Difference Maker: Enacting Systems Theory in Biology Teaching

by Christian Moore-Anderson

"Rarely have I been so convinced by the power of a new theoretical underpinning for a pedagogical technique such as the one presented here." —School Science Review; issue 393

From the author of Biology Made Real, Difference Maker reveals how to teach with students rather than merely teach to them. Without slides or worksheets, it shows how to provoke understanding through diagrams and dialogue. It brings forth a distinct teaching approach.

Inside you’ll find:
• The recursive teaching model. An evidence-and-theory informed model for co-constructing meaning with students rather than just telling them or having them discover alone.
• Detailed examples of real lessons. The exact diagrams I’ve drawn in lessons and how I’ve built them step by step with students. Plus the questions I’ve asked, at what point in the lesson, and why.
• A theory-informed how-to guide for planning explanations. How to explain biological concepts by applying the variation theory of learning and enactive cognitive science. The resulting heuristic cuts planning time while vastly improving students’ understanding.
• A theory-informed how-to guide for adaptive teaching. Adapting is essential in the moment as you never know how students will interpret a new explanation. With an original model for productive conversation, I unveil the types of questions that generate understanding and rich feedback for the teacher. These looping conversations trigger a coordinated co-regulation between teacher and students, ensuring mutual understanding before moving forward.
• A theory-informed how-to guide for co-constructing stock and flow diagrams. There are several benefits: 1. building these models clarifies your understanding to yourself and your students, and 2. teaching becomes more conceptual, conversational, adaptive, and enjoyable. I show how to read, design, and teach with them through detailed lesson examples. Plus an appendix of 37 diagrams I’ve used with my classes.
• A new model of curricular content: metacontent. The curriculum is not just a list of content of equal weight. There are fundamental ideas that give meaning to the rest of the curriculum. By including this metacontent in teaching, a shared way of seeing and talking about our subjects emerges.
▹ The first type of metacontent I explain is a set of principles that I share with students and discuss during every topic. These unifying principles avoid the feeling that biology is just a lot of facts to learn.
▹ The second type is understanding understanding itself. I share a taxonomy of understanding that allows students to grasp what I expect of them in every topic. I provide example sentences for each level of understanding, questions I’ve asked to test my students’ understanding, and answers my students have given.
• A way of seeing and being. Rather than a training manual with activities to follow, this book provides teachers with a new conception of teaching, learning, and acting together in the classroom. The novel insights of Difference Maker will inevitably change your perception.

218 pages, Paperback

Published August 11, 2024

Reviews

[Scott Milam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of thought-provoking questions and framing for teaching biology. Even as a chemistry teacher it's easy to abstract the key ideas into a manner that I can translate within my own classroom. And it's so lovely to see more books being written with a focus on specific content instead of generic education discussion.

[David Knuffke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another solid and well-justified view of a systems-theory approach to Biology teaching by the author. Very enjoyable.

[maria karroll · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, this familiar cry betrays the flawed logic at the heart of how we approach learning.
Revising - the whole culture of it - is in fact cheating children and their parents. It looks like effort, like doing the right thing. But it's barking up the wrong tree, a pale imitation of learning. Time-consuming, draining, expensive (when parents pay tutors for more or last-minute "revision"). Yet it barely scratches below the surface. Even if it helps scrape through exams (oh bless them), what next? What will such a student actually be able to do?

Moore-Anderson cuts through this revision nonsense. Instead of endless repetition, he pushes students to actually think and see how biological concepts fit together in ways that matter.
Biology isn't a shopping list of disconnected topics. Like any science, it follows a story arc of human interpretation and feeds our pattern-seeking brain. Because that's what humans do - we find patterns to make sense of chaos, to find familiar shortcuts in unfamiliar contexts. And those patterns emerge from contrasts that actually mean something. (Nobody compares Shakespeare to oranges - it would be stupid. But you must compare photosynthesis to respiration, diffusion to osmosis, plants to animals, the heart in mammals to the heart in birds or fish, if you want to understand what they are and why they are what they are. Why do birds and humans have four-chambered hearts, while reptilian hearts have three, and fish have a two-chambered heart? What does that mean? Why?)

Unexpectedly and in-explicitly, the book offers solutions to some of education's open wounds:
- Why do kids switch off? Why aren’t they interested?
- The time-effort-outcome imbalance (why can’t they learn if they’re putting in so much time?)
- And what about the families who can’t afford extra tuition - how are they meant to help?

Moore-Anderson’s approach might actually heal these problems. Kids get interested when they have a voice and a hand in learning. Learning becomes efficient when knowledge forms a connected map, rather than a series of isolated mountains to conquer. And parents save money when the revision-tutoring merry-go-round finally stops.

In this book, he’s managed to find the optimal balance between solid theory (his approach is grounded in classical and recent cognitive research, and you can trace any thread if you want to go deeper) and practical classroom teaching, drawn from his 15+ years of teaching experience. He connects serious knowledge with genuine student engagement - not through shallow entertainment tricks, but through co-creation, co-discovery, and real classroom dialogue. What’s surprising is how well this works with normal classes of 25–30 kids (not just up-to-10 elite groups). And how few resources you need, no fancy technology.

The book is a treasure for both academics who want to explore what can be under the bonnet in curricula structured around "big ideas," and for teachers who want to make knowledge coherent and see their students really thinking and grasping the way biology works. (I actually think the approach is not limited to biology.) The book is full of examples clearly explaining the “how to” for many topics and ideas in biology.

His approach reveals the storylines running through biology, gives students tools to continue independently, and makes them the actual masters of their learning - not as a slogan, but for real. They’ll be able to pass their exams without revision, because they’ve understood what it’s about and how to look at it. Isn’t it just lovely?

[Beth Hawks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written specifically for biology teachers, but I'll be loaning my copy to the biology teacher I know.

Read my in depth review on the Learning and the Brain website.
https://www.learningandthebrain.com/b...