I teach future biology teachers at the university level. They have stars in their eyes, visions of perfect students dance in their heads, nary a troubled adolescent comes their way. You see, my students are all dedicated students who didn't have trouble in school. They learn easily. Lectures are a breeze for them. You could throw them in a dark black box, toss in a text, and they would come out learned in biology. Yes, they are that good. So, they are doubtful when I keep involving them in methods of inquiry, cooperative learning, the learning cycle, and other active learning strategies. do we need to use these? they ask. Our students will be eager to I said, Some will, many won't. All students are not like you. Wait until you are out in the schools and work with the My students went out in the schools and taught. They were surprised by what they saw. They were in diverse, suburban and rural schools. They were with new, experienced, exemplary, tired, out of field and every other permutation kind of biology teacher. My students saw students eager to learn. They saw students sleeping, snoring, absent, invisible, and angry. My students realized that what they were learning with me all of a sudden was making sense. These students would not listen to a lecture, take notes, and fill out worksheets. When my students engaged them in inquiry, the students got involved, became interested and took notice ... well almost all of them. One thing my students did notice is the biology teachers kept spending an exorbitant amount of class time on vocabulary words. They came back to my class and asked Since when did biology class become a vocabulary class? The high school students are not taking the words seriously. They are not learning the words. Why are the teachers doing this? No one can deny the large number of terms found in a biology text. However, is it humanly possible in one academic year, at the college level or the high school level, to internalize all those terms in a meaningful constructive manner so that long-term learning takes place? Paolo Freire, the noted educational theorist (1970), describes these immense number of terms as being contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them their significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become hollow, and alienating verbosity (p. 25). Freire talks of this kind of knowledge not having any transforming power over the students. The students repeat this knowledge, memorize the terms, and become a repository of inert information. Freire calls this the banking system of education where teachers do the depositing, and the students are the depositories. Within this theory, the students take the definitions of biology only as far as receiving, filing and storing the deposits. (p. 26). Without working actively with biological terms through inquiry, no working knowledge emerges. Knowledge only emerges through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry, human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other (Freire, 1970, p. 26). Using the 5 Es learning cycle in the biology classroom is one of the most effective strategies for engaging students in a meaningful way to uncover biological concepts. Students redefine, reorganize, elaborate, and change their initial concepts through interaction with their environment, other individuals, or both while engaged in a learning cycle (Bybee, Taylor, Gardner, Van Scotter, Powell & Landes, 2006). Real learning is dynamic and interactive. Giving students vocabulary lists, having them define words, and regurgitate definitions is not real learning. It is inert. It smells like school, tastes like school, feels like school, and does nothing to tickle the neurons of the grey matter. Students' construction of knowledge can be assisted by sequences of lessons designed to challenge current conceptions and provide ample time and opportunities for reconstruction to occur within the framework of a learning cycle. …