{"id":4919,"date":"2015-02-23T16:20:29","date_gmt":"2015-02-23T22:20:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kabt.org\/?p=4919"},"modified":"2015-02-23T16:20:29","modified_gmt":"2015-02-23T22:20:29","slug":"my-biology-objectives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kabt.org\/?p=4919","title":{"rendered":"*My* Biology Objectives"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unless you lucked into being one of my students, you have probably never laid eyes on my course objectives. But today, I am releasing them to the public in all their glory. My reason? Because I know they can be better and they’ve been mine too long for me to see them with fresh perspective. If you can use them, great. If you can improve them, even better. If you can’t use them, perfect, please tell me that too. With that being said, first let me get some a couple things out of the way.<\/p>\n

First,\u00a0acknowledgments<\/b><\/span>. The template for the layout of these objectives comes from Cindy Gay. I loved her layout and simple way of organizing concepts. She is an incredible teacher and I don’t want any credit for the organization. Secondly, I’ll credit my high school for providing some objectives and College Board for providing some of the essential knowledge and big idea concepts. They also provided good scaffolding for me in putting these together.<\/p>\n

I’ll also provide some context<\/strong>. These are the learning objectives for my freshman general biology class. For what it’s worth mentioning, I’m not sure how these would look “different” for an honors class. In some way that is a loaded statement to me that involves the discussion and analysis\u00a0of what it means to be a “general” or “honors” students. That may be a post for another day (feel free to start the discussion). These are handed to students on the first day of a new “Big Idea” (the breakdown of how the document is laid out is below) and they use them throughout the rest of the unit. I put them on different colored paper and it’s in landscape, both of which are to emphasize the importance of this document.<\/p>\n

Where<\/strong> did I get these objectives from? I got the big ideas and essential knowledge concepts from the\u00a0College Board Standards for College Success<\/a> (Life Science portion). These were written by College Board in 2009 as prerequisite knowledge before heading into AP.\u00a0Now, is College Board a perfect source for content standards? No. But I do like as an AP Biology teacher that I can hold students to standards that can align with AP Biology so that my students can have a good foundational understanding while also being prepared for higher level science classes. It’s also nice for me to use similar terminology with both my freshman and AP classes, such as objective, big idea, essential knowledge, etc.<\/p>\n

So finally, before I unveil these statements I want to set up some ground rules and requests:<\/p>\n