The Biology Teacher's Survival Guide

Book excerpt: This unique resource is packed with novel and innovative ideas and activities you can put to use immediately to enliven and enrich your teaching of biology, streamline your classroom management, and free up your time to accomplish the many other tasks teachers constantly face. For easy use, materials are printed in a big 8 1/2 x 11 lay-flat binding that opens flat for photo-copying of evaluation forms and student activity sheets, and are organized into five distinct sections: 1. Innovative Classroom Techniques for the Teacher presents technique to help you stimulate active students participation in the learning process, including an alternative to written exams... ways to increase student responses to questions and discussion topics ... a student study clinic mini-course ... extra credit projects ... a way to involve students in correcting their own tests ... and more. 2. Success-Directed Learning in the Classroom shows how you can easily make your students accountable for their own learning and eliminate your role of villain in the grading process. 3. General Classroom Management provides solutions to a variety of management issues, such as laboratory safety, the student opposed to dissection, student lateness to class, and the chronic discipline problem, as well as innovative ways to handle such topics as keeping current in subject-matter content, parent-teacher conferences, preventing burnout, and more. 4. An Inquiry Approach to Teaching details a very effective approach that allows the students to participate as real scientist in a classroom atmosphere of inquiry learn as opposed to lab manual cookbook learning. 5. Sponge Activities gives you 100 reproducible activities you can use at the beginning of, during, or at the end of class periods. These are presented in a variety of formats and cover a wide range of biology topics, including the cell ... classification .. plants ... animals ... protists ... the microphone ... systems of the body ... anatomy ... physiology ... genetics ... and health. And to help you quickly locate appropriate worksheets in Section 5, all 100 worksheets in the section are listed in alphabetical order in the Contents, from Algae (Worksheets 5-1) through Vitamins and Minerals (Worksheets 5-100). For the beginning teacher new to the classroom situation as well as the more wxperienced teacher who may want a "new lease on teaching," Biology Teacher's Survival Guide is designed ot bring fun, enjoyment, and profit to the teacher-student rapport that is called teaching.