In this lesson, I taught the basic principles of gene duplication as part of a course that is supposed to serve as a broad introduction to genetics. Because of the structure of the course, I was actually able to give the same lecture both in the morning section and the afternoon section on the same day. This allowed me to discuss with the course coordinators between the lessons and improve upon my delivery of the lesson. The experience was overall quite positive. There were a few hiccups in the first lesson but the course coordinators were quite happy and thought that the second lesson went much better. This was my first time giving an hour long lesson so it was a learning experience for me.

One of the focal points of the lesson was an exercise in which the students had to draw an event occurring in the cell (unequal crossing over) which leads to gene duplication. I tried to frame this activity by first introducing the concept in a simple situation, and then having them try to draw it out with a slightly more complicated situation. I then repeated this more complicated situation in a more directed example as part of a clicker question later in the lesson. I think that the way I presented the problem could have been clearer, or the example could perhaps have been less difficult. Some of the students felt that it was confusing.

I have been including one or two questions in each of my lessons which are designed to make the students think back to concepts and ideas that they have learned previously in the course or in previous courses, and apply their knowledge to a specific problem. I am basing my Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) self-study project off of this, as I want to test whether these questions are effective in helping students better grasp concepts and content. Overall, the response I received using an online survey has been positive so far, although there has been some criticism that it took time away from some of the lecture concepts. This can be partially reconciled by better designing the lesson to fit within the time constraints of the lecture slot, although this also is something that comes with experience with the particular lesson. Designing these types of questions to both be useful to the students as well as insightful to previous knowledge that they might have is not trivial. This is something I aim to work on throughout the year. I am also curious to see how these questions will work in a first-year course, with students who have less university experience.

I tried to implement a few of the methods we’ve covered in the CATL program in this lesson. Unfortunately, I was too unfamiliar with the content of the lesson (i.e., I had learned about it at some point in the past, but have not dealt with it since) to do proper justice to a pedagogical content knowledge approach. I used real world examples (evolution of colour vision) to try to help the students understand how gene duplication works and why it is so important in evolution of new functions. I tried to use learning as transformation by consistently emphasising the reality of the situations that I was describing. In molecular biology, it can be very difficult to visualise all the internal mechanisms of the cell as anything but abstract concepts, while losing sight of the larger picture. I tried using a graphics approach to constantly remind the class that these situations are occurring in a three-dimensional space, and that nothing in the cell is happening independently of anything else. I believe that learning to approach biology as a system where almost nothing is independent is critical to actually understanding what is going on.

I spent roughly half the lesson presenting an example in which gene duplication has led to important evolutionary outcomes. The idea behind this was to show the students how these events occur and to give them a real world example of what they can lead to. In this case, the topic was evolution of trichromatic colour vision in primates. This is a particularly interesting example because it really only involves two different genes, and the duplication of one is what leads to old world primates, such as humans, having trichromacy. Furthermore, the duplication in question occurred in a gene on the X chromosome, which means that males are more likely to inherit certain problematic traits more than females (since they only have one X chromosome) – in this case, colour blindness. I liked this example, since many people know someone who has colour blindness, or may even have it themselves, but they might not know the origin of the trait.

Overall, I think this lesson went quite well and having the ability to do a ‘redo’ in the second section was really helpful in improving my delivery of the material and the activities. For my next lesson, I would like to focus on improving my timing for any activities, and remembering to repeat any questions asked in class to make sure everyone hears.