Wallblog

I have been having a problem in class trying to cover all of the material that is required and trying to incorporate more student driven learning. In Biology I really let the students ask any question that they would like, and are interested in. I believe that this causes students to be more engaged, however, it seems like I cannot cover everything that is included on the test. Is this okay? I believe that this will put more responsibility on students to read and comprehend material outside of class, but will they actually do it?

I recall Mary Habas talking about her class and how there are always students that fight the constructivist methods. Last class, in Biology, I had several students hit that point becasue I would not tell them the answer and I also made them think if the answers that I did give them were even right. I basically told them that I could lie to them all day long and they would not even know. Their response was disbelief that a teacher would do that because it is our job to give them the right answer. I then asked them why the answer had to be right if a teacher told them and they responded with "because you know more". Which I have to agree is true, however is the knowledge that I am trying to impart to them actually correct or did someone lie to me and then I incorporated that lie into my truth? I just told them that they are the ones that have to decide if what I say is true or not. Don't take things for granted. I would love to teach a whole lesson and then tell them that 50% of what I said was untrue and they have to decide what is "truth" and what is not.

Start of the new semester and I have started trying to be more constructivist in my classroom. 1st and 2nd hours I had students circle up and we discussed evolution and religion. It still seemed that I was doing most of the talking still. It is tough to do when we are first introducing a new topic for the students to come up with a lot to talk about. I noticed that when we were talking about evoultion and religion that there are a lot of students that are so ingrained in their beliefs that it seems that they may try to fight this unit. I will start a post on my AP bio page to let them discuss their misgivings about evolution. See a great site about Intelligent design: http://www.venganza.org/