Ms. Sanford taught honors and AP biology during the 2019\u201320 school year at a suburban high school in Montana. Her state was one of the last in the US to experience major spread of COVID. Therefore, she only briefly touched on the topic before her school building closed, tying it to her instruction on natural selection:<\/p>\n
As we were talking about the natural selection unit, we were looking at the evolution of the virus and looking at some research coming out of Washington about how the virus changed over time and some of the tracing they were doing of who was getting the virus based on the . . . RNA sequence of the virus.<\/em><\/p>\n However, once the school building closed, Ms. Sanford substantially expanded her instruction related to COVID. She taught about multiple facets of the pandemic during a week-long instructional unit that she adapted from an AP Biology Facebook group she was a member of. In her words:<\/p>\n We did kind of a coronavirus week in AP Bio. There was actually another teacher who . . . had started making a PowerPoint that included all sorts of topics about coronavirus. Everything from structurally what is the virus, to the specific coronavirus, to how you get it, to what treatments were being worked on and vaccines.<\/em><\/p>\n Ms. Sanford noted that her instruction relied heavily on research articles, statistics, and data sets that were being released and updated on a regular basis:<\/p>\n I took [the information from the AP Biology Facebook group] and modified it for an AP class so that they were looking through a bunch of the different things. I would snip parts of the research articles and give it out. And the teacher out of Washington who had made this initially, she had done a lot of that too and then just kept updating it as studies were put out. So they were looking at some of the primary research in an easy-to-swallow chunk with links to the actual journal articles that things were coming out of. . . . Even talking about some preprint articles, because there was a lot that was coming out, and some of the statistics they\u2019d heard in the news versus what was in the original research articles on all those topics.<\/em><\/p>\n Ms. Sanford also provided opportunities for her students to apply what they were learning from the emerging research they examined. For example, she asked her students to seek out information from popular media sources and use scientific evidence from research to refute false claims. As she explained:<\/p>\n The last thing as a part of this unit was they had to go spot fake news. So they had to go and find popular media, and it could have been social media, it could have been newspaper, whatever, and find the fake news, explain why it was fake news, and then cite evidence from actual scientific articles . . . in terms of why it was fake news.<\/em><\/p>\n In addition, Ms. Sanford had her students create informational videos about COVID and share them with members of their families. In her words:<\/p>\n They had to make a video, and they had to get on and explain something about the coronavirus from what they learned to their parents. So, they were teaching their family members.<\/em><\/p>\n Although Ms. Sanford was able to access many COVID resources and lesson ideas from the AP Biology Facebook group, she noted that teachers would have benefitted greatly if they had access to comprehensive repositories of information that were applicable to the grade levels they teach. As she said:<\/p>\n That one teacher [on Facebook] who had done all the work to put so much information in that one PowerPoint was so helpful. And so once I found that, I didn\u2019t really search a lot of other places because that was being updated every two days. And so that information was there, and if I had a question on a topic, I\u2019d look for things myself. But having a hub for educators, somewhere that has current research articles [would have been helpful.] We just don\u2019t have time to do that. . . . For coronavirus, I\u2019m guessing that the majority of biology teachers are at least somehow teaching it in spurts, and the information is changing so quickly that it would be nice to have a spot to go that information is there without searching through and finding the information that\u2019s most relevant when you have to pare it down to what a high school student can understand.<\/em><\/p>\n\n