Forensic Science Lesson Plans

Forensic Science Lesson Plans

 

A lesson plan is a teacher's detailed description of the course of instruction for an individual lesson. While there is no single way to construct one, most lesson plans contain some or all of the elements of the course. In today's modern teaching style, individual lesson plans are often inappropriate. Specific objectives and timelines may be included in the unit plan, but lesson plans are more fluid as they cater to the students needs and learning styles.

Students are asked to engage in problems or inquiry learning. Rigid lesson planning with title, objectives and specific outcomes within certain time constraints, often no longer fit within modern effective pedagogy.

Today, formal lesson plans are often required only by student teachers, who must be demonstrably familiar with the components of a lesson, or by teachers new to the field, who have not yet internalized the flow of a lesson.

Given below are a series of different lesson plans which may appeal to science professors, currently teaching forensic science in class, involving a range of difficulties and different aspects of forensic science.

Bloodstain Analysis involves introducing students to some of the techniques used by forensic scientists for analyzing blood, the concept of blood type, and providing opportunity for students to practice critical thinking skills in the context of scientific inquiry. It consists of two parts. The first part is intended to teach students about the catalase test, which is used to detect the presence of blood. While there are more sensitive tests available for the presence of blood that an investigator might use, this is by far the cheapest. Students are expected to predict whether or not the substances provided will be catalase positive or negative. They also examine whether each substance tests positive for blood using the phenolphthalein test. After this step, they open the evidence packets provided and test whether each stain that was found is likely to be blood or not. The second part addresses blood typing.

Hair Analysis intends to introduce students to the thought process involved in developing a technique for forensic analysis and to the physical structure of hair. It also provides opportunity for students to improve skills in observation, critical thinking and microscopy. This activity again involves two parts, which may be performed separately or as a cohesive unit. The first part requires students to examine a given set of hair. Using their observational and critical thinking skills, they develop a procedure to identify hair collected from crime scenes. The second part is intended to complement any crime scene scenario. In this part, students examine the hair supposedly collected from the crime scene as well as hair of the suspects and the pets involved. They use the data sheet provided to determine which suspect is the most likely match.

DNA fingerprinting involves the preparation and conduct of the DNA fingerprinting laboratory. It is divided into the following parts- Preparation of the student materials, plasmid DNA preparation, restriction endonuclease preparation, migration dye preparation and preparation, loading and running of an agarose gel for use with carolina blue stain.

Whether you're teaching elementary level biology, a high school level chemistry class, or you're arranging a physics lab for a college course, having quality science lesson plans is essential to making the class work. Failure to create sensible lesson plans can do more than just result in confusion and disorder-it can completely break down the basic skeleton of your classroom structure. Here are a few ways that science lesson plans can benefit you.

Regardless of the type of science you're teaching, it's nevertheless a good idea to have a sound plan regarding what you plan to do. Some examples of topics found in science plans include field trips, educational films, labs, texts, essays, presentations, demonstrations, and more. Considering that science classes typically involve more hands-on activities than most over courses, it's a good idea to give yourself and your students plenty of time to prepare.

In many school districts, it is required that science plans are scrutinized before a committee before you put them to use. This is why you should do everything possible to plan them out as soon as you can. While it's not possible to predict everything that may happen, it's a wise idea to have a basic plan. In addition to this, you may be required to edit your lesson plan, change textbooks, or make other revisions according to the requirements of your committee.

Once your science lesson plans are approved, you'll find that they're quite useful indeed for a variety of reasons. After all, it doesn't matter how difficult the course material or how packed the schedule, if one has a solid plan to work through, you and your students will be able to triumph over it and you'll all walk away from the experience richer for it. Science plans are what keeps the classroom routine going even when things grow hectic or circumstances make things very difficult indeed.

Of course, other teachers argue that science plans are too rigid and formal and leave no room for growth or creativity. This is why you should try and leave a bit of wiggle room in your work. After all, no one can predict how the semester will go, and you may find that you need a day or two to compensate for discussion tangents, sudden changes in plans, classroom disruptions, school cancellations, and other events. Learn more today about how a sound lesson plan can transform how you teach!

Unfortunately, the USA isn't doing as well as it used to be internationally when it comes to high school science. An international survey in 1998 ranked 12th graders in the USA 19th out of 21 countries surveyed. While that survey is now ten years old, there hasn't been any real change since then. It's high time all teachers had a good look at their science lesson plans and had a hard think about how we're teaching science, as well as what science we're teaching.

One of the problems that many teachers encounter when drafting up science lesson plans is helping students to grasp difficult concepts, and making science interesting rather than something that "only nerds/geeks do". While teachers have a number of potential tools to make science more lively and relevant - and understandable - one of the easiest teaching tools to get the knack of is the video or DVD player - or more up-to-date classroom technology such as online clips and video feeds.

Videos have a lot of advantages for teaching science. With a video - whether your science lesson plan involves an elementary-level Magic Schoolbus jaunt through the innards of a flower or a more advanced animation explaining black holes and relativity - your students have the chance to go on impossible journeys and get a grasp of advanced concepts with their imaginations as well as with the logical parts of their mind - and concepts in the imagination tend to be better understood and easier to recall.

And videos have another advantage: the rewind button, which means a clip or sector can be watched again and again so a point can be properly understood.

Videos can be fitted into a science lesson plan in many different ways. While the first thing that springs to many teachers' minds when you think about using video in a science lesson is full-length documentaries that take up the whole lesson (or most of it), this is not the only way to use a video.

Use short bites of video to bring variety into your lesson and to let another voice speak to explain a concept. How about playing the segment in Young Einstein where the (very offbeat) Einstein outlines his thought experiment about riding on a wave of light? Or that popular YouTube clip by Alpine Kat explaining particle physics and what the Large Hadron Collider aims to do?

Demonstrations. Some experiments just can't be done in your classroom. Either you don't have the equipment or the experiment is too potentially dangerous to leave in the hands of a room full of fidgety adolescents. But you can show someone else doing the experiment on video quite safely and cheaply.

Analysis. Just say your science lesson plan for today was on animal adaptations. After teaching the main points, you can then show a clip of one or two animals in action (you could try leaving the sound off as a way of focusing your students on what they can see and notice for themselves rather than relying on what the presenter tells them) and get your class to list all the specialised adaptations the animal they watched has (e.g. the cheetah is spotted to give it camouflage, it has long legs to help it run fast, etc.)

What you shouldn't do is just mindlessly plug and play, leaving your students to watch the video while you catch up on a little grading or other paperwork. The most valuable and affordable resource for enhancing your classroom lessons is educational videos and DVDs. So make sure you're using video the right way and see immediate benefits in your students' engagement, retention and test performance by clicking here. Are you using them as well as you could?