Teaching about Ecosystems

STUDENTS WILL BE ABLE TO:
- Explain concept of ecosystems to younger students.
- Recognize important components of a lesson.
- Develop communication and teaching skills.

GUIDING QUESTION: How can we teach others about the ecosystem?

MATERIALS:
- Wood cookie nametags (circular slices of branches, 2-3 in. in diameter and no more than ½" thick, with a hole drilled in the top for a string to pass through) or clay that can be hardened (such as Sculpey®)
- Markers or other art supplies to decorate wood cookies
- Field Guides and/or list of suggested Steward names
- SECRETS of our Forest/Shrub-Steppe Home lesson plan (Lesson 1: Ecosystems)
- Lesson materials noted in SECRETS of our Forest/Shrub-Steppe Home lesson (Lesson 1: Ecosystems)

CLASS ACTIVITIES:

The Cycles of Learning curriculum program is designed to prepare high school students to teach specific curricula, "SECRETS of Our Forest Home" or "SECRETS of our Shrub-Steppe Home." Please contact the Gorge Ecology Institute for information on obtaining the eight 1-hour lessons. (The lessons can easily be applied to other ecosystems if you do not live in the forest or in the shrub-steppe, and may be adjusted to satisfy specific state benchmarks.) If you choose not to use these specific lessons, your students may instead plan and teach their own lessons in order to cover the appropriate concepts. Keep in mind that in this case you will need to allot additional classroom time for student lesson planning.

Day 1: Wonder
1. Hand out nametags. Explain to students their new role as "Stewards of the Forest." (Substitute appropriate ecosystem if you are not teaching in the forest.) Option: Instead of using wood cookies, students can sculpt nametags from clay. As stewards, they are forest experts and they help the forest by teaching other people about it. All SECRETS stewards teach under code names, usually the name of an organism in the appropriate ecosystem. For instance, a team of instructors in the Pacific Northwest Ecosystem may be named Tailed Frog, Mountain Beaver, Harlequin Duck, and Douglas Fir. Give your students the opportunity to each choose a steward name (looking through field guides if necessary) and have them decorate their nametags with their new name.
2. Discuss the importance of sharing what you have learned with others. Explain to your class that at the end of every unit, they will be teaching some of the concepts that they have learned to a younger class.
3. Pick an activity from the lesson (or choose another appropriate brief activity) and teach it to your class. While you are teaching, the students should focus primarily not on what you are teaching, but how you are teaching. (Choose an activity that will review information with which they are already familiar.) Have your students take notes on what you are doing well as a teacher and where you need to improve. (If time allows, you may emphasize this point by teaching two brief lessons, one poorly and one well.)
4. Discuss with the class what things teachers must do well to be good teachers.
5. Hand out the lesson plan to students. Students should read the lesson plan for homework and be prepared to teach the activities the next day.
Alternative: If you choose not to use the SECRETS of our Forest/Shrub-Steppe Home curriculum, students should design their own lessons to teach about ecosystems or about the information they discovered in their survey.

Days 2-4:
1. Lead your students through the lesson activities in the SECRETS Ecosystems lesson. Point out specific things to be conscious about when teaching.
2. Have students break into groups. Pair up the groups, so that one group (the stewards) teaches the lesson activities to another group (the students). After each activity, the group of students should give constructive criticism to the stewards. Alternative: Have your students fine-tune their planned activity to teach the concept of ecosystems. Students should practice leading each other through the activity, as noted above, and then teach the activities to younger students. Lessons should strongly reinforce the core concept of ecosystems and insure that the younger students have a working definition of this term.

Day 5: Share
1. Your students teach the lessons to a classroom of younger students.
2. If time allows, students should critique the experience immediately after teaching. What was most challenging? What was most enjoyable? What can they do to be better teachers in the next lesson?
3. Optional: Critique, comments, and specific teaching notes may be recorded in student journals, so that they can be reviewed before each lesson.