Meggie Gonzalez
Secondary life science teacher Digital Portfolio
Biology Pop-Up Museum
As a project-based school, all our first semester work culminated in the curation of a pop-up museum. Utilizing our class text (The Body by Bill Bryson) as a primary source, groups of students selected a human anatomy system of interest. They researched their system, composed annotated bibliographies, and then worked to create an interactive exhibit to educate their community on biological concepts. I was blown away at the creativity of the students! We had homemade candles, an Operation game, a foosball table, and even slime! With this being the first project I had participated in at the school, another thing that struck me was the engagement of the students. Some who had been very hesitant to complete classwork and join discussions were suddenly engrossed in their project. When asking students where the spark came from, I was told they enjoyed having the choice to choose their own topic and interactive component. Being able to personalize their exhibit and focus on an area of interest really led to students being invested in their project and taking pride in their work.
Early brainstorming of what students believe makes for an engaging and interactive exhibit
AI tracking of the human hand, coded by students
grab an organ and learn all about it!
Cycle 1 Lesson - Meiosis
For my first CalTPA cycle, I led our biology students through a lesson on meiosis. Knowing this lesson would have a lot of new vocabulary for my students, some of whom are ELs, I made it a point to introduce the vocabulary the day before. I provided students with a graphic organizer which allowed them to use images and their own words to define the key terms. With deeper learning in mind, I am a big fan of multiple modalities. I also strive to access my students' schema and build upon prior knowledge. This led me to begin the lesson with a class discussion of our experiences with how physical traits may or may not pass from parent to offspring. For this discussion, I used personal family photos to share some of myself and build on my relationship with my students. Later, I added an active component to our learning by with an acting-out activity where we paired up and moved about the room to mimic the movement of chromosomes during meiosis. Finally, students were able to get hands-on by building chromosome models and observing the process of crossing over. By approaching the material in a variety of ways, students had many examples and experiences to understand how gametes are created and why we see genetic variations within a species.
