How To Eat a Virus... BCM's
GK-12 Program
Student Scientists Get Back to Basics at Local High Schools
by Ross Tomlin
Wade Haaland could sequence DNA, but he was at a loss for words trying to explain high school biology. As a participant in Baylor College of Medicine's graduate student outreach teaching program, Haaland found himself in foreign territory the first time he heard the school bell ring at Eastwood Academy.
"I came in with preconceptions about what these kids knew and their interest levels," said Haaland, a fifth-year graduate student in an interdisciplinary cell and molecular biology program at BCM. "Trying to explain science on a fundamental level so that they can start building on to their knowledge base was nerve-wracking."
Haaland's struggle has been shared by a handful of other courageous Fellows who have participated in the Graduate Teaching Fellows in K-12 Education (GK-12) program, to which BCM has contributed since 2001. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the national educational effort pairs graduate students with teachers in K-12 schools. BCM, one of four GK-12 projects in Texas, targets biology needs in HISD schools with a high enrollment of disadvantaged and underrepresented minority students. The youthful BCM scientists serve as role models as much as they do field experts.
"It's a win-win situation for everyone," said Dr. Nancy Moreno, principal investigator of BCM's GK-12 program and an associate professor in the Center for Educational Outreach. "It definitely benefits the local biology classes, and it gives our graduate students an opportunity to develop leadership and teaching skills."
It's not always a walk in the park - supervising adolescents rarely is - but Drs. Moreno, Sonia Rahmati Clayton, and Scott Basinger help the GK-12 Fellows through the rough spots, meeting with them regularly to troubleshoot problems and evaluate their progress. Amazingly, most GK-12 Fellows complete their studies at BCM without any setbacks - averaging 5.37 years to graduate versus 5.6 for the entire BCM graduate school - a remarkable feat considering that the 10 to 15 hours of preparation, teaching, and grading they do every week do not count as course credit.
Funding for BCM's GK-12 program was renewed in April for another five years by the NSF, coming at a time when the education system - particularly in math and science - has several steep hills to climb. For starters, a third of Houston's fifth-graders failed the math section of the 2004-05 Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) exam, and passing it is required before moving on to the sixth grade.
Around the country, teacher-to-student ratios are shrinking, school finance shortfalls are snowballing, and the demand for qualified teachers outweighs their supply. At this rate, the United States, which has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the industrialized world and currently graduates six times fewer engineering students than China, risks losing its edge as a global technology leader, among other fallouts.
While legislators and bureaucrats scramble to reform education with precious few resources and even fewer definitive strategies, the show must go on - in the classroom that is, which is where fourth-year pre-doctoral student Maria Fadri spent much of her time last school year. When not bogged down by her research in molecular physiology and biophysics at BCM, she helped tenth and eleventh graders at Eastwood Academy gear up for their annual biology TAKS tests, even though it meant spearheading tutorial sessions well after school hours. Fadri's efforts have not been in vain: Eastwood's pass rate of the TAKS exam has increased in recent years even as the test's standards have become more stringent.
GK-12 student-teacher projects are featured on BioEd Online (www.bioedonline.org), a BCM-produced educational website that provides middle and high school science teachers with a wide array of free instructional resources.
In his first experience with the GK-12 program, Dan Morgan, a fourth-year pre-doctoral Fellow studying structural and computational biology and molecular biophysics at BCM, worked with three classes of mostly tenth graders at Davis High School during the 2004-05 school year. He and his students participated in an annual robotics competition designed to generate interest in engineering professions. Morgan volunteered his programming skills to help his students prepare for the three-day competition against mostly larger and better-funded teams from other states. The team made it all the way to the quarterfinals, where it lost by one point. The students immediately began planning for the following year's competition.
Erica Eichers, a sixth-year pre-doctoral Fellow in the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics, completed her second year in the GK-12 program and worked with tenth graders taking biology at John H. Reagan High School. Eichers organized a classroom version of the television show CSI, in which her students used gel electrophoresis to identify the culprit from two suspects in a simulated crime scene. At the end of each teaching unit, Eichers talked about possible career paths in science students might consider.
 Fifth-year graduate student Carlos Rivera used infectious diseases as a recurring theme in his lesson plans at E.L. Furr High School. When not immersed in molecular virology and microbiology at BCM, Rivera found time to teach biology to rambunctious ninth graders. His students worked in groups to prepare oral presentations and three-dimensional models of a virus of their choosing. Ever a leader by example, Rivera constructed a viral representation out of candy corns, mini-M&M's, and gummy worms, which was promptly ingested by the class.
Other projects organized by BCM graduate student teachers have included:
"The Elizabeth Towns Incident: An inquiry-based approach to learning anatomy with six lessons, each addressed a major human organ system (musculoskeletal, nervous, immune, digestive, skin, respiratory, and circulatory).
In the "Laboratory Sabotage Scenario," students tried to find the guilty party behind the fictitious mislabeling of lab results at BCM; lessons address molecular biology (DNA transformation, restriction digest, DNA minipreps), blood typing, karyotyping, and DNA fingerprinting.
"Anatomy of Vertebrates" challenged students to create an organism based on structure and function of different anatomical parts and organ systems, in addition to considering environmental adaptations.
 A DNA curriculum unit focused on structure, properties and function of DNA. A patented neurotransmission simulation model developed by a GK-12 Fellow was incorporated into a neuroscience teaching kit.
One GK-12 Fellow worked with a high school student in a BCM lab to develop a project on retinal development that advanced to a recent HISD district science fair.
A Fellow and partner teacher collaborated on a weeklong series of activities for "Brain Awareness Week."
In other words, GK-12 Fellows had to get creative to make an impact.
The project Haaland eventually settled on helped him overcome his early jitters. He found that his graduate thesis - DNA sequencing in diabetes patients - provided the perfect educational tool to bridge his laboratory research to a classroom of teenagers.
"I used diabetes as the underlying motif because student populations with diabetes are pretty prevalent, " said Haaland, who found open discussions about diabetes were a better litmus test of his students' comprehension than their performance on multiple-choice exams. "Real-life applications were taken a lot more seriously at the end of the year compared to the beginning. Some of my students have definitely become interested in science."
Eventually, the only misunderstanding between Haaland and his students had to do with how they addressed him. "When they said, 'Mr. Haaland,' I wasn't paying attention," he remarked. "That's my dad, not me."
|
