Shaky Scaffolding and Limiting Factors

Yesterday I needed to get a group work activity completed for my Module 3 paper, and after one day of teaching and getting some feedback from two intermediate high classes, I settled on my topic.  Limiting factors (things that restrict a population from growing e.g. lack of food or water, extreme temperatures, and predators etc).  Over the past two weeks I have been teaching about Ecosystems and the Energy Pyramid (mouse eats grains, snake eats mouse, eagle eats snake). The information in the book while very detailed, there seemed to be an understandable flow.  The task for the group work was to identify a limiting factor in a particular ecosystem (Arctic Tundra, Tropical Rainforest, Desert and Ocean) and give an example of its effect. For example - The lack of water restricts plant growth in the desert.

What I thought was a logical flow from predators eating prey limits the number of prey, to limiting factors in ecosystems, turned out to be a tough hill to climb.  I reviewed the concept of poisonous red tide algae, where the fish eat the algae and die and then there is no fish for the sharks to eat, so some sharks may die.  I had 4 Ecosystems and 4 groups, I normally give out one category to each group, but one of the students asked if we could use the Red Tide as the Ocean example.  I said yes and that threw me off and so instead of allocating one ecosystem per group, I just said do them all (3 more ecosystems and 3 more examples).  This class is very smart almost advanced level but they had a great deal of difficulty getting through this. Most groups only had 2 out of 6 answers (2 answers is their normal task).   So what I thought was the Eiffel Tower of Science Information Scaffolding, was actually a condemned shanty on the beach.

With my first dismal failure for the day I focused my efforts and tried to be more clear in my explanations to the next class of intermediate high/ advanced students, and after watching the video of that class I realized I have fallen back into a lot of teacher talk.  That said I accompany my flapping gums with a lot of gestures, but I know now that a simple written example on the board, with me eliciting why it is there from the Ss, would have been so much more successful.  Something very amusing happened in my second class. I asked for an answer from a S who spoke softly.  I couldn't hear her, so I put my hand to my ear to show her "Speak Up".  As she told me her answer bit by bit I wrote it on  the blackboard (BB). I was acting out her answer using MIC and she picked up on this, and mimed the last part of her answer to me.  I cracked up!! That was awesome!!

I realize now that even with my intermediate high/ advanced students, they have the cultural behavior of nodding their head "Yes, I understand", when they really mean "No, I don't understand".  They understood the meaning of the vocabulary word but they had difficulty applying the concepts into meaningful sentences.