyway. 

When I was doing the lesson plans, I would like to refer to the NGSS guidelines to help me think more about my design philosophy. Many methods may already be used by myself before, but they have not been thoroughly analyzed for the reasons behind them, so they are not very convincing. Now I will use NGSS to find theoretical support for my curriculum plan, making it easier for others to understand the meaning of each classroom activity and the corresponding educational achievements. Because I thought about and designed my own web page structure at the beginning, I didn't use the existing NGSS design outline. There are still many places that need to be strengthened in the lesson plans, but for my initial contact with NGSS, I am happy to see the improvement I made and will keep exploring in the future.