Pandemics: From 1918—To The Future return to home page
Skills
Skills:
- Skills, Methods, Interdisciplinary Topics:
- Crossing interdisciplinary lines: this course will encourage students to become critical, global citizens as they make sense of the scientific, historical, social, cultural (literature), economic, and political matrix surrounding the disease. Working with these complicated issues, students will be given the opportunity to ask pertinent questions, and perhaps find some solutions.
- With the use of a case method approach, this course will rely upon and improve critical thinking skills; students will learn how to reason from a variety of data (scientific, historic, cultural, economic data) and examine complicated issues more critically. Teachers can create a problem solving mindset for class-work and group/team experiments, research projects and reports.
- By requesting a chapel period, we can have seniors prepare for a community wide update; this could be a productive and purposeful assessment that engages the students and benefits the community. We will share our important findings and discoveries.
- Flexible learning environments for our interdisciplinary navigations: Because we would be a large section of students, it would be best to utilize the space of the library for research, Tisch for multimedia work; room 37 (where the old faculty table resides) for discussion; field trips also become a realistic endeavor because Gerry and Bill both have certificates to drive toasters.
Science skills:
- We will develop critical reading skills with an ability to analyze scientific documents; although there will be some synthesizing information, students will need to develop and refine their abilities to discriminate among various research studies, hypotheses and theories. NB: Watson and Crick's work with DNA;
- We will enhance microbiology skills: culturing and using a microscope to study bacteria;
- We will develop a common vocabulary of epidemiology;
- Retrace our understanding of how scientists work. We will appreciate the cycle of scientific inquiry: Observe, question, experiment, publish. How do we heighten our observation skills (a sense of wonder about the natural world)? How do we learn to ask the right questions?
History skills:
- Research skills that you have learned throughout your high school classes in history; most importantly, we will have to sharpen our historiography skills. Do you know what historiography means?
English skills:
- Critical reading and writing skills: just as we explicate a poem in literature class, we will need to analyze writing for tone, connotation, etc.
- With the SA Writer's Handbook in mind, we will encourage you to refer to the points for clear and effective style in your prose.
Interdisciplinary (21st century) skills:
- Higher order thinking and writing skills.
- Digital detectives: we need you to embrace 21st century literacy; we will probably be creating assessments that require web pages and other multimedia documents.
- We also need students to be aware of how to research the internet for this topic. For examples, what criteria should we use for checking web pages critically? The agreed upon answers will help us make a guide for annotations.
- Check out these other links that host ideas about 21st century student skills:
- 21st Century Schools: http://www.21stcenturyschools.com/. This page also has some good links about authentic project based learning. We see this class as such a project for students and teachers to learn more about the nature of pandemics. Eventually we want to share what we learn with our community at a chapel program; given the importance of our topic, we see this as a meaningful service to the community. (http://www.21stcenturyschools.com/Project-Based-Learning.htm) This page's latest link includes ideas about service learning:http://www.21stcenturyschools.com/Service_Learning.htm. This page on Critical Pedagogy also has some interesting resources for teachers and students. Read it to see how your concept of school can be turned upside; read more if you want to reconsider the notion "of the teacher as the authoritarian giver of knowledge and the student as the passive receiver."(http://www.21stcenturyschools.com/What_is_Critical_Pedagogy.htm)
- Partnership for 21st Century Skills: http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/index.php
- The Center for 21st Century Skills: http://skills21.org/
- The 21st Century Learning Initiative: http://www.21learn.org/
- If we want to use essential questions to guide our curriculum, we can use this page to help us consider what ingredients of a good essential question. http://www.essentialschools.org/cs/resources/view/ces_res/137
Web journals and resources:
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