Introduction.

 Teachers in NYC public high schools generally teach 5 classes per day.  Each class can contain up to 34 students.  How, then, does the teacher decide who goes on field trips?  The students in my classes who get taken on field trips are those who would profit most from the trip.  This generally includes students who are performing well academically and students whose grades could see some improvement, but who I perceive as well-behaved and trying hard.  I stress to students going on field trips that they will be acting as ambassadors of our school and that people will form their opinion of our school’s students based on this group’s behavior.

 What are we doing, and why are we here?

The targets of our proposed museum visit are those exhibits which illustrate a collaboration between species in some sort of symbiotic relationship or simply a general interdependence between organisms.  Exhibits which illustrate these concepts include the diorama of the Cape buffalo and its attendant cattle egrets, the giant-sized microcosm of soil inhabitants, the mixed species gathering at the African waterhole diorama, the birds’ nests which hang from thorny branches, etc.

 These will serve to provide the students with visual examples of biological principles discussed in class, a wonderful reinforcement tool.  The 9^th –12^th grade students in my classes are generally at a very low reading level, usually testing out somewhere at a primary grade level.  Visual aids are therefore very important.

What content area and standards do I hope to cover with this topic/visit?

This lesson deals with ecology and the interdependence of living things, including symbiosis.  I would start out the discussion of interdependence by having the students offer examples of tasks they could not accomplish by themselves, but could with the help of others.  Enlarging on this, I would elicit from the students how people with certain abilities or trades in their community would work together to make the community function.  I would then make an analogy between shared tasks and collaboration between humans and what goes on in an ecosystem.

 In addition to providing class notes on the board, I would distribute copies of food web charts for examples of inter-species connections, then have the students try their hand at creating a plausible food web.  They would also be assigned readings about the different types of symbiotic relationships (parasitism, commensalism, and mutualism).   Later in the week, I would assign students a diorama to be created as a group project.  This diorama would feature organisms interacting in a realistic setting reflecting their actual habitat.   The students would then have to deliver a short oral report to the class, describing the various ecological niches of the diorama organisms and who eats who.  The students would also have to describe any symbiotic relationships which might exist in their diorama organisms.  I would provide the students with websites which might provide helpful information in preparing their dioramas and reports.   I would also show some videos that I own which teach about ecological relationships.  The Museum has several dioramas which show interdependence of species, in addition to their having some online examples to illustrate this principle.  A visit to the Museum would fulfill standard S2C (interdependence of organisms) and standard S2e (evolution, diversity, and adaptation of organisms).

 How can I prepare my students for their Museum visit?

In order to make the most of our visit to the Museum, I would, as previously described, introduce the concepts of collaboration and interdependence in class a few days before our anticipated visit.  I would  also brief the students on proper behavior while on a field trip, what materials I might wish them to bring on the trip (e.g., notebooks, pens, camera, lunch), where and when we would be assembling for the trip. 

 After our actual arrival at the Museum, I would hand out a guide (which I would have prepared) that would list, in order, which Museum exhibits we would visit and what types of information the student is to extract from each exhibit.  The guide would ask the students to extrapolate on what they saw in the exhibit to how it demonstrates the principle of interdependence.  There would also be some critical-thinking questions at the end of the guide, to be answered at home. 

 The Fruits of Our Labors.

Due to time constraints which preclude an opportunity for a dry run, I will instead predict how our Museum experience will probably have gone, based on many previous trips to City resources.  I imagine that the number and array of interesting exhibits at the Museum would tend to distract the students from the relatively few exhibits I would wish them to focus upon.  One way to counteract this problem would be to bring more than the requisite one chaperone per ten students.  Another way to keep students focused on their target exhibits would be to bring them in smaller and more manageable groups.  The tasking sheets given to them at the outset of the Museum visit will also serve to keep them focused, as they must observe and record certain information to fill in their sheets and answer the questions at the end.

 Teaching outside a classroom setting is much more challenging.  For one thing, other visitors to museums and other public places are a source of noise and distraction, so my students sometimes cannot hear my instructions or explanations of exhibits.   Also, the students tend to get separated from the main group either by wandering off or by other visitors getting mixed into our group and splitting it up.

 I would expect my students to be very interested in the fascinating exhibits at the Museum.  However, due to the aforementioned distractions, I do not know if they would get as much out of static exhibits, passively observed, as they would from a hands-on class, perhaps in the Calder Lab or Discovery Room.  When I take students to the Coney Island Aquarium, for example, I always arrange for them to also participate in a hands-on class in the Aquarium’s classroom to augment and amplify what they observed in the Aquarium exhibits.

 And then what?

After the Museum visit, I would have the students read aloud in class from their task sheets, sharing what they saw, telling what they liked best, what they disliked most, and what they think they gained from the experience.  We would hold further discussions of the principles of interdependence between organisms in an ecosystem.  Finally, I would have cooperative teams of students choose from various “live” soil samples I would provide, and prepare a paste of the soil as we did at Pace University.  I would then have the students set up petri dishes containing their soil paste with and without various forms of enrichments, just as we did at Pace University.  The students would then have to observe and record any day-to-day changes in the population of organisms in their petri dishes, over the course of a month.  They could use various techniques to accomplish this, such as observing the whole petri dish under a dissecting scope, making bacterial smears from the soil paste and staining them, etc.  I would ask them to present reports to the class about what type of soil they used, how they enriched it, what kind of ecological community eventually developed, what types of organisms they found, what was the ecological niche of each organism within this community, how they interacted, and what analogies there might be to types of macro-communities we have studied and to their own neighborhood community.  They would then create a realistic food web based on their petri dish’s organisms and create a poster graphically representing their soil community and the members therein.

 

For print in Word Document format
Visit to the Museum WorkSheet (print)	Symbiotic Relationships (print)

 

About Me

I'm starting my fifth year of teaching at John Adams High School in Ozone Park, NY. I majored in Zoology, and my special interests are animal behavior and ecology. I have taught marine biology, zoology, environmental science, and living environment. I'm a "Critter Person":  Many of my pets find their way into my classroom to help illustrate lessons. I love to introduce kids to "nature", and take my students on field trips to see biology happening firsthand.