I followed up these activities with other activities designed to help and encourage the students to look for adaptations out- side of class. As a class, we discussed adaptations we might see outside of class, including human creations based on ~or analogous to! animal adaptations. Finally, on a Monday at the end of the adaptation unit, I had the students write about any out-of-class experiences they had of seeing and thinking about adaptations over the weekend. Students who did have such experiences were allowed to share their experiences with the rest of the class. Hence the students themselves became models of expansion of
perception. So, overall, the activities in the idea-based class were designed to support students as they moved from having peripheral, in-class participation in the experience of seeing animals through the lens of adaptation to having their own out-of-class experiences.