Biology Made Real: Ways of Teaching That Inspire Meaning-Making

By Christian Moore-Anderson

'This outstanding book... deserves to be very widely read. I hope it makes a major contribution to how school biology is taught.'
—Dr Michael J. Reiss, Professor of Science Education, University of London

'This is a book that all teachers, not just biology teachers should read.'
—Ben Strathearn-Burrows, Head of Biology, Emanuel School

Introduction
I've been motivated to discover what biology is to us as humans. What it means to understand biology, and how I could make it meaningful for my students. I've read as much as I could and reflected, I've discussed and listened, I've taught and observed. While it doesn't cover all aspects of biology education, this book is about sharing what I've learnt on my journey of synthesising and trialling ideas with my secondary-school mixed-attainment biology classes.

'Not only is this book likely to change how you teach biology but also how you perceive yourself within the living world.'
—Dr Alex Sinclair, Institute of Education, St Mary's University, Twickenham

What you'll find inside:

A vision for an integrated and meaningful biology education.

A framework for teaching for meaning-making, which cuts planning time.

Ways of creating a unified narrative across disparate topics.

A taxonomy of understanding that unlocks problem-solving with minimal workload.

Tried and tested examples from mixed-attainment biology classrooms.

Chapter 1: Meaningful biology relates principally to organisms:
This sets the scene for the book. It brings together many threads to define what I see as most meaningful to secondary biology students. And therefore what we could do about it when designing our lessons & curricula and thinking about how students progress through their biology education. Planning for meaning-making has vastly enhanced interest and motivation to learn in my classroom.

Chapters 2 & 3: Teaching for meaning using variation theory:
Next I introduce a powerful—relatively unknown and often misunderstood—pedagogical theory. Variation theory. In these chapters I set out to show how useful it is—and easy to use—in the secondary biology classroom, with many examples.

Chapter 4: How to integrate organisms, ecology & evolution:
Now I pull together the previous chapters to present a new framework for teaching for meaning-making that cuts planning time & focuses on biology.

'An excellent text demanding we think not just about what we teach but also why and how.'
—Dr Paul Ganderton, Consultant and researcher

Chapter 5: Concepts of the organism that unite a biology course:
Here I discuss two concepts that I think can unify all the topics on the curriculum.
1. Seeing biology through thermodynamic systems lens and
2. Seeing biology through an ecological-evolutionary lens via the concept of life strategies. I lay out the reasons why and discuss how I've introduced these ideas with students.

Chapter 6: Teaching systems thinking to help students see interconnectedness:
I show how stock and flow diagrams are very useful for the biology classroom and give examples. Next, I introduce a new taxonomy of understanding biological systems that unlocks problem-solving.

Chapter 7: Establishing a thinking classroom:
This chapter is focused on the whys and hows of embedding the taxonomy into biology curricula. I give examples of how I use it and examples of my students answers from lower and upper secondary courses.

Chapter 8: Navigating classroom and biological complexity:
This chapter rounds up the book by considering the complexity of our subject and the classroom.

'Biology Made Real comes with an education health warning—be prepared to have your beliefs challenged.'
—Dr Alex Sinclair

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Moore-Anderson
• Release date: Apr 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215315521

Book preview

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Biology Made Real

Ways of teaching that inspire meaning-making

You can find me at [e-mail] or @CMooreAnderson on Twitter

Christian Moore-Anderson: Author & images

Blanca Martínez Valiente: Book design & cover design

Teresa Such Ferrer: Cover illustration of Posidonia seagrass

Copyright © 2023 Christian Moore-Anderson

1.

Meaningful biology relates principally to organisms

‘The fundamental problem in all education is that learners are too often swimming in a sea of meaninglessness, engaged primarily in rote learning.’

—Joseph Novak (2010, 65).

Some years ago, early in my career, I stood in front of an eager Year 7 class (11 years old) and was excited to begin our first biology topic: cells. Why this topic? Because that’s what everyone seemed to do. Anyway, it wasn’t long until their body language and facial expressions stopped me in my tracks. It was all meaningless for them. I have more memories like this. I once chatted to a keen science student who had joined our college (aged 16) and was studying physics but not biology. Because he saw biology as principally descriptive—it was just about names and functions—and had no exciting frontiers. A tutor once mentioned to me that a student I had didn’t like biology because they saw it as simple memorisation. Many teachers I chat to often think back to their biology courses in similar ways—as a bank of facts. Some even recall them to me without much of an idea as to what they mean. On social media I’ve come across physics and chemistry teachers (even biology teachers sometimes) complaining of how teaching biology is just telling’ and how they long to return to a ‘real science’ (i.e. chemistry or physics) in which students have to ‘think’.

These and many similar experiences have weighed on my mind. They motivated me to discover what biology is to us as humans. What it means to understand biology, and how I could make it meaningful for my students. I read as much as I could and reflected, I discussed and listened, I taught and observed. While it doesn’t cover all aspects of biology education, this book is about sharing what I’ve learnt on my journey of synthesising and trialling ideas with my secondary-school mixed-attainment biology classes.

In search of meaning

In recent publications, such as Harlen et al.’s ‘Big Ideas’ (2010; 2015) of science, and the Royal Society of Biology’s ‘Big Questions’, there has been a move in biology education to organise the details that students learn around bigger ‘wholes’. This means that the course contents in biology represent the parts that come together and constitute a bigger and more general understanding of the world. Harlen et al. (2010, 1–2) wrote that:

‘Students are widely reported as finding their school science not relevant or interesting to them. This is certainly their perception of it, whatever the reality. They appear to be lacking awareness of links between their science activities and the world around them. They don’t see the point … Part of the solution to these problems is to conceive the goals of science education not in terms of the knowledge of a body of facts and theories but a progression towards key ideas which together enable understanding of events and phenomena of relevance to students’ lives during and beyond their school years’.

I feel that the big ideas concept has helped curricular thinking in biology, but it’s a first step. ‘Big Ideas’ represent goals, end points, but not visions of how to get there. There is no framework for the teaching and learning of such things, but this is what I hope to contribute to in this book.

A central problem in biology education is that much of what students learn is by rote. Rote learning occurs through memorisation and leads only to the ability to recall (Ausubel 2000; Fiorella and Mayer 2015). It’s more common than teachers think. This is because getting questions right, saying the right thing at the right time, and the general enthusiasm students can show from succeeding, can all mask a general meaninglessness. Students become well trained at acting in a successful manner in school. To succeed is often to remember and to say it like it is in the textbook, or revision guide, or in the notes, or how the teacher said it. If, as a teacher, you don’t search for meaning-making in your students, it’s hard to notice this problem. Once you do though, it can be enlightening. Verifying what students are seeing will be a regular theme in this book but let me give an example of where my teaching changed.

It started when I chose to listen more to my students. I stripped my lessons down to the essentials. Gone were the worksheets and projected presentations. Instead, it’d just be me, my students, biology, and my own hand-drawn diagrams—plus any images or videos to illustrate what I couldn’t. Diagrams are beneficial because you can build them while responding to your students, and they occupy two dimensions of space—writing and speech are forced into a linear one dimension (Caviglioli and Goodwin 2021). When you strip everything back, you expose the teaching and learning for what they are. And this way you come to notice more things. One thing I came to realise was that students needed time to mentally wrestle with what they’d been exposed to. Sometimes they just needed to comment something to a partner or just talk through it. Instead of jumping straight into answering questions, students could think about their own understanding. Afterwards I would take any questions that we’d discuss as a class. And their questions are often very revealing.

The technique I’ve used with students is called self-explanation, and I now use it in most lessons. Self-explanation is one of Fiorella and Mayer’s eight generative learning strategies (2015). Building on the work of Wittock (1974; 1978; 1989), they see ‘meaningful learning [as] a generative activity in which the learner actively seeks to make sense of the presented material’ (2015, 1). As with other cognitive scientists, they distinguish between rote learning and what they call generative learning. Generative learning entails both the remembering and making sense of information so that the learner is enabled in solving new problems later in time. In short, they see meaningful learning much like others discussed in this book; it’s something that should allow transfer of learning. They also see motivation, and metacognition—an awareness of one’s own thinking and learning—as key to meaningful learning. They present their model as ‘SOI’, for selecting, organising, and integrating. This involves ‘selectively’ attending to information, ‘organising’ by generating relations between concepts and ‘integrating’ this with a learner’s prior knowledge and experience.

The research suggests that self-explanation is especially useful for learning conceptual knowledge and making sense of diagrams (Fiorella and Mayer 2015). This makes it a perfect addition to a biology lesson. My students have a copy of the diagrams I’ve drawn and taught. I tell students to imagine a friend had missed the lesson and they asked them to explain the diagram. This stops them just reading and repeating. I also ask them to do it silently in their mind, and it’s quite easy to see when the majority are finished. It only takes a few minutes but gives students some time to think it over, to ruminate and ponder, and realise what they don’t yet understand. Then, they can reveal to me their doubts, and I can begin glimpsing meaningful learning.

Teaching and learning in the classroom could be seen as cycles of meaning-making and revealing what meaning has been made. This sets up strong feedback loops that steer a journey through a curriculum. When they are missing, rote learning tends to dominate (chapter 7). When I first delved into the world of meaning-making I was fascinated by Joseph Novak’s suggestion (2010) that teachers should conduct periodic interviews with a sample of students. Because it was the best way to find out what students were understanding. Without the time for such work, but still with a will to reveal what my students were seeing beyond the correct answers, I turned to open writing tasks with novel questions. And that was a humbling but very informative experience. I could see so much more than through the typical biology questions used in lessons.

What I noticed initially was that the students that demonstrated a better grasp of the content in lessons were much more likely to give interconnected answers. At the other extreme, some answers were more list-like. In one experiment, I sketched out student answers as concept maps, seeing how each sentence was connected to others. The better answers were indeed interconnected to some degree. The worst answers mapped to a central idea with everything else extending from it like spokes in a wheel (for this idea of mapping for revealing see Kinchin 2016; 2018). I’ve learnt a lot since then about how to channel these open writing tasks into something that promotes both meaning-making and the revealing of it (chapters 6, and 7). I’ve also discovered and pioneered ideas for how to teach for meaning-making (chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5), and how to embed problem-solving the biology way (chapters 4, 6, and 7).

However, the big idea that took me some years to grasp was that the idea of connections in itself isn’t so useful—it’s too vague. Instead, I began to see two types of connection in biology that helped my teaching. It was this insight that led to the taxonomy of understanding presented in chapter 6. These two types of connections were those between the parts of a topic, and those that connected to a bigger picture—a larger whole. But these holistic connections were not generally seen in conventional biology questions and answers. And, consequently, were usually not cultivated. So, what do I mean about these holistic connections? That’s what I’ll turn to now. Because behind any good teaching idea, there must be a purpose. In this opening chapter then, I set the scene for the play to unfold—worry less about the details than the bigger picture I paint. By the end of the chapter, I’ll show you where I’ll be taking these bigger ideas in the subsequent chapters.

Meaning is in our immediate world, not in correct answers

Most students can show an understanding of how the parts of a single topic fit together. They show this by answering a teacher’s questions correctly, and it gives a general good feeling that students are learning. But this doesn’t mean that they’ve made meaning of the content, because that understanding of the content could still be isolated from the students’ world. To see if our students are making meaning, we need to look beyond the immediate explanation, and beyond the immediate topic. But to what?

The polymath and founder of biogeography, Alexander von Humboldt, believed that ‘knowledge could not be gained from books alone…. To understand the world, a scientist had to be in nature—to feel and experience it.’ (Wulf 2015, 192) and that individual phenomena were only important ‘in their relation to the whole’ (101). How much of what students learn in the biology classroom do they come to feel in the world outside the classroom? How much do they come to connect up into a bigger picture—a whole?

Imagine you’re on a walk with an idealised graduating student, discussing the nature around you, urban or rural. Maybe some topic about human health, such as a disease, or a tree you pass by covered in aphids, becomes the focus of conversation. How would the dialogue differ to one with a student you felt had less of a grasp of biology but who had been generally successful in school?

In my mind the conversation with the idealised student flows dynamically, sometimes making predictions from the physiological mechanisms they’ve learnt, possibly from the area of immunity, but then making sense of what they observe by drawing upon ecological ideas such as an organism’s life strategy or community interactions between species. They think in terms of the organism and how it functions, but also ecologically and how organisms interact with their environment. They think evolutionarily, in predictions about the coevolution of the populations, or in taxonomic relations.

In contrast, many quite successful students gain understanding of fragmented islands of knowledge and our imagined conversation falters. I prompt the student to think about things we’ve learnt together. They can tell me a thing or two about those islands of knowledge, maybe a mechanism of the immune system, such as antibody production. Yet, they stand dumbfounded when I try to open up the conversation and ask questions such as ‘but what is all that for?’ or ‘but what does all that mean for what you can see?’ Those prompts I have to give represent the missing links in the web of meaning. Like a jigsaw puzzle in which the major features have been discerned and completed but the background is unfinished. The context that gives meaning, the pattern that connects, is absent.

Can we say a student has understood a concept if we isolate it from everything else? Can we say a student understands the digestive system if they can detail the steps in the process, but cannot elaborate on why some animals have digestive systems in the first place? Do students simply need to know lots of things in biology? Or is there something deeper? Something students can improve upon all the way through secondary school that isn’t simply accruing, or trying to remember, knowledge? What lies beyond the content itself?

Meaning is felt strongly in our identity, origins, and landscape

‘One feels empowered when looking at some bit of the immediate world and seeing something that would have been imperceptible without a sense of the scientific.’ (Vogel 2012, ix). Here, self-empowerment is connected with the idea of learning new and more efficient ways of seeing the world. But Vogel also puts emphasis on explaining our own immediate, sensed world. This immediate world depends not only on what we have learnt, but also on how we experience our world—because ‘our world is a real world, but it is a described world, a world experienced by humans’ (Marton and Booth 1997, 171). And this comes with an important warning: ‘genuine learning always relates to the learner’s reality, the world as already experienced. When the whole is missing, learning is very likely to fail’ (217).

What is this whole that matters so much to us, especially when learning biology? Identity. Establishing what we and others are—our biological nature and place in our natural context. And this makes other organisms of our immediate world central to meaning-making. Because seeing what we’re not helps form our identity and seeing how we’re related helps us find our place. Indeed, ancient cave paintings have been considered a central part of a culture of understanding humanity itself via other organisms (Weber 2016). This interest in other organisms starts early. Possibly even at birth humans discern the difference between the living and non-living (Weber 2016). Young children also discern how living organisms, including plants, grow, recover from damage, and require an input of matter (Inagaki and Hatano 2002). And they begin to reason about other organisms, making predictions about their properties and behaviour, by drawing upon their own experience as a living organism and recognising our shared condition.

And it’s possible to see this in Indigenous, or Aboriginal, knowledge systems. In such systems there is a connection between humans and other organisms, the ancestors and descendants of these, and the land. For example, Yunkaporta (2020, 41) describes an Indigenous person as ‘a member of a community retaining memories of life lived sustainably on a land-base, as part of that land base.’ and that ‘What we can know is determined by our obligations and relationships to people, Ancestors, land, law, and creation.’ (273). The native North American, Silko, noted that, ‘I carried with me the feeling I’d acquired from listening to the old stories, that the land all around me was teeming with creatures that were related to human beings and to me’ (Silko 1996). Furthermore, Cajete (1994), suggests that nearly all Indigenous cultures share a set of expressions, metaphors, or concepts that relate them to the land and other organisms.

I also see connections here with how our reasoning and thinking stems from our whole-body experience of living (Capra and Luisi 2014). Lakoff and Johnson (1980) suggest that the bodily metaphors used in science are not a linguist phenomenon, but devices employed for our understanding. Yet, it’s not just our understanding of movement, force, sight, and containers, etc, that stems from our nature as organisms, but also how we’re able to understand the existential struggle of other organisms. Indeed, Weber (2016, 6), tells us that ‘today, many scientists have realised that the fact that we are animals defines our perception in such a fundamental way that we cannot change much about it. We do not experience the world primarily with our minds but with our senses and our bodies’.

E. O. Wilson used the word biophilia to describe this. It is ‘defined as the innate tendency to focus upon life and lifelike forms, and in some instances to affiliate with them emotionally’ (2003, 134). While Wilson describes how more Americans visit zoos than attend sports events, he also comments on our tendency to fill our homes with plants. Paco Calvo even based his book (2022) on the wonder of ‘what it might be like to be a plant’ (3). I doubt many people wonder what it is like to be a population, organ, tissue, or even a cell of a tissue. There is something enticing about a whole organism, even those living at vastly different scales. The biochemist, Nick Lane, expresses his fascination with unicellular organisms under a microscope, ‘the way they move around, explore, graze, give chase or flee from predators, struggle for their lives, or regenerate themselves…this behaviour is marvellous and sophisticated, and takes place in real time as we watch’ (2022, 280). And even of the cells barely visible under a light microscope, Lane ponders ‘if [a] collapsing membrane potential feels like something to a bacterium’ (2022, 282).

What can we make of this? In my view, living organisms themselves embody meaning-making. And, as part of our search for identity and meaning, humans are also interested in ancestry, origins, and descendants. The origin of ourselves especially, but also that of others. This is seen as much in Aboriginal knowledge systems as in Western society—with its interest in genealogy, family trees, and the many DNA sequencing companies that promise to provide a story of your genome’s origin. In many ways, we are interested in origins and ancestry because it sheds light on the nature of organisms today, and, importantly, what it means to be human (Newson and Richerson 2021). And this is exactly what I find in my classroom—my students are inherently interested in who and what our ancestors were.

I want to venture another point of meaning for us—the landscapes around us. E. O. Wilson puts this in evolutionary terms, ‘a prominent component of biophilia is habitat selection’ and that ‘with nearly absolute consistency [natural] landscapes are preferred over urban settings that are either bare or clothed in scant vegetation’ (2003, 134). In short, ‘people prefer to be in natural environments’ (134) where they are surrounded by other organisms. But it must be more than habitat selection alone. As I have mentioned, in Indigenous knowledge systems a relationship with the land is a central concept that is much more meaningful and complex. Indeed, the new and exciting movement of rewilding is gaining traction and interest among people of the West. It goes beyond the conservation of individual species and looks to the restoration of whole landscapes via the introduction of similar species to those that have been driven to extinction (Jepson and Blythe 2020). And again, this is something I have experienced in my classroom, when ecological principles are discussed with a concrete, local and familiar, landscape.

In general, I think this pattern matches well the idea of meaning given by systems thinkers Capra and Luisi (2014, 309), ‘To understand the meaning of anything [i.e. organisms] we need to relate it to other things in its environment [i.e. ecology], in its past, or in its future [i.e. development, and evolution]. Nothing is meaningful in itself.’

Nevertheless, by continuing with the theme of establishing identity, another way of seeing these points is through these questions:

What am I? (The study of what it means to be an organism and to be living).

How did I come to be? (The study of reproduction and development).

Who were my ancestors and who will be my descendants? (The study of evolution).

Where am I? (The ecological study of our place within a landscape and ecosystem).

How should I live with other organisms? (The ecological study of how our actions affect the landscape).

With this view, the whole organism is found at the heart of meaning-making, and should, therefore, be the root of our curriculum, from which everything stems. But usually it isn’t, and often it is ignored. Students are successful anyway in learning and remembering if they care and put the work in, but they likely struggle to find meaning. It’s something I only realised once I looked for it.

Educational literature supports the organism being central to meaning-making

But what of the cell? The ‘elementary particles of life’ according to Theodor Schwann amid the development of cell theory (Mukherjee 2022). Shouldn’t it be the great unifier of school biology? Cells are clearly central to biology as a subject but what’s fundamental to the structure of biology doesn’t necessarily have to be pivotal to the meaning-making of biology students. Instead, the meaning found in cells is in seeing what a cell’s functioning means for how the organism lives—how it performs in its context. Organelles—as important as they are—shouldn’t commence our secondary students’ exploration of life. Yet, they often do. Typically, I do want to show cells early, but when I do so, it is with cells as whole organisms. Unicellular protists that are swimming, making decisions, and living a whole life. Because here there is a familiar sense of purpose and agency.

And what of the whole ecosystem? I have already suggested that the wider landscape experienced by students is a point of meaning-making. The landscape is the ecosystem that is perceived by people, on a scale coherent with our experience with the world. But as an ecosystem is a larger whole than an organism it is further from our centre of perception. Ecosystems are not us, but rather emerge from us. Therefore, understanding them should be helped by an understanding of the whole organism.

In fact, in the area of evolutionary epistemology, Vollmer (1983) argues that humans are adapted to sensing and processing phenomena at the specific spatial and temporal scales that we sense and experience. Vollmer described this as the mesocosm, and ‘it is a