The "how" is as important as the "why"

One such example occurs annually in my classroom through a partnership with Vaughn Cooper from the University of Pittsburgh who developed the Evolving STEM curriculum. Students perform an evolution-in-action project in which they culture bacteria and in less than one week, witness firsthand speciation of bacterial morphology.

My students also participate in The Clover Project through Washington University in St. Louis. Students collect clover samples from the lawn outside our school and perform an assay to detect for hydrogen cyanide (HCN) production, eventually discovering that some clovers evolved the ability to produce HCN to deter small herbivores, such as snails.

ConnectedBio is yet another evolution initiative my students engage in through a collaboration with Michigan State University and the Concord Consortium. Digitally-enhanced evolution lessons and interactive manipulatives allow my students to make sense of variation among deer mice through multiple lenses: population, organismal, cellular, and molecular.

Getting students actively engaged in examining evolution data is an initial step to building a scientifically literate society. Doing scientific investigations is essential to understanding and ultimately accepting evolution. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming. Teachers need to include high-quality, authentic evolution resources and activities in their instructional practices, recognizing that their high school biology course may be the last formal opportunity their students have to engage with accurate evolutionary concepts before becoming the next generation of citizens, leaders, and decision-makers.