Candidate's Statement on Teaching - Lee College

needed to build their bacteria. They can seek and trade for missing parts with other teams. Some
parts (e.g cell membrane, genome, ribosomes) will be required for all bacteria, while some parts
are required for only specific riddles. Not all cards have to be used, but students do have to meet
all the requirements of each riddle. Once the riddle is solved, and the cell has been made, each
group will write a one minute paper about how they came to solve the riddle and the significance
of each individual part they used to make their bacterium. For example, a team may receive a
riddle that says:
“I am a tough little bugger that can survive nearly any thing you throw at me. Normally
I don’t like you guys and would rather be out playing in the mud, but get me in the wrong place
(like a poorly ventilated wound) and I will eat you up.”
This riddle should lead the students to a bacterium that has an extensive cell wall (tough)
and can produce endospores (which are usually only killed by really stringent conditions like
autoclaving). This bacterium is normally found in soils (playing in the mud), but can cause
problems if they get into humans where there is little oxygen (like in a poorly ventilated wound).
Once they have built their bacterium, I will let them use their computers or the lab computer to
come up with a specific type of bacteria. This particular bacteria is of the genus Clostridium.
The purpose of this exercise is to better familiarize ourselves with bacterial morphology
and structure. Students must be familiar with the pertinent information and must interpret this
information in order to solve the riddle. Their point of view is important to this process as well
as using the information in order to build their bacterium. The essential concept that this exercise
should drive home is that the different characteristics of different bacteria determine how
individual bacteria interact with the environment (including the human environment).
Critical thinking exercise #3: Microbiology Bingo
I thought it might be instructive to include a critical thinking exercise that I tried without
thinking critically about the exercise. There are several discussions which are heavily laden with
terminology, and students normally just sit and take down the definitions without thinking about
them, or more often, simply glaze over and think about something completely unrelated to
microbiology. I thought that to keep their attention on microbiology I would give them bingo
cards (see attached) with microbiology terminology at the start of class and told the students that
if they connected terms linearly all the way across the card the would get five bonus points.
They could mark off the terms on the sheet only if I said the term. Clever students could ask
questions to get me to say certain terms, most just sat and waited for me to say the term. The
purpose of this exercise was to use active learning to familiarize students with microbiological
nomenclature. After that, the exercise fails nearly all of the critical thinking elements. While
most students did indeed pay attention to what I was saying, they were only doing so to hear the
term, not to better understand it. I think most actually got less out of this exercise than they
would have normally, because instead of listening to what we were discussing, they were merely
hearing the terms. I will therefore NOT be conducting this exercise again.