CLIL - Bird brain dissection
My last post mentioned the recent publication of an article of mine in a local academic journal. The message may have given the wrong impression that I am negative towards my school. I would like to clarify that the article was written one year ago, and many things can happen in a year. One of the greatest opportunities I have been fortunate to receive at Tokyo Seitoku University Junior High School and High School is to experiment with a new teaching method (for me), called CLIL - Content and Language Integrated Learning. I have mentioned it in a few posts in the past, but basically it is teaching another subject area in another language. In my case, of course, it is teaching a science lesson in English. But what made this a little more special was that it was a demonstration lesson for prospective students coming to the school next year. So, that makes them Year 6 students (11 years old). The lesson - dissection of a chicken's head to observe the brain. Yeah!
I cannot take all the credit for this lesson today, as the topic and basic outline was devised by another teacher, Mr Y. I was the English-speaking vehicle delivering his idea. As you can see in the above photo, we chose to carry out the lesson in a regular classroom instead of the science laboratory due to the location of the HDMI overhead projector. The constraint of not having a sink on the bench was definitely a concern prior to the lesson, however we compensated with gloves and working directly on a mini garbage bag. This worked successfully.
I began with a dissection of the chicken head - a very soft, collagenous head that is purposely softened for consumption in dog food. You can buy 15 heads in a can - I think that freaks people out more than the dissection itself. We decided to focus on five main areas in the dissection - the cerebrum, the cerebellum, forebrain (thalamus), midbrain (optic lobe) and hindbrain (medulla). After watching me dissect on TV, they had a chance to extract the brain and stem from the head, as I did, and then dissect the brain to locate the forebrain (thalamus). After that, I labelled the five structures on the blackboard and carried out some language-specific practise. Naturally, the most challenging part was the "r" and "l" distinctions with cerebrum and cerebellum, which needed a few listen and repeats. However, on the whole, they handled the words and the pronunciations much better than I had expected.
Challenges
1. We were not sure whether a dissection was such a great idea for a lesson that is supposed to encourage students to come to our school in the future. The risk of it scaring them away seemed to be more ever-present than attracting them. However, we were completely wrong. Every student was actively engaged and loving it, even though they were a little nervous to begin with. We even had enough for some of the parents to do their own dissection at the back of the classroom at the same time.
2. Simplifying the scientific words. I was quite nervous about the difficulty of the scientific words and whether I could simplify it enough. I chose to use forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain instead of the actual names of the structures to make it a whole lot easier. I accompanied it with a terrible drawing of a mysterious four-legged animal with forelegs and hind legs to assist with the easier naming method. It worked well too. The "r" and "l" practice with cerebrum and cerebellum ended up being a lot of fun, which resulted in a lot of incidental learning about tongue placement when doing "l"s and "r"s.
Overall, the lesson received great feedback and was a fantastic opportunity for me. I am very grateful to be working with some amazingly supportive, trusting and intelligent teachers at the school.
