The PowerPoint Paradox: Can a website help put students at the center of learning?

The Short Version

This website now contains somewhere in the realm of 3,500 slides and around 500 learning activities to cover the entire span of the IBDP Biology syllabus. With all those slides in mind, it might be surprising to know that one of the main goals of building ATCG123 was to get away from over-reliance on slides in the classroom.

But…can I website full of slides really do that? I’ll do my best to answer that by starting with the 3 classroom scenarios to the right.  Starting with stories of students, I’ll try to explain:

Scenario 1: Clever-but-struggling Timmy

“I just really understand it better when you explain it in detail. I just get it,” says Timmy, a seemingly lazy-but-clever student who knows just how to bait my ego to talk about this subject that I love dearly enough to dedicate a career to.
 “Ok, I’ll explain apoplastic loading again,” I say and go along with it, only to do a double take 10 minutes later as Timmy sits there looking like he’s getting a mental massage. I ask him a quick assessment question only to realize that he’s been quietly daydreaming about the new pair of shoes that he’s been DHL tracking on his phone since 1st period. Timmy hasn’t been doing well in DP Bio. 

 

Scenario 2: Super Studious Naomi

Five seats across from Timmy is ‘Naomi the Studious’, who writes lab reports like a graduate student and has aspirations of becoming a surgeon. She’s one of those who needs to be fast-tracked, because after all, it could be me that she cuts open one day. She doesn’t need the “content + study habits” package that many of her peers do, but she does have a comfort zone that I will try to gently push her out of. Despite her advanced level, Naomi can still genuinely be challenged, and she needs to get in a cycle of challenging herself as often as possible.

 

Scenario 3: Capable but Can’t be Bothered Sylvia

Somewhere between the motivational poles of Timmy and Naomi is Sylvia, who is a perfectly capable student but who would rather not be memorizing stuff like what side of the carbon-1 atom in a beta-glucose molecule the hydroxyl group is located on. “How is this supposed to help me in my future?” she asks, reminding me that she wants to study business and economics.

 

Despite the vast range of ability and interest these three students represent, every one of thesm will take the same exam at the end of their DP experience.

Whatever their motivations may be, here’s something I’ll never stop trying to get them to understand: every one of them can benefit from the skills needed to learn this subject effectively. The foremost challenge of my day-to-day work is essentially to make sure that studying biology – this detail-laden, beautiful, challenging, inspiring and intimidating science – is relevant for all of them.

Why relevance matters more than recall

I don’t have all the answers for how to make the DP biology syllabus relevant for students like Timmy, Naomi, and Sylvia. But I do know that the pursuit of making it relevant for them, and everyone in between, should be the foremost focus of my career so long as I’m working with this age group. Students have to be made aware – ideally, on day one of their DP experience – that they’ll eventually forget almost every detail they learn while studying DP biology. It’s the pursuit of that detail that makes it worthwhile for all of them – those inevitable encounters with inquiring, problem-solving, designing investigations to support theoretical ideas, the practice with communicating complexity in both their writing and speaking, and so on. This must be made explicit to students for them to go along for the ride with any sense of group-wide enthusiasm. 

How to make slides actually enhance learning

So…how and why are 3,500 slides and 500 activities meant to help teachers and students get there? If I had to distill it down to a simple set of ideas, it would be this: organization, engagement, and agency. Organization because students need a consistent and straightforward format that cleanly aligns with the syllabus so they can easily navigate the syllabus from week one of their DP experience. Engagement because almost every student does better when teachers put hands-on activities alongside engaging stories and clear visuals, leaving technical details to support these greater themes. The stories get them hooked, inquiry pushes them deeper into it, activities give it meaning, and the details fall into place along the way. And lastly, agency – because students themselves (more than anyone) need to understand that many learning pathways are available to them. They need to be challenged to make deliberate choices to pursue one that best aligns with their interest and skill level.

Ultimately, ATCG123 was about coupling high-quality, visual-based resources with (an attempt at) hyper-organization, engaging stories, and fun activities in a go-to website. This idea was mostly introduced to me (and still holds true) by Greta von Bargen, who continues to run the amazing biologyforlife.com. And here is where I hope ATCG123 is of some use to both students and teachers: once students know how to navigate the syllabus + unit plans, and once teachers don’t have to soak up all their planning time finding and/or making stuff to teach, then class time becomes more about the relationships in the room. Teachers can spend more time looking at each student and less time worrying about ticking every detail in the syllabus content box. 

 

How it works in class

My classroom is far from perfect and I don’t mean to imply that any website can function as a 1-stop shop for achieving this.

But here’s an example scenario of how the website might be used with a Timmy, a Naomi, and a Sylvia, among others.

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The idea here is that there’s something for everyone. Rather than spending all my time being nervous that I haven’t organized or packaged the resources needed to teach next week’s topic to anyone, I can instead spend my time catering the content and skills for the array of personalities in my class. That’s ultimately the idea behind this website.

Scenario 1: Helping Timmy face the lecture trap

Timmy needs to realize he asks for lectures because it’s the easiest way for him to zone out. It isn’t working. Deceptive though it may seem through teachers’ eyes, he could very well be unaware that he’s actually doing this. So long as we’ve got a decent relationship going, getting him to realize this can come with a bit of fun – I can role play Timmy in front of Timmy to help him realize the absurdity of what he’s doing. I give him the simple task of reviewing a chunk of 20 slides on his own, and then calling me over to explain it without anything in front of him. A bit of success for a guy like him will go a long way, so I’ll try to make sure we work together enough that he can get a respectable score on his next formative assessment.

 

Scenario 2: Pushing Naomi beyond her comfort zone

Naomi has reviewed apoplastic loading 3x and still finds a few small points confusing. But she’s got specific questions ready to go that will most likely clarify her confusion. I just need to make my way to her in the next 10 minutes to do so. Beyond that, she needs abstract, problem-solving activities, AND she needs to be challenged to move outside her comfort zone – which is typically solo-based writing activities. So I challenge her to do one of the podcast activities with one of her classmates. All our podcast assignments must be OUTLINED BUT UNSCRIPTED – ensuring Naomi engages in a live, face-to-face discussion about the content she’s learning.

 

 

Scenario 3: Hooking Sylvia with stories and peers

Sylvia is clearly bored with the details but also loves working with peers and loves a good story. I give her one of the story hooks (currently, I’m in the process of adding one of these to each unit’s Teaching Slides) in hopes that it piques her interest. I’ll then suggest an activity that is perhaps content-light but meant to provoke discussion and engagement, and encourage her to do it with a peer. I’ll rinse and repeat this process until she lets on that she actually finds biology a little bit interesting. If the day never comes, I’ll keep trying, and I’ll never scold her for not being more motivated.

Why human teachers still matter

Students stick like glue to what I consider one of the guiding rules in working with teenagers: Most of them are looking for the best possible outcome with the least possible amount of work input. Indeed, students often have a hard time understanding that there is anything at all beyond content. This isn’t their fault – IB teaching (and really, science teaching at large) still remains a bit confused on where exactly the needle should land when comparing the value of content vs. the value of skills.

Education is notoriously slow to adapt to the times. Still, I think that is all going to change in the upcoming decade as we all begrudgingly realize that AI can deliver near-perfect explanations of complex science content for YOU as an individual. 

The humble thing for teachers of all technical content (STEM) to admit now is that AI has already reached the point in which it can give a better explanation than you can. In spite of that, the optimist in me really does think that teaching just might end up serving as the primary example of where and why human connection is sometimes needed even when a computer can “teach it” better.

Students need complex content explained, sure, but more than that they need to be challenged, and challenges are best served socially – they mean more when they come from people we respect, trust, and enjoy being around. A challenge from a teacher a student connects with will therefore always reach farther and more personally than it will from a computer.

AI will come for our science teaching jobs, too, unless we start emphasizing the pursuit of science as being less about content knowledge and more about collective, collaborative problem-solving. AI is an amazing tool that should be fully integrated into science, but eventually even AI won’t know what to say if we continue to pretend science education is about content knowledge over human interaction.

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What are your thoughts? Email me at sph@wolfert.nl.