On October 5th, 2021, I taught a lesson on “Symmetry, Nature and Beauty” as a guest instructor for ISCI 312 – Symmetry. This is a third-year level 3-credit course in the Integrated Sciences Program that runs in the Winter 1 Term on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2:00 to 3:30 pm (~ 1 hr 20 mins) in Henry Angus Rm 241. This term there are 57 students currently enrolled in the course, and the course instructor is Dr. Jim Evans. Of the 57 students enrolled, 44 students attended the class in-person, and 8 students attended synchronously via Zoom.
The ideas for this lesson I got the students to explore were scaffolded around how symmetry plays a critical role in driving evolution (e.g., changes in and beyond an organism’s body plan, changes in niches, preference driven by visual biases, etc.) and how symmetry is not always indicative of health and fitness. For this lesson, I wanted to do as little lecturing as possible to maximize time for active learning in a group environment and a formative assessment based on class discussion. This lesson-tyle is different from how Jim has been instructing the course this term, as he mentioned to me that the lessons have been lecture-dominant with more brief (5- to 10 minute) opportunities to work with practice questions in-class. To maximize the in-class time, I recorded an 18-minute pre-lesson lecture, where I introduced myself, my CATL project, and provided them foundational materials that would help them to successfully participate in the in-class activities and discussions. To check if students watched the pre-lesson lecture, I asked them a few questions related to the new ideas I introduced with formative low-stakes multiple-choice questions. To respond to the questions, each student was given a folded piece of paper with the letters A-B-C-D (each letter is displayed on one of four folds; this is the poor-persons clicker-question), where they would flash their answer to me so I could get an idea where everyone stood with their understanding of the ideas we were going to discuss in more depth throughout the lesson.
After the click-question assessment, I taught the idea that symmetry plays a role in beauty and attraction. I did this by using an activity (which I borrowed from Denise—a previous guest lecturer) based on studies that have been done on facial symmetry. In the activity, I showed students 4 sets of faces, where each face had 3 different versions: the original, left symmetry, and right symmetry. During the activity, students would vote which image was more attractive using the A-B-C-D cards. I then used another study to supplement this idea to take the idea of symmetry and beauty a step further which revealed to students’ symmetry only influences our perception of beauty and attraction to a degree (i.e., there are elements of beauty and attraction in nature that are beyond symmetry), and that beauty is subjective and therefore “in the eye of the beholder”. To take this a step further later in the class, I asked students how attraction is affected by organisms with and without vision. The students came to the realization that something can only be taken advantage of once an organism becomes aware of it and becomes attracted/unattracted to it (i.e., organisms without eye’s can’t select mates based on variations in symmetry because they cannot observe symmetry).
In my pre-lesson lecture, I introduced the idea that symmetry influences evolution, and showed them some fundamental examples of how it applies in nature using various examples using simple and complex organisms in the Animalia and Plantae kingdoms (e.g., symmetry in angiosperms; symmetry in birds) and its implications (e.g., how flower symmetry can impact the success and evolution of insects; fitness and natural selection in barn swallows). During the in-class lesson, I got students to use this foundational understanding of how symmetry and evolution influence each other by asking them to confirm or refute the claim of “symmetry is indicative of an organism’s health” by researching an organism of interest in groups of 4-6 students. The application of using their existing knowledge of a topic and applying it elsewhere is an example of both Far Transfer and Experiential Learning Theory. The impact of this activity not only enhanced engagement throughout the classroom but gave the students the practice of systems thinking (a key disciplinary behaviour—elaborated on in the next paragraph) and collaborative research by getting students to work in groups. In their groups, students collected evidence, discussed their findings with respect to the question prompts I provided for them and displayed their findings to the class on a poster by a gallery walk.
In this class, the disciplinary behaviour I was trying to teach was systems thinking. The steps I took to do this was in multiple ways providing various examples of how symmetry in nature manifests in various ways and on different scales with respect to size, and how symmetry can be influenced by genetics or the environment. I supplemented this idea with a group self-directed activity centred around the claim “symmetry is indicative of an organism’s health” for students to confirm or refute by following guiding prompts that I made to help them come to their conclusions. In the activity, I asked students to look at how the organism is its own system, how symmetry varies throughout the organism and how it can affect the overall organism (i.e., what symmetry/symmetries has/have the most impact on health and fitness and why), and how external systems (i.e., the environment it lives in) can impact its symmetry and influence its health and fitness. I think this was quite successful because students began to realize the various types of symmetry a single organism can have, and how these symmetries may or may not be influenced by genetics or nature, and how they may/may not be advantageous to their health and fitness.
After teaching this lesson I noticed there was a transformation in how students thought of the lesson topic at the beginning of the lesson and how it changed at the end of the lesson—this demonstrates Transformative Learning Theory in the design of my lesson. This transformation occurred during the student self-directed group research activity and was expressed during the classroom discussion near the end of the lesson. Students expressed that they initially only associate symmetry with fitness evolution, however, through their self-directed group research activity and class discussion, students discovered that the idea of symmetry driving evolution is biased towards organisms that can observe symmetry, and that there are also benefits of asymmetry that drive evolution.
In this practicum, I learned a lot about teaching in person since I have done most of my teaching virtually thus far. It was strange teaching again in person; I have never taught a class of that size before in person. I think teaching larger classes (>25 people for me) online prior to teaching this lesson in person helped me feel less anxious than I thought I would have. Although, there were some struggles that I forgot regarding in-person teaching. Here are some examples of my experiences teaching in-person and with my activity:
- A couple of hours prior to when I was scheduled to teach, Jim mentioned that he records his lessons on Zoom while he teaches in-person and that Zoom “crashes” almost every time he does this. As I taught my lesson Jim monitored the internet, and with little surprise, my Zoom “crashed” not too far into my lesson (Jim discovered this was because the internet dropped at 12:20 pm). From this experience, I would prefer not to teach in this hybrid manner as it took away ~5-8 minutes of class time from the students in the classroom while Jim and I tried to fix the issue (we could not get Zoom running again), and even when Zoom was working, it was challenging to monitor the Zoom chat and waiting room while doing activities in-person.
- Another thing I discovered was that I do not project my voice loud enough for everyone to hear in a ~100-person lecture hall. I found the situation frustrating because I was not provided with the suggestion or opportunity to be set up with a mic. For my next lesson in this classroom, I will ensure that there is a mic set up for me so that everyone in the class can always hear me clearly—if they can’t hear me, they are not going to pay attention, what was the point of coming to class at that point?
- Something I found with the group activity was that some groups of students finished it much faster than others and didn’t need the full 30 minutes they were allotted. For next time, I will either make the activity more challenging with some deeper-thinking questions, or I will give them less time to complete it and allot more time to the class discussion.