As a teacher, I believe innovation is a very handy crucial skills to have, and this is for two reasons: first, it helps in finding alternative approaches and solutions to problems and teaching, and second, innovation rubs off on students over time as the teacher interacts with them.
Understanding certain topics in Biology can be quite a challenge, especially practical ones that require the use of instruments like microscopes which are not always accessible in rural schools, and this seemed to be one of those topics for my students.
My students and I just finished discussing life processes in unicellular organisms, and faced a blockade when we got to talking about conjugation in paramecium. If you’ve done Biology at high school, there’s a chance you came across this, so you understand why my students were struggling with this - there are too many steps and technical terms in the process. It doesn’t help that the majority of my students are average students and slow learners also.
Anyways, the good thing is that they have a very observant, innovative and creative teacher (yours truly🤓). In the short time I’ve been teaching them, I’ve noticed that they’re more receptive towards graphical teaching methods, and grasp concepts faster when it involves learning by doing. So with this in mind, I decided to transform the lesson into more of a project, something engaging and fun for my students, hoping it would make it easier for them to understand.
I am also one of those teachers that places a lot of weight on group works and presentations, because I believe it creates the spirit of collaboration and team work among my students, and that’s really something I want for them.
I assigned the project to both the two classes I teach. I divided the classes into two groups, and gave them cardboards, scissors and tapes to bring the science to life based on what I explained. It was a sort of a take home group assignment. I made it take home so they’d have ample time to experiment and get creative with what they wanted their presentations to look like. The assignment was simple: with the materials provided, make a presentation on conjugation in paramecium.
Everyone was excited to participate in their groups as we used papers, scissors, and tape to bring our science to life! And the best part? This was all done by the students!
Now here’s a little something they added in that I was totally surprised by – a Lead for Ghana logo. I didn’t know they’d been taking note of the logo on the back of the Lead for Ghana T-shirts I normally wear, so it was a very pleasant surprise seeing that they were thoughtful enough to include that. Not exactly a copy paste of it, but the thought is what counts.
After the various presentations, we pasted each group’s work at the back of our class. I really want this to be a sort of a ritual for us where we paste “arty” representations of our science in our class from time to time.
Most rural schools complain about not being able to meet certain standards of educational quality because they lack the instruments to teach students. This is certainly not a fix, but I believe it is small things like this that we can do as teachers to bridge the gap of problems like this, while simultaneously enhancing student enthusiasm and interest in their respective courses of study, and instilling in them innovative skills.
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