On November 30th, 2021, I taught a lesson on “Crystallography of Crystals and Viruses” as a guest instructor for ISCI 312 – Symmetry. Of the 57 students enrolled in the class, ~44 attended. Unlike previous lessons I have taught for this class, I did not attempt to simultaneously teach and record the lesson over Zoom.
I wanted the final Symmetry class to be a “capstone” lesson, where students got the opportunity to connect most of what they learned throughout the semester and see how it can be applied to a new concept that I was asked to teach about—crystallography. I designed this lesson to incorporate the ideas of far transfer, experiential learning (ELC), and (PCK). For the topic of crystallography, I decided to introduce the students to organic and inorganic crystals in the first half of the lesson, and then viruses in the second half of the lesson. I chose to look at this broad scope of ideas through the lens of crystallography because this is an interdisciplinary course where many of the students will eventually (if not already) work with crystalline materials. Furthermore, a learning outcome for the course is that the students should be able to connect related ideas (far transfer; ELC) with respect to symmetry in different areas of life (e.g., systems, disciplines). To provide the students with practice identifying such connections in my lesson, I led them through a series of group-based activities (PCK) to help them connect and understand that different materials (e.g., crystals and viruses) are all made of the same foundation—a lattice structure. Note, the concept of the lattice structure is not new to them, as they learnt about lattices and symmetrical operations that could be applied to them throughout the term.
For the lesson, I designed a 4-part activity where students practised self-directed learning in small groups. I provided each student with their own worksheet that had a series of tasks to complete which were guided by action and question prompts. This activity acted as both their notes for the lesson and practice working on problems with respect to crystallography. I made sure to inform students that the activity was not for marks/it was not “due” at the end of the lesson, and that it was okay if they did not finish it by the end of the lesson, as the activity is hefty and will help them prepare for their final exam. Below I have summarized the activity design and what happened during the lesson.
Part 1 (15-minutes) of the activity split students into pairs, where each pair of students would either be given blue worksheets for “inorganic” crystals, or yellow worksheets for “organic crystals. For this activity, students were asked to research general characteristics of these types of crystals, look up the atomic structure of a crystal of their choosing that falls within the category of organic/inorganic to practice seeing the symmetry in the crystal structures by drawing and annotating 3D models, and provide an example of how understanding the atomic structure of this crystal has benefited society/contributed to our understanding of the natural world. This activity was somewhat successful, as I gave the students a brief demonstration of exactly what I was looking for them to do before they began the activity and some of them were able to complete the activity in the amount of time given. However, I during the lesson I realized that the students had not been exposed to 3D lattices until the previous class, so they were not used to looking for symmetry in atomic structures. Because of this, some students were falling behind because they were confused when they couldn’t readily see symmetry in the atomic structure of the crystal that they chose to investigate. The major problems I came across during this activity were (1) technological, as this was the first time the students used software to look at 3D models of crystal structures, so they struggled to figure out what exactly they were looking for, (2) lack of knowledge and understanding, as students didn’t realize that atoms in a lattice could actually fall on the outside of the lattice structure and that the symmetry is often more obvious when you begin to expand/repeat the lattices, and (3) burnout, several students were slow at processing what to do because they were exhausted in general, and they are not used to doing self-directed learning activities in this class.
Part 2 (18-minutes) of the activity got students to pair with a group that were assigned a different crystal type than them (i.e., organic group pair with an inorganic group). These groups were tasked with teaching each other what they had learned thus far, and then answer a series of questions along the theme of “how do we measure the atomic structure of crystals?” I think that this part of the activity was successful(ish) because some of the students moved onto this task and were able to complete it, and others decided to continue working on part 1. If I did the activity again, I think I could axe out them researching about how to measure the structure of crystals and lecture them on it to help save time and to give them a little bit more time to work on Part 1.
After part 2, I paused the students and reviewed the key ideas (i.e., differences between inorganic and organic crystals, types of instruments we measure crystals with) that the students should have found to ensure no one was falling too far behind for ~8 minutes. During this, I had a student question one of the examples I gave for organic crystals. Here, I realized that our disciplines think of organic crystals with different definitions; in geology, anything considered “organic” is defined as biogenic, and in medicine, anything “organic” is bonded with carbon. For next time, I think that at the beginning of the lesson I should have a brief class discussion on how different disciplines define these terms and the context that we will choose to look at them in the lesson.
Part 3 (18-minutes) of the activity got students to stop looking at inorganic and organic crystallography and instead investigate viral crystallography. Here, students remained in the groups that they formed in part 2, where they were tasked to research what part of a virus holds symmetry (and why), the 3 different types of viral structures, and then asked to investigate the viral structure of a virus of their choosing. For the virus students chose to research, they were asked to create a poster with a schematic drawing of the virus with its symmetry annotated, a type of diffraction method that has been used to study the crystal structure of the virus, and how understanding the structure of the virus has benefited society. I think this part of the activity was somewhat successful because over half the class was able to complete it, however, a few students had decided to work on previous parts of the activity or work on other tasks. It’s important to note that the students had a poster presentation in the next class, so I think a lot of them were wanting last-minute feedback from the course instructor with respect to that, and their final exam was scheduled for 2-weeks after this lesson, so some of the students began to panic and ask the instructor questions about that. To help the students focus on the lesson materials, I think it would have been beneficial to have the instructor either state at the beginning that they will not answer questions about coursework for upcoming items (i.e., upcoming group presentations and the course final exam) until after class, or simply not come to the class—although, the lack of presence of the instructor may have made students less inclined to stay and participate during the lesson.
Part 4 (5-10 minutes) was to get students to tape their posters to the wall and do a gallery walk, but there was not enough time to do the gallery walk due to some interruptions that occurred at the beginning of class. Instead, I took photos of the posters and got the course instructor to post them on the course Canvas page so that students could look at them on their own time. I don’t think that cutting out the gallery walk activity was a detriment to the students learning, however, it could have provided the opportunity for students to question each other’s work, as some of them clearly had issues interpreting their viral structures (i.e., drawing an icosahedral virus capsid and claiming it had a hexagonal crystal structure).
To wrap up the class, I asked a few students to share a benefit they found with respect to studying inorganic and organic crystal structures, and viral crystal structures, and then shared a summary slide of takeaway concepts, which reflected the big ideas that they should have come across during the lesson. The brief discussion was successful, as a few students readily shared their findings which tied in very nicely to my summary slides (alas, some students successfully understood the big idea of the lesson).
I will not lie; this lesson was very ambitious—it was what would normally be 2 to 3 lessons condensed into 1. If I were to do this lesson again, I would either make the tweaks I mentioned in the paragraphs above or redesign it completely. If I made the previously mentioned adjustments, I think I could save some time during the lesson by lecturing on content that they are not expected to deeply understand (i.e., diffraction techniques). However, if I were to redesign the lesson, I would probably focus on one crystallographic group (inorganic crystals) for ~2/3 of the lesson, and either get students to freely research how what they have learnt applies to other items (e.g., viruses) and have a group discussion on what everyone found and the implications of these findings (e.g., what big picture ideas are we converging on in crystallography?), or I could lecture and provide examples of how it applies to other items (which is less interactive, boo).
Finally, the last lesson I guess lectured for I lost the “power” in the class to the other instructor, and in turn, the student’s attention and respect. To try to regain power in this class, I tried my best to be more assertive by not using minimizing terms, direct statements, eye contact with students, and speaking through the chest. I knew the students were tired and would not take me seriously, so I also stated that it is essential for them to work as hard as they can during the lesson so that they can learn the material and succeed in the exam. I normally don’t like to talk about things in terms of exams, but in this classroom, the students have been completely transparent with me that doing well on the final exam is what they care about at this point in time, so I had to use that as leverage to gain their attention maintain focus on the lesson. This worked quite successfully as I was able to catch their attention quite quickly when trying to transition through different parts of the lesson.