Teaching Thinking Skills + Human Anatomy

I had a chance to visit a middle school science class last Tuesday. The students were learning about systems in the human body (respiratory, circulatory, muscular, skeletal), and the teacher wanted to infuse thinking skills in this lesson. He used several of the Patterns of Thinking Guiding Questions to probe their thinking:

• What are the parts of this system?
• How does this part relate to that one?
• What would this process look like from an oxygen molecule's point of view?

The students came up with some interesting insights into their bodies. In this video clip, they notice that the same parts that connect the respiratory and circulatory systems also connects the circulatory and skeletal systems.

When I visited earlier, I asked the teacher what students struggled with in the past. He said that, while they were able to list the parts of the body and categorize them into systems, students had trouble explaining the relationships among these systems.

To address this, the teacher used some interesting procedures. He broke students into 4 groups, with each group focusing on 1 system. Students were comfortable with this task. Their only struggle was to describe how the parts within the system related to one another. How do the bones and soft tissue relate? What does the diaphram do for the lungs, and vice versa?
Each group built an elaborate model of their system like this:
As the group finished the model of their system, the teacher challenged them to connect their system to one at a neighboring table. He had two of the groups physically move their model over and find relationships between them:


Students initially wanted on to name the anatomical part that connected the two systems (blood vessels connect the respiratory and circulatory systems). By using the Guiding Questions, though, they were soon explaining what each system does for the other like this:

Soon, students were looking for connections with the other table. What does the skeletal system do for the circulatory system? How does the respiratory system relate to the muscular system?

This was the moment of truth - when every student looked for connections among all of the systems they had studied in isolation.


At the end of the lesson, the teacher asked students what all of these systems were a part of. "That's easy!" they said. "It's all part of the human body." But as the teacher asked them to think at larger and larger scales, the students were challenged to think.

• If we had many humans, what would they be a part of?
• If we had many different populations, what would they be a part of?
  

This summary activity helped students connect what they are learning in this particular unit (the human body) to the larger themes that they learn throughout the year.

Mr. Devoe's class also posted to their blog about the lesson.