[Rough Draft]

Learning Objectives

• Community Creation

  • Developing a feeling of openness, family and community within the classroom.

  • The idea that creating collaborative networks is essential in Science

    • Angus

  • The idea that creating communities where there are strong bonds between people is often an important ingredient for happiness.

• Literature Search

  • How to search for scientific literature using google scholar and databases

  • After finding an interesting paper, how to search for papers that they referenced.

  • After finding an interesting paper, how to find papers that cited it.

  • How to download papers

  • How to find the appropriately cite the paper of interest.

  • How to read a scientific paper.

• Portfolio Development

  • Lab Notebook

  • Listening Protocols

• Regression Analysis

  • Be able to take data and graph it and then fit a trendline and understand whether the fit is good or not.

  • Determine whether the trend is statistically significant or not.

  • Obtain an equation for the trendline and use it to forecast the future (extrapolate) or find values between data point (interpolate)

  • Understand Correlation vs Causation.

• Module Project

  • The feeling of empowerment where students feel that they conduct preliminary literature search on a topic of their interest and use it develop a research idea where they collect data, fit a line to it and then predict the future based on the trendline’s equation.

Detailed Materials

Community Creation

A very core component of Marisa and my teaching style is create a feeling of community within the classroom. We believe that some class time should be allocated in developing connections and bonds between students and provide a place where they can share their ideas, their dreams and their selves. In traditional classes because of the necessity to cover state strands and tests, it is often hard to allocate enough time. With this course, we had more time to develop this feeling of openness. This was also very important because the course requires students to idea generate and collaborate with one another. Below are some methods we used.

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Humanizing the Teacher

I often find that by sharing my life journey, students empathize with me and see me as more of a human than a distant creature. I find that it can help open up the classroom. By talking about my own struggles, students feel more comfortable sharing. There can be downsides to sharing one's life story too and it isn't a style that fits every teacher. In my presentation I share how my grades were very bad and how I fell into depression and how I emerged from it. Additionally I share ideas that have helped me through life. My former students who returned expressed that they appreciated these ideas. Teachers always have to be very careful on how they share these 'life advice' ideas because the role of the teacher isn't to indoctrinate but rather to empower. So, I always give many disclaimers on how these are just my views and could be only useful for my life.

• I was vulnerable

Developing Student-Teacher Bond

Understanding each student deeply is important. Often students not only need knowledge but also emotional support. In the first homework assignment, students share something deep about themselves and it becomes a way to talk about something more than small talk with the students.

Developing Student-Student Bond

To encourage students to talk to everyone in the class, we had them write down everyone's name and then over the span of the year they had a conversation with every student. To express the importance of developing community, we read and discussed the Havard study on Happiness. They had a homework assignment on this.

• Ecoli

• Walk

Literature Search

Conducing literature search is a core skill needed in research. Students were taught:

• • How to search for scientific literature using google scholar

  • After finding an interesting paper, how to search for papers that they referenced.

  • After finding an interesting paper, how to find papers that cited it.

  • How to download papers

  • How to find the appropriately cite the paper of interest.

  • How to read a scientific paper.

The first homework was very gentle and meant to show students that they had the power to search for and read scientific research articles that went far beyond and deeper than what is often found in a general search.

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Regression Analysis

Module Project

Feedback

Having an environment where I was allowed to talk about whatever I needed and was understood by mostly everyone

Having the opportunity to conduct unique experiments and also I liked the show and tells

The fun atmosphere

the students

It was a safe space where I could learn freely. I was able to acquire knowledge that had a deeper purpose (other than just textbook information). Your personalities, the emotional aspect of the class made it easier for me to feel a human connection.

I liked that the students were the ones actually designing the experiments. I also really enjoyed the uniqueness of this course.

I liked the feeling of openness our class had with each other.