A Deep Dive in Aquatic Pollution

This week’s task for lab was to tackle the inquiry-based approach in only 20 minutes. Now, inquiry-based alone can be a bit challenging, but add to it the time constraint of trying to capture the essence of this teaching style in a mere 20 minutes? Now that’s a challenge.

At the time that we were introduced to inquiry-based approach, I was in the middle of working on a unit plan for a human impacts unit I will be teaching in my Fish and Wildlife course. As we worked through what this style of teaching entailed, I started thinking about the different topics I wanted to cover in that human impacts’ unit. Already I had an idea of having the students do some kind of research with either land pollution or aquatic pollution, and after looking at a National Geographic resource that specialized in inquiry-based lessons and activity ideas, I was inspired to focus my lab on aquatic pollution.

While I struggled a bit at first in making my inquiry-based lab different than my problem-based lab, I found the rubric that Dr. Ewing gave us extremely helpful in working out the differences between the two. The more I worked through this lesson in planning it, the more excited I got. As someone who is very passionate and nerdy about conservation and what we as humans can do to protect our planet, the fact that I would get to share this excitement with my classmates in a fun and engaging way made this lab a lot less stressful for me.

--

I started off class skipping bell work and going right to my interest approach. I played a clip of a Dawn commercial from the BP Oil Spill as a way to introduce what a catastrophic aquatic pollution event can look like. This clip served two purposes: it demonstrated a relatively recent pollution event and it played on people emotions (as these commercials do so very effectively).

From there I jumped into my lesson, introducing the core of today’s lesson as us taking a “deep-dive” (pun intended) into aquatic pollution via major aquatic pollution events. I gave students sample events they could pick from with the option to pick their own if they felt so inclined, as well as a worksheet with parameters to help guide their research. I wanted to focus on having the students learn about the different types of aquatic pollution though these different aquatic pollution events so that they had a concrete example they could then generalize from. Events had to also be cleared through me, so that I could make sure that the different types of aquatic pollution were represented.

I had the students plan on creating something that they would share out with the class to educate their classmates on the pollution events and its causes. One small benefit to this is the class gets to teach each other so that they do not constantly hear my voice delivering information. Another benefit and the bigger benefit, is that it helped students to discover his information on their own (as is the nature of the inquiry-based approach) with a little guidance and nudging from me which helps the students to retain the information better and understand it at a deeper level.

I was very happy with the engagement in this lesson and I feel like my peers were very receptive to the activity and the content. By putting my worksheet in our shared group folder and being more intentional about asking the zoom participants question, I feel like I was finally able to effectively engage said zoom audience in a productive way (for those just tuning in, working with the zoom group has consistently been my struggle all semester). Overall, I thought this was a great lesson and has me feeling a lot more comfortable with inquiry-based. I’m very excited to do this with my students next semester!