ALPS Collection Active Learning Practice for Schools (ALPS) is a collection designed to help faculty understand and recognize meaningful teaching and learning. Harvard Project Zero resources are provided to help teachers reflect on their teaching practice. A Collaborative Curriculum Design Tool is available to help teachers brainstorm ideas and design curriculum. Courses are available for K-12 teachers and administrators. Educators can integrate these ideas into their practice, working with them in their classroom or other educational environment. The organization of the resources allows various options to view the collection as well as a search ALPS function.

Search Functions The physiology learning material is easily found by typing in either circulation or respiration to Search ALPS. These will each lead to a section of the 8th grade middle school life science lessons by Bill McWeeny, who provides an example of a cardiovascular lesson. This material is also referenced within the Look - Pictures of Practice and the Explore - Teaching for Understanding sections of the website. Bill McWeeny's 8th Grade Body Systems Unit

Core Concepts The Human Body Systems Unit profiled here demonstrates how a teacher planned, implemented, and reflected on his work with the aid of a framework and ideas detailed within ALPS. The teacher designed this lesson about the circulatory, respiratory, and nervous systems for eighth grade. The Respiration Lab activities focus on lung capacity, respiratory waste products, and a lung machine model. The Circulation Lab activities emphasize valves and vein flow, heart beat sounds, and blood pressure. Both of these labs have students collect individual and group data on percent change in pulse and breathing rates from resting to active states. The learners engage in the hands-on and cooperative learning activities with little or no prior experience.

Driving Questions The unit purports to focus on understanding by having students make observations and express how they feel about what they learn. Some questions are asked in closed form that could be adapted to open discussion. For example, a statement that the circulatory system runs in one direction was followed by a question, why? Another question asked students to relate percent change in pulse rate to their data analysis on breathing rate in a prior lab.

Claims and Evidence The resource may help students understand the evidence for scientific claims about body function. The Respiration Lab asks students to compare their own bodies to a model called the Lung Machine. The Circulation Lab has an exercise asking students to collect data about blood in veins depending on the position of a student's arm and to use the evidence to explain venous blood flow.

Examples of Student Work A complete sample for each of the Respiration and Circulation Labs includes answers from one student about the lab. Teacher reflections focus on student attitudes and about what they liked or considered to be fun. For example, the teacher quoted positive reactions to self-directed initiative by the students. He also noted instances of more student interaction - working in cooperative groups during hands-on activities. Some students expressed negative reactions to a video showing internal structures and functions of the body. The depth of conceptual understanding was not always apparent but seemed to depend on the level of questions. Students differed in their ability to interpret results on the percent change in breathing or pulse rates from resting to active states and the relationship between the cardiovascular fitness of a person and these changes. Circulatory System Lab

Strengths The middle school science teacher worked in conjunction with a middle school English teacher. They shared in the grading of written assignments that asked students to reflect on their learning about cardiovascular function. ALPS allows teachers of any discipline to share their lesson plans and student work samples with others. Many examples illustrate backward design principles. ALPS supports instruction that emphasizes goals such as teaching for understanding, critical thinking, learning transfer, and technology integration.

Concerns These lessons begin with direct instruction of vocabulary through exercises and quizzes, lectures and audio-visual presentations, and stylistic diagrams. An alternative approach is to have students first observe, measure, illustrate, etc., and then describe and explain their findings with everyday language. This would allow the teacher to provide the scientific terms for students to connect with the structures and functions that they have encoded visually and verbally themselves. They can then compare their own understanding to information from instructional resources. The rubric used by the eighth grade science and English teachers scored essays holistically but assessed little science content in depth. Rather than giving points for the number of facts or correct sequences, an alternative would be to assess description, analysis, and reflection of the data as indicators of science quality.

Summary Overall this material merits recognition because it shows a teacher in transition from novice to competent to expert working with students who have little or no experience with science being taught through hands-on, inquiry-centered instruction. The model shows communication online to improve teaching and learning.