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Nature or nurture? A lesson incorporating students’ interests in a high-school biology class

We present a case study of a lesson that incorporates high school students’ interests in heredity alongside the requirements of the curriculum. This was done by collecting students’ questions in advance and inserting them in strategic places in the biology curriculum, thus creating a ‘shadow curriculum’. The idea underlying the lesson plan is not to change the curriculum to suit students’ interests, but rather to use what students want to know in order to teach them what the curriculum requires. The lesson included readings from a well-known children’s book on twins that illustrates a range of complex behavioural and physical traits, a hands-on exercise in which students externalised their thinking, a class discussion further problematising the study of the genetic basis for complex traits and, finally, research-based responses on the role of environment and heredity in different traits.