Ideas for a 7-minute lesson plan (biology)

Hester Prynne

Hello there,

I am new to this forum and am looking for a little advice.

I have to conduct a 7-minute lesson plan in front of a high school biology class as part of a selection process for a teacher residency program. I seem to be stumped on finding an activity that will;
a. be within the 7-minute time frame
b. show evidence of student learning
c. designs lesson to incorporate student interaction
d. encourages all students to participate

I've been looking at various lesson planning / activity books for science teachers and websites with lesson plan / activity ideas, but they are all at least 20 minutes in length or more.

I was trying to think of food web activities, for example; ask them what they ate for breakfast/lunch/dinner, then break down the food products into individual ingredients on the board and categorize them into producers, consumers, etc, and then break that down even further and ask them questions. But, I am not 100% confident in this idea.

I would greatly appreciate any advice!

Andy Resnick

7 minutes does seem to be unreasonably short. I wonder if a possible solution involves a short period of open discussion followed by a vote, for example: introduce the idea of 'phototropism', have the class devise an experiment, and poll the students as to predicted outcomes.

Moonbear

7 minutes is very short to get a whole class involved, but maybe the point is to see how creative you are by eliminating most of the pre-packaged lessons.

One short demo I do with my college students includes explaining the role of myelin on neurons for changing conduction velocity by saltatory conduction. For that, I line them up in two aisles between desks in the classroom. In one aisle, I pack them in all next to one another. In the other aisle, I have fewer students all spread out with big gaps between (you can also have them stand with empty desks in between). I hand a foam ball to the first student in each row and explain the spaced out ones are the myelinated axon, and the close together ones are unmyelinated. Then they have to race...they have to pass the ball to every student in the row and see which is fastest...the myelinated ones get to toss the ball along the gaps. The myelinated one wins every time.

I do a lot of things like that, but in a large lecture usually only get a few volunteers to participate rather than getting everyone involved. But nobody ever volunteers to open my shaken seltzer bottle when I try to demonstrate the role of pressure on solubility of gases in blood.

Something else you might be able to do is a demo like cooking shows are done. Have them do the set up, then pull out the final result already prepped for them to analyze.