H1- Honor student diversity and development

H1.- Honor student diversity and development. Teacher candidates plan and/or adapt learner centered curricula that engage students in a variety of culturally responsive, developmentally and age appropriate strategies. Each student is vastly different from the next. As a teacher, it is so important to see "the student" as an individual versus "the studentS"  all blurred together. One way to honor student individuality is to offer activites and projects that allow indiviudality to shine through. Each student is in a unique stage of life. Giving them the opportunity to express their own thoughts is critical to the high  school population. One way to honor student individuality in Biology involves project-based work. I assigned my students the "cell analogy project" (figure 1) to complete with their table groups.

[caption id="attachment_384" align="alignleft" width="257"] Figure 1. Handout/rubric for cell analogy project.[/caption]

This project is based off of an article I read outlining various ways student diversity may be honored in the science classroom (attached as "Culturally Relevent Teaching in Science"). This project is great for all age and developmental levels because it leaves room for excelling students to go deeper and other students to gain an understanding without as much work. Through this project I was able to gauge student understanding of the central focus (cells) and give them an opportunity to relate what we were learning in biology class to their own lives. From this project I learned several things about classroom culture. Students were able to choose both the analogy they based their project off of as well as the way they presented their analogy. I found that students were engaged with the other presentations because I made sure all presentations were different. Not only was student individuality honored, but I as the teacher was in control of classroom engagement. Students worked intimately with the various components of cells and gained a well-rounded understanding of how the cell works. As an audience, students were asked to write down three things they learned from the presentations. I read through these comments when I graded notebooks after this unit so I had physical evidence that students were learning during the presentations.

In future years, I would be interested to work out a way for each student to do an individual project. Although table groups were effective for this project, I would be interested to see if individualized projects would impact students (and their grades) differently while still working out logistically.

culturally relevent teaching in science