We are trying to create a learner-centered environment -- here you can see a small group of students gathering data and asking questions of a TA. We want an environment where it is the student's activity that produces learning, where students are encouraged to evaluate their own understandings prior to instruction, and where students collaborate to solve problems.
Speaking of collaborative learning, we are trying to create a community-centered environment, where students not only work together, but discuss ideas in biology: trying to put ideas into their own words and building social connections that persist outside of the classroom. The furniture of the lab puts students into natural groups of three and provides a computer workstation that is integrated into the laboratory environment.
We trying to create a knowledge-centered environment -- we have begun a re-evaluation of the curriculum to emphasize the structure of knowledge and what's really important in biology. We encourage students to build upon and extend their own understandings of ideas in biology, focusing on learning what makes answers good, rather than just remembering the "right" answer.
Finally, we are trying to create an assessment-centered environment in which students make products like those actually produced by scientists: like these figures, produced by students in my lab two weeks ago. Let me read the legends: [...]. These are figures such as any scientist might produce (but hopefully a scientist would choose a larger font size).
In this second transparency, I've tried to pull together all of our work into one example: Underlying everything, is a concept map that was made by a student trying to organize ideas in evolution. Along this side, are images of dragonflies. These are high-resolution scans of live dragonflies that students, in small groups, used as the basis for constructing evolutionary histories. Students then had to compare their tree with the trees produced by the other groups. For this activity, students took their abstract ideas in evolution and used them to produce a scientific product.
