Biology Made Real: Ways of Teaching that Inspire Meaning-Making

“This outstanding book… deserves to be very widely read. I hope it makes a major contribution to how school biology is taught.” –Dr Michael J. Reiss, Professor of Science Education, University of London From the author of Difference Maker, Biology Made Real explores what makes school biology meaningful for students. Pulling from many sources–including personal experience, educational research, the history and philosophy of biology–you’ll find a way of seeing biology teaching and how I’ve enacted it. What’s inside: >A vision for an integrated and meaningful biology education. >A framework for teaching for meaning-making. >Concepts that help create a unified narrative across different topics. >A taxonomy of understanding can be shared with students and used to assess work. Chapter 1 combines many threads to explore what holds meaning for secondary biology students. Chapters 2 & 3 introduce the variation theory of learning to show how useful it is in the secondary biology classroom, with many examples. Chapter 4 presents a lesson planning framework for enhancing meaning-making in biology lessons. Chapter 5 discusses two concepts that can unify all the topics of a curriculum. >I. Seeing biology through a thermodynamic systems lens and >II. Seeing biology through an ecological-evolutionary lens via the concept of life strategies. Chapter 6 introduces a taxonomy of understanding biology that can be shared with students and used to assess their answers. Chapter 7 explores the how and why of embedding the taxonomy into biology curricula. I give examples of how I use it and examples of my students’ answers. Chapter 8 concludes by considering the complexity of our subject and the classroom.