DI+in+7-12

This year has barely started and already there are signs that DI is alive and well at the MHA/FYOS! At in service, I was pleased to share some of what I learned at the SDE conference with my colleagues and I am so excited by their responses, I need to wiki about it! First of all, I am attaching the power point presentation and hope you will take the time to watch it and remind yourself of some of the ideas we discussed. I know that I go back to my conference notes and look for inspiration. Before I get too overwhelmed, I plan on reflecting on what I am doing in my classroom to really address the learning needs of all of my students and DI is an excellent place to look. If you have additional questions on some of what I spoke about, please email me and I will find time to sit with you and work on fun DI activities or clarify concepts or even listen to some of the sessions with you. I can access all sessions (as can Melissa, Sandy and Becky) and would be happy to share the resource whenever. Next, I want to share a success story. Dana Vaughn, science teacher extraordinaire, decided to try throwing his students a “R.A.F.T.” Having ascertained that they could all swim and no one was in danger of drowning, he thought the raft might help them navigate the waters a little easier. In this case, the girls of bio had been studying cellular structure and the organelles associated with it. R.A.F.T, which stands for “**R**ole **A**udience **F**ormat **T**opic” is a different way of looking at a particular subject, with the goal being to immerse the students in the material. The girls of bio were cast in the role of microscopic explorers, charged with explaining to an audience of schoolchildren the topic of cellular structures. The format was a story, and their creativity was put to the test. By making the audience schoolchildren, the girls had to really think about what they had learned and explain it in a way a child would understand. //It was a fascinating story, what happened to those girls. They had the wish to be as small as a cell. So, Jenny and Ovadia closed their eyes and *POOFED* inside a cell! Jenny and Ovadia were staring at the wonders of the cell, when they suddenly saw something floating towards the cell. But it didn’t go in! “Certain substances can’t go in, Jenny. This is selectively permeable, and I learned that in Mr. Vaughn’s class!” Ovadia said. Ovadia and Jenny decided to sit down on the cushioned looking mitochondria. Suddenly, they heard a whisper saying, “Get off the mitochondria, kinderlachen! It’s trying to transfer energy.” Jenny and Ovadia were so surprised that Jenny slipped off the mitochondrion. “Quick!” yelled Ovadia, “Grab onto something!” Jenny quickly grabbed onto the microfilaments floating by. The wormlike microfilament suddenly opened his eyes and yelled “I’m working here or giving support and helping the cell to move and divide. Get off me!” That’s when Jenny jumped on the lysosome. Suddenly she started to sink in. She screamed, “Oh my g-d, it’s digesting me because it doesn’t know what I am.” Ovadia sighed as he watched Jenny die. “Oh, so much for our first date.” Ovadia looked down and saw an oddly shaped structure that he knew to be Golgi apparatus. “Oh, if it packages things that the cell made, it will carry me to someplace else.” So he floated until the Golgi apparatus dumped him onto a maze looking thing inside the cell. There was a big sign in the entrance at the maze which said **Rough endoplasm reticulum**. Ovadia didn’t know what it was until some ribosomes floated by and told him that it helps get the proteins to leave. He turned to them. “Well, what do you do?”They answered, “We help organize the making of proteins.”Ovadia rolled his eyes. “This is boring. I want to go home.” He headed for nucleus, when he was suddenly socked into the nucleus envelope. He opened his eyes and saw Mr. Vaughn’s angry face in front of him. “Why are you sleeping in my class again?!?”//
 * DI in action- In 2009, biology students float through cell on R.A.F.T.s they designed**

Finally, I want to thank everyone for remembering that our continued collaboration and openness to helping each other become better teachers is a win-win situation. We try new lessons and can chat, wiki or blog about our successes and failures. Not every R.A.F.T. will float. However, I feel that I am in a community of learners, not only teachers, and that we all inherently want to know more about our craft and our untapped talents as educators. In my eighth grade English class, I am trying a TIC-TAC-TOE exercise to assess understanding of //To Kill a Mockingbird// by Harper Lee. I will share the results when they are in. For now, all I can say is that it is different and scary to let my eighth graders off with “light-weight” projects, rather than paragraphs and paragraphs on Lee’s masterpiece. Yet, based on the students’ responses, all of them are excited about the prospect of showing me the way they understood Lee’s words, plot and themes. I hope to share more stories of DI and just plain good teaching. Thank you for listening and, please, tell Dana how clever this lesson is!