In My Classroom: NESC Videos are helpful

I have a student-teacher this semester, and he asked to teach our evolution unit as his “portfolio” unit. He is, at this point, mostly being left on his own to plan, assess, and manage the classroom. Our students were all on board for the Geologic Time Scale and natural selection (and it’s accompanying demonstrations and labs).

However, as we started talking phylogenies and focusing on ancestry, a handful of students started asking why people thought we evolved from monkeys, and why monkeys weren’t evolving into humans. I knew as a more experienced teacher (who had made many mistakes already while teaching students), that this kind of questioning is preventable with some different organization of your unit. But I was interested in how he would confront this in his classroom because it would tell me a lot about his progress and readiness to handle his own classes. As a cooperating instructor, I was interested in how he would respond to this. As a fellow biology teacher, I could sympathize with how he was probably feeling; even if you do everything perfectly, address every misconception, incorporate the nature of science into every lesson, this type of question is always going to get asked by somebody. So what did he do? He impressed me.

I have used “tree-thinking” quizzes and other resources available from Understanding Evolution but have never used any of their video clips. My student teacher had some productive discussions about making conclusions from evidence, why scientific explanations have to be falsifiable, and what it means to have a “common ancestor”. He followed all of that up with this video:

I had never seen this before, but our students really responded well to it. It is definitely something that I will be using in the future!

More Understanding Evolution and National Evolutionary Synthesis Center videos can be found here.

And perhaps it is time to remove my padawan’s braid.