Post-Practicum Reflection, BIOL 115, Langara College, 11/18/2021

I taught my sixth and final practicum lesson in a majors introductory biology class at Langara College taught by Dr. Martha Nelson-Flower. I anticipated this being the most difficult of all the practicum lessons because it was a long lesson (110 minutes) on a technically challenging topic, and when I observed the class previously the atmosphere was extremely quiet. This made me concerned that it would be difficult to build and sustain engagement during the class. This lesson was also a quick (2 day) turnaround from my fifth practicum lesson on salmon sustainability issues at UBC, also a long and complex lesson. Designing and delivering both of these made for a challenging stretch! However, I think this was great preparation to be a full-time instructor when teaching multiple lessons a week is a routine part of the job.

In the previous lesson in a large lecture hall at UBC I never fully relaxed, and my delivery suffered a bit because of it. After reflecting on this I vowed to make my #1 priority to relax in the class at Langara, and not worry as much about saying everything I intended to perfectly. Fortunately I was able to achieve this! I’m very happy with how comfortably I was able to deliver the lesson, and it shows me the progress that I’ve made over the year.

One approach I took to help students apply transcription and translation outside the textbook context was incorporating applications to contemporary issues. The major one I connected is the human health application of mRNA vaccine development for SARS-CoV-2. I started the lesson by showing the spike protein of the virus that the mRNA delivered by the vaccine codes for, and immediately engaged student attention with a discussion about what it might be and how it related to the topic. I concluded the lesson with a wildlife conservation application by describing my research incorporating the physiology (gene expression) and infection of sockeye salmon, and then revisited the mRNA vaccines in more detail.

One of the CATL teaching and learning theories I implemented was aligning the material to “big ideas” in biology, in this case the relationship between genotype, phenotype, and natural selection. I wanted to make sure students didn’t get too bogged down in the myriad technical details of transcription and translation and forget their overall purpose. Therefore, I reviewed these big ideas and situated transcription and translation within them before teaching the details. I also found and included a really well done and concise (< 2 min) video from the University of Utah that illustrated transcription and translation leading to production of luciferase proteins in fireflies. The video concluded by mentioning the functional ecology of the light created by luciferase (attract mates, avoid predation), and I briefly tied that to natural selection and promised they would learn much more about that later in the course. I also added a funny anecdote about my sister and I feeding fireflies to our pet American toad when we were young, causing the toad to light up for a several minutes after.

In designing the lesson I followed Dr. Nelson-Flower’s lead and included many “check-in questions” to gauge student comprehension, typically a couple at the end of each major section (e.g. transcription). This worked well and was good practice for both me and the students, and I received feedback that they were happy with the variety of questions. I think the most effective one was showing an animated gif depicting part of the translation process and asking students to identify each macromolecule and action shown. This helped bring the process alive more than the 2D static images shown previously, and caused the students to synthesize their new knowledge about the processes and pieces involved.

At the end I had an activity for students to compare each of the components of transcription and translation to the housebuilding process because this makes for a nice analogy and visualization, but unfortunately ran out of time for them to work with partners, so I suggested they do this activity while studying.

I entered this lesson unsure about my ability to foster an engaging atmosphere for a technically demanding topic with a group of quiet students who were not familiar with me. However, I am very satisfied to have achieved this and gotten exclusively positive feedback afterward! I’ve learned that the general formula of a relaxed delivery, alignment with disciplinary big ideas, connections to real life applications, and activities to gauge student comprehension is very effective, and this is important pedagogical knowledge that I can draw on in future lesson design and delivery.