Hexagonal Thinking in AP Biology

I happened to be scrolling through Facebook a couple of weeks ago and saw a post about reviewing for an AP Biology unit test with hexagonal thinking. I was immediately intrigued. I used to give students some time in class to start working on their progress checks in AP Classroom before the test, but I had several students who were not engaged and others who preferred a quieter environment to complete these questions. Although I love a good Kahoot!, I don't always find them incredibly helpful for reviewing for an AP unit test. 

The hexagonal thinking exercise engages students and makes them think about the concepts we were studying and how all of these concepts were related. I decided that this is what we needed to strengthen our review sessions. I went to Amazon to start looking for potential hexagons to use. In the end, I settled on these cards because there were a lot of them, they were a comfortable size for writing on and fitting several on a table, and they were fairly inexpensive. Because they are just matte card stock, I laminated them. It was a little time consuming to laminate and cut out, but now I have a set of 120 cards that can be used over and over. 

I listened to this Cult of Pedagogy podcast about hexagonal thinking to get a feel for how it might work in my classroom. The podcast talked about students not just building connections with their hexagons, but also to choose several key connecting points to describe why there was a connection there. There are several digital versions that are free to use to do the hexagonal thinking exercise virtually, but since we're in class, I enjoy my students being able to get their hands on. 

When we were ready to do this in class, I made a list of key words and phrases for the unit as well as sets of 5 connection arrows and a shared document for students to share their connections and a picture of their hexagonal web. 

So far we have made hexagonal webs for our Ecology unit and our Metabolism unit. Here is the copy of the document that I made for unit 8 and also the document students used for unit 3.