Biology Made Real

Book excerpt: 'This outstanding book... deserves to be very widely read. I hope it makes a major contribution to how school biology is taught.' —Dr Michael J. Reiss, Professor of Science Education, University of London 'This is a book that all teachers, not just biology teachers should read.' —Ben Strathearn-Burrows, Head of Biology, Emanuel School What you'll find inside: —A vision for an integrated and meaningful biology education. —A framework for teaching for meaning-making, which cuts planning time. —Ways of creating a unified narrative across disparate topics. —A taxonomy of understanding that unlocks problem-solving with minimal workload. —Tried and tested examples from mixed-attainment biology classrooms. Introduction I've been motivated to discover what biology is to us as humans. What it means to understand biology, and how I could make it meaningful for my students. I've read as much as I could and reflected, I've discussed and listened, I've taught and observed. While it doesn't cover all aspects of biology education, this book is about sharing what I've learnt on my journey of synthesising and trialling ideas with my secondary-school mixed-attainment biology classes. 'Not only is this book likely to change how you teach biology but also how you perceive yourself within the living world.' —Dr Alex Sinclair, Institute of Education, St Mary's University, Twickenham Chapter 1: Meaningful biology relates principally to organisms: This sets the scene for the whole book. It brings together many threads to define what I see as most meaningful to secondary biology students. And therefore what we could do about it when designing our lessons & curricula and thinking about how students progress through their biology education. Planning for meaning-making has vastly enhanced interest and motivation to learn in my classroom. Chapters 2 & 3: Teaching for meaning using variation theory: Next I introduce a powerful—relatively unknown and often misunderstood—pedagogical theory. Variation theory. In these chapters I set out to show how useful it is—and easy to use—in the secondary biology classroom, with many examples. Chapter 4: How to integrate organisms, ecology & evolution: Now I pull together the previous chapters to present a new framework for teaching for meaning-making that cuts planning time & focuses on biology. 'An excellent text demanding we think not just about what we teach but also why and how.’ —Dr Paul Ganderton, Consultant and researcher Chapter 5: Concepts of the organism that unite a biology course: Here I discuss two concepts that I think can unify all the topics on the curriculum. 1. Seeing biology through thermodynamic systems lens and, 2. Seeing biology through an ecological-evolutionary lens via the concept of life strategies. I lay out the reasons why and discuss how I've introduced these ideas with students. Chapter 6: Teaching systems thinking to help students see interconnectedness: This chapter is dedicated to systems thinking. Firstly I show how stock and flow diagrams are very useful for the biology classroom and give examples. Next, I introduce a new taxonomy of understanding biological systems. Chapter 7: Establishing a thinking classroom: This chapter is focused on the whys and hows of embedding the taxonomy into my biology curricula. I give examples of how I use it and examples of my students answers from lower and upper secondary courses. Chapter 8: Navigating classroom and biological complexity: This chapter rounds up the book by considering the complexity of our subject and the classroom. ‘Biology Made Real comes with an education health warning—be prepared to have your beliefs challenged.' —Dr Alex Sinclair