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PBL Unit Name: Taking a Stance on Cloning

Facilitator Name: Kelly Reed

School Practicum Location: Ben Davis 9th Grade Center-Indianapolis, IN

Grade: 9th

Subject(s): Biology

Course Name: Biology

PBL Unit Description & Content Topics Addressed: In this project students will addressing the topic of cloning and developing their own stance on this issue.

A. Learning Goals: Content Knowledge & Skills Addressed (Standards)

  • B.4.4 Use a model to illustrate the role of cellular division (mitosis) and differentiation in producing and maintaining complex organisms.

  • B.4.5 Make and defend a claim based on evidence that inheritable genetic variations may result from: (1) new genetic combinations through meiosis, (2) viable errors occurring during replication, and (3) mutations caused by environmental factors.

  • 9-10.LST.1.1: Read and comprehend science and technical texts within a range of complexity appropriate for grades 9-10 independently and proficiently by the end of grade 10.

  • 9-10.LST.2.1: Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of science and technical texts, attending to the precise details of explanations or descriptions.

  • 9-10.LST.4.3: Compare and contrast findings presented in a text to those from other sources (including their own experiments), noting when the findings support or contradict previous explanations or accounts.

  • 9-10.LST.5.1: Write arguments focused on discipline-specific content.

  • 9-10.LST.7.1: Conduct short as well as more sustained research assignments and tasks to answer a question (including a self- generated question), test a hypothesis, or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.

  • 9-10.LST.7.3: Draw evidence from informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.

B. Authenticity & Relevance (Real-World Connections) : With advancements in science technology, processes such as therapeutic and reproductive cloning are becoming more common. People are now able to pay to get their dogs, cats, and horses cloned and recently scientists were able to clone macaque monkeys. These examples of reproductive cloning raise a lot of ethical issues. Also, therapeutic cloning has the potential to drastically effect disease treatment and donor opportunities. Therapeutic and reproductive cloning are similar processes with very different outcomes. With technology like this, it is important for students to form their own opinions on these types of cloning based on factual evidence.

C. Driving Question: How do we as members of a rapidly evolving society form an educated opinion about cloning?

D. Entry Event: When students enter the classroom, they will be put into groups for a picture activity related to cloning. Each group will have various images of protests related to cloning and stem cells and articles describing a supportive or opposing stance to cloning. Each student will choose an image and explain, to their group, what they believe their image depicts. Then as a class, we will discuss these images. I will also show students short clips of the first mammal cloned, Dolly the sheep, and the first primates cloned, Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, which are long-tailed macaques, to demonstrate that successful animal cloning has happened. These activities will hopefully get students engaged and interested in learning more. The letter from the community partner, Dr. Peter Murphy, will introduce the actual project; students will be reading through the letter and the rubric which will help them form their NTKs list.


E. Benchmarks & Scaffolding:

Overview of Project Phases

Beginning of Project:
•Entry Event
•Students will list need-to-knows.
•Key terms pre-assessment to see what terms related to meiosis students already know
•Introduction to daily journals which students will be doing throughout the PBL unit and turned in weekly.
•Mitosis review, reproduction strategies article to introduce natural cloning, collaboration workshop, natural cloning slide work time.
•Stem cell therapy use by athletes, notes on stem cells and cell differentiation, microscope lab activity to demonstrate cell differentiation.
•Stem cell in the news activity, therapeutic cloning video and discussion, resource workshop

Middle of Project
•Transplanting Hope video and artificial heart article to introduce and demonstrate the potential of adult stem cells.
•Presentation workshop and work time on the therapeutic cloning slides of the students’ presentations.
•Meiosis will be introduced with an acrostic activity, “Fair Play at the Olympics” article, and notes.
•Meiosis review with a web quests, crossing over lab and diagram, important terms activity to help students learn important terms like haploid, diploid, sister chromatids, homologous chromosomes, and crossing over.
•Students will have a meiosis test
•Introduction to reproductive cloning using an article about Chinese scientists cloning monkeys.
•Continued daily journals turned in weekly.

End of Project
•Somatic cell nuclear transfer procedure introduced with an interactive simulation.
•Student work time on the reproductive cloning slides
•Students work days
•Practice presentations with feedback
•Students will evaluate themselves and their group members.
•Student presentations during class
•Students will evaluate other groups during their presentations.
•Daily journals. At the end of the unit, journals will be turned in.

F. End Products: Students created a Google Slides or Powerpoint presentation. They presented their products in front of their class.

G. Formative & Summative Assessment Activities: A couple of the assessments used are attached below.

H. Rubric: Taking a Stance on Cloning Rubric

I. Employability (21st Century) Skills Addressed:

  • Presentation

  • Collaboration

  • Media Literacy

J. Community Partners:

  • Dr. Peter Murphy – Bioethics Professor at the University of Indianapolis | Contact: murphyp@uindy.edu
    Helped revise entry event letter and provided advice on ways to incorporate more bioethics conversations throughout the unit.

K. Inquiry: The goal of this unit was for students to form their own educated opinions on the different types of cloning based on the information they found; this allowed students to come to their own conclusions which fit with their own beliefs as well as the evidence they came across in their research.

L. Student Voice & Choice: Students got the choice of which specific examples of therapeutic and reproductive cloning they wanted to investigate, they got to choose their groups, and the project allowed students to voice their own opinions about these procedures.

M. Required Materials and/or Tools: Students had access to their Chromebooks which allowed them to get on the internet for research and create Google Slides with their groups. Google Classroom was also utilized.

N. Examples of Student Work: Each of the examples provided were from groups that were on track throughout the unit and created very nice presentations and received high scores on the rubrics.