One Concept, Whole Unit

Something has been quietly shifting in the way I plan units this spring. In Neuroscience, it is action potentials. In Chemistry, it is single replacement. One concept sits at the center, and everything else is gravity around it. Pathology spins off the anchor. Case studies orbit it. Even the off-the-wall connections (an opioid called Journavx, a periodic paralysis case, a Play-Doh battery that lights a red LED but not a green one) end up tracing back to the same epicenter.

I think I am starting to understand what critical thinking actually looks like in a classroom. It might be this. The ultimate concept map. One idea, deeply, with everything radiating outward.

The Epicenter Concept

In Neuroscience this week, the action potential opened up so much room. Opioid addiction, dopamine, the new pain drug Journavx, periodic paralysis as a potassium channel disruption, multiple sclerosis as a story of myelin and demyelination. Each new topic was not a new unit. It was a new orbit around the same gravitational core.

The students saw it too. Once they understood the action potential well enough, they could predict what would go wrong in every disease we encountered. Sodium channel mutation? They knew the firing pattern would change. Demyelination? They knew the signal would slow or fail. The anchor was doing the work. I was just pointing at the orbit.

Synaptic connections is the other anchor. Once you have it, addiction makes sense. Reward circuits make sense. So much of human behavior makes sense. Two anchors. A whole semester.

The pattern: Teach one thing well, and let everything else spin off it. The concept map is not the product. The concept map is the thinking.

Inquiry Before the Explore

I have been pushing the engage phase harder this year. Not as a hook, but as a genuine hypothesis-forming moment that runs underneath the whole exploration. The students should already be reasoning before they touch the lab materials.

In Chemistry, we did this with single replacement reactions. I put the reaction of copper and silver nitrate on a time-lapse loop and asked students to watch and guess what was happening. They debated the colors. They argued about what was forming. Then I challenged them to set up the same reaction themselves, also on time-lapse. The engage moment was already an exploration.

In Neuroscience, we used a multiple sclerosis case study to launch into brain anatomy. Students started with a patient profile (blurry vision, balance issues, right-side weakness) and used the symptoms to hypothesize which parts of the brain might be affected. From there, they did a sheep brain dissection, located the regions they had predicted, and pulled small biopsies into labeled tubes. The dissection was not a separate event. It was the test of their hypothesis.

The Play-Doh battery moment was unplanned but landed beautifully. Students built a battery from Play-Doh, zinc, and copper chips, and tried to light an LED. The red one lit. The green one would not. They started hypothesizing on their own, connecting it back to the flame test activity we did at the beginning of the year. Lower energy required for red excitation versus green. I had not planned the through-line. The anchor concept did it for me.

Build the Tool, Not the Workaround

Two more apps came out of this week, both because I needed something specific and the existing tool did not fit.

I needed a better classroom timer. Not a generic one, just something simple, big, and silent. So I built one. Class Timer took about an hour. It does exactly what I need.

I also wanted students using podcasts as a homework vehicle instead of a textbook chapter. I needed an app that would help them find topic-relevant podcast episodes quickly. So I built Classroom Podcast Finder. Now homework is a curated, searchable, audio experience instead of a static page.

And inside Spark Learning's Inquiry Studio, I figured out how to generate a QR code for the lecture video and place it directly on the student handbook. That changed everything for the flipped classroom. Students watch the video during class, on their own devices, while I stay in the room. They check in with me when they finish. The video becomes personal again. The structure stays. I do not have to chase anyone down.

The shift: The flipped classroom always had a logistical problem. The video lived outside class. The accountability lived nowhere. Bringing the video back into the room, with a QR code on the page, fixes both.

Two old blog posts felt newly relevant this week as I worked through this. The Explore-Flip-Apply theoretical framework is the structure. A pedagogy-first approach to the flipped classroom is the why. Worth a re-read if it has been a while.

A Question for the Chemistry Crowd

One thing I keep turning over: are we teaching mole conversions and dimensional analysis the way we do because it is genuinely the best path, or because it is the aesthetic we inherited? I am not arguing for tossing it. But I am wondering if we are sometimes loyal to old methods at the expense of student access. Worth thinking about. I do not have an answer yet.

I will leave you with this. The anchor concept does not just structure the unit. It structures the thinking. And maybe that is what we have been chasing all along.

Resources

Explore-Flip-Apply theoretical framework

A pedagogy-first approach to the flipped classroom

Classroom Podcast Finder

Class Timer

Opal (Google's mini app maker), exploring how it fits

Springer paper on emotional regulation