Relevancy is often a buzzword used to describe “good” Professional Development (as it was last week at NCCAT). It’s also something that I strive toward when developing lesson plans and engaging students in complex biological phenomena. Relevancy is why I was REALLY excited when I found out that I had been chosen for the “Breaking the Code” Kenan Fellowship. I knew that I would be learning content and laboratory techniques that I could discuss (and maybe even practice!) with my students.
It’s all good and well to describe to students the protocol and reasoning behind Western Blots, Polymerase Chain Reactions (PCR), and Bacterial Transformation. It’s another thing to be able to show students pictures of you (their teacher) performing each of these tasks, or to describe to them how/why you had to repeat the procedure 3 times because you kept skipping a step. In the 7 days that I have been in the lab, I have witnessed and/or completed the procedure for:
1. Protein Purification
2. Western Blotting
3. Bacterial Transformation
4. Growing/Culturing E. coli
5. PCR
6. Making/Running protein polyacrylamide gels
7. DNA Sequencing
Almost all of these procedures and techniques are things that I talk about with students. However, I had only ever performed 2 of the above protocols. I am SO excited to be able to take my new knowledge back to my classroom and really engage my students with the advances in biotechnology and laboratory science. It could be really interesting to take what it says in their textbooks (which are ~15 years old), and compare those to how scientists now actually “do” science!
Many thanks to the Strahl lab and the Kenan Fellows Program for allowing me to make science relevant for my students!
Love the relevancy in this post! 🙂 Great job!
So glad you are finding connections to your classroom. Love the jesse pinkman meme.