musings | teacher feature

The group of third graders gathered up their sweeping nets and collecting boxes and headed out to the fields behind Walnut Bend Elementary School. There, they followed the sweeping technique for collecting spiders that their teacher Margo Henderson demonstrated. It worked! The class put the spiders into the temporary collecting boxes and headed back to the classroom, where they transferred their catch to a larger container.

Margo Henderson with several of her third-grade students from Walnut Bend Elementary School in Houston, Texas.
© Charlene Joachim

There, students observed the captive arachnids and used their growing expertise to identify the basic body parts of a spider. No spiders were harmed. When their observations were finished, students returned the spiders to the field.

In some ways this is a typical day for these Walnut Bend third graders in Houston, Texas. Students in Margo Henderson's class often conduct inquiry-based investigations, making observations and analyzing data.

A wolf spider Margo collected during The Study of Spiders course.
© Margo Henderson

Something set this spider-hunting expedition apart, however. The expertise to help students collect and identify their spiders came from an online course called The Study of Spiders that Margo took in spring of 2000. Margo learned the sweeping technique by viewing this sweeping video (

), which features American Museum of Natural History Research Scientist and arachnologist Dr. Vladimir Ovtsharenko collecting spiders in Van Cortland Park, Bronx, New York.

Walnut Bend Elementary is "wired," and in the 1999-2000 school year, the school's faculty decided to join Classroom Connect's Connected University (CU) and have every teacher take at least one course. Connected University offers online professional development for educators. In late spring Margo came across three courses from the Museum. "I wanted to take courses where I would learn something new for me and have something that I could share with my kids," she explains. So she enrolled in two courses — The Study of Spiders and Diversity of Fishes.

After taking several courses with Connected University that focused on integrating technology into her science and social studies curriculum, Margo was looking for opportunities to learn new content. She was excited to be able to "talk" with people from other fields and have access to the scientists at the Museum through these courses. During both of the courses, Margo completed activities with her students, then shared them in the courses' Forum (a discussion board — essentially the "classroom" space for the online course).

For example, Margo posted the following message in the Diversity of Fishes course:

"On Wednesday I made an overhead for my class of your cladogram to show relationships between vertebrates... It was our last regular day at school, but you could practically see the wheels turning. It was amazing! I'm not saying they understood everything exactly, but they did get the concept... Right off the bat, they wanted to know why you included a ladybug, since it isn't a vertebrate... They noticed we shared more characteristics [6 characteristics in total] with birds (budgie) than the other groups. We had a great time with this activity, and they were excited that they helped me with my homework."

A branching diagram that illustrates supposed evolutionary relationships between groups of organisms. Click to enlarge.
© AMNH

Margo's class was analyzing a cladogram: a diagram that shows evolutionary relationships between species.

This is how Dr. Adriana Aquino replied to Margo's posting:

"Hi, Houston! Good for you and the kids. About the ladybug, very good question. I included it because when we do these... analyses, we need what we call an 'outgroup' as an element of reference... So, we say, for example, 'the presence of a backbone' is a ...novel character compared with the state we find in insects (represented here by the ladybug). Therefore, we can state that the backbone is an evolutionary novelty, acquired for the first time in vertebrates."

In the fall of 2000 Margo's students were exploring the geology of Houston while Margo took the new AMNH online course, Earth: Inside and Out. One of their first activities was taken directly from the online course: "How is the Earth changing around you? What do observations in your region tell you about geologic processes?"

In the following discussion post, Margo explains how she immediately began to use parts of the course in her teaching:

"My class and I worked on this question for the last couple of days, and I think they were actually impressed that Texas is so diverse. Since we live in Houston, this is the area we researched the most. Houston rests on the flat surface of the coastal plan, which is at the top of a giant wedge of mud and sand deposited into the Gulf of Mexico during the Ice Age by ancestral Texas rivers. The kids got a little worried when we read that this 'giant wedge' is naturally sliding into the Gulf of Mexico. I reassured them it wouldn't be any time soon. :)"

See the Fall 2000 issue of Musings for more information on the Seminars on Science. For information on current course offerings and registration, go here.