Teaching Science 2.0

Alfie Kohn was on Wisconsin Public Radio this morning talking about education reform and the lack of honest discussions about education in the U.S.  It was a fantastic discussion and you really should listen to the entire show here (He takes a caller to task for supporting Michelle Rhee at the 14:30 mark).

I asked the following question (22:30 mark):

NBC is hosting “Education Nation” next week with 11 panels focused on education.  Only one of the panelists has a view different than the dominant perspective on school reform.  The voice of parents and teachers are completely missing.  While looking at the panels, I was appalled by one… “How do we keep good teachers, throw out bad ones, and put a new shine on the profession?”

I assume that this will become a union bashing session.

(1) Why would high-quality prospective teachers want to teach in an environment like this?

(2) Is it possible to have meaningful reform without putting support for teachers at the center?  How did “high performing countries” get to where they are by supporting teacher professional growth?

Thanks

Kohn’s response:

Right. Second point raises an interesting…even when you look at International test scores for what they are worth you find that the countries that tend to do very, very well and are impressive by that nature, like Finland have a complete different approach to education. They value teachers as professionals. They don’t give much homework. They rarely give standardized tests. They start the kids in school at age 7 instead of this drilling little kids and so on. That’s interesting.

But the first question he asks about attracting teachers is a very important element of this. In all of the tough, macho talk about rooting out bad teachers and keeping them accountable not only are we …as a professor put it in the NYT op-ed yesterday… not only are we missing what really maters but we end up with a situation where:  (A) we protect bad teachers as - she [NYT Op Ed] put it - by hiding their lack of skill behind narrow goals and rigid scripts so that really bad teachers are often good at raising test scores and really terrific teachers often aren’t good at raising test scores because they are doing stuff that matters more; and (B) we make it much less likely that really talented young people will choose education as a career. Because they know they are being turned into test prep technicians and who can blame them for not wanting to do that.

Background: Related posts are Here, here, here and here. Read this about Education Nation, this about the vilification of teacher unions and this about Race to the Top. Make sure you read this too - Diane Ravitch on Michelle Rhee

As the opening activity for my elementary science methods class, I had them make marshmallow towers out of 20 spaghetti noodles, a yard of tape, and a yard of string (oops, forgot to give them that).  I gave them 20 minutes to work in pairs with the goal of building the tallest tower (marshmallow on top).  When time was up, they all wanted to know who won.  I did not measure or give them time to look.  Instead, I gave them a new challenge…

This time, I challenged them to build one tower as a class (whole-class inquiry) that was at least 25 inches tall.  They had 18 minutes to complete the challenge.  At that point, I stopped talking and let them run wild.

They made it…barely (26 inches). After completing their tower, we watched this video:

After watching the video, I asked them to discuss how they thought this activity related to teaching-

When teaching you are always striving to get better…you try ideas and they may not always work, but you keep trying different things to get to your goal.

Learn to collaborate and share ideas

Teachers share ideas and build off of each other

A solid base and support help you reach your highest potential

Teachers your students to work cooperatively to achieve what they may not be able to do on their own. It gives the classroom a sense of community by having everyone working together to reach a common goal.

I added-

Prototyping:

As a teacher, you are continually “prototyping” your craft.  You need to test your ideas about teaching and strive for continual improvement.  Additionally, those builders that frequently prototyped, did well on the final evaluation. Your students need to “prototype” their learning. You need to help them through formative assessment strategies monitor their learning.

Motivation:

Extrinsic motivation (ie: candy for behaving well) do not always work well.

Process management:

Classroom management is important (CEO’s with an admin assistant performed better), but it is not the only factor in good teaching.

Architects & Engineers:

Architects and engineers did not go to school to learn how to build marshmallow towers or the Atomium in Brussels. They learned important skills and structures needed to create functional (and sometimes beautiful) buildings.  However, these skills are not enough.  They need a strong philosophical vision for what is “good.”  As pre-service teachers, they can learn skills and structures in methods classes and even implement some of those in clinical experiences.  However, that is not enough.  They need to develop a vision for what they want to be when they get to their own classroom.

What else?

Inspired by this.

I need your help -

We are really hitting hard on science inquiry over the next few weeks in my secondary science methods course.  During week 2, we spent a lot of time focusing on what science inquiry is, how it is defined, and how it is “bigger” than the scientific method described in most textbooks. From here, we will look at helping students develop evidence-based explanations, questioning, and lots of classroom examples.

At the end of week 2, one student summed up their discussion with a  great question.  I would love to hear your answers.

Can we cover enough material and still promote a learning environment that encourages self-directed learning?

Your thoughts?

During tonight’s #scichat, a side conversation emerged about facilitating whole class and small group discussion.  A variety of protocols can be used to help this.

@cookp provided a link to a useful facilitation guide for POGIL activities, but it can be used in a variety of situations.

Here are a bunch of useful discussion protocols:

1. Protocols Part 1

2. Protocols Part 2

3. Protocols Part 3

4. Protocols Part 4

5. groups reporting out

I got the following list of “discussion moves” from a colleague.  He gives copies to his students and expects them (and explicitly asks them) to use these moves during class discussions.

Conversational Moves for Questioning, Listening, & Responding.

1. Ask a question or make comment that shows you are interested in what another person has said.
2. Ask a question or make a comment that encourages someone else to elaborate on something that person has said.
3. Make a comment that underscores the link between two people’s contributions. Make this link explicit in your comment.
4. Make a comment indicating that you found another person’s ideas interesting or useful. Be specific as to why this was the case.
5. Contribute to something that builds on or springs from what someone else has said. Be explicit about the ways you are building on the other person’s thoughts.
6. Make a comment that at least partly paraphrases a point someone has already made.
7. Make a summary observation that takes into account several people’s contributions and that touches on a recurring theme in discussion.
8. Ask a cause-and-effect question – for example, “Can you explain why you think it’s true that if these things are in place, such and such a thing will occur?”
9. At an appropriate moment, as the group for a minute of silence to show the pace of the conversation and give you and others time to think.
10. Find a way to express appreciation for the enlightenment you have gained from the discussion. Try to be specific about what it was that helped you understand something better.
11. Disagree with someone in a respectful and constructive way.

Brookfield, S.D. & Preskill, S. Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms. (2^nd ed). Sand Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 2005.

For my first assignment in my secondary science methods class, I asked my students to read the first few chapters of the draft Framework for New Science Education Standards and complete the “Meaningful Learning” assignment.  Besides reflecting on these, they needed to identify one question that they have.

Here are 4 of their questions:

Thomas, “This leads to my question: how will the new national standards improve our ability to “reach” students and society as a whole, closing the perception of science as distant and impersonal?”

Amanda, “How can we as parents and educators use diversity to heighten science learning?”

Bernadette, “Since children are “natural born learners,” what can we do as a society to promote our natural instinct to learn?”

Brandon, “Scientific definitions are important to know; therefore what is a good technique to have students “know” them without memorization without meaning?”

How would you answer?  Grab one and go (in the comments)!

“The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation,” wrote Samuelson.

With this quote, Thomas Friedman sums up the problem with U.S. education in his 9/11 column, We’re No. 1(1)! Friedman’s hook is that the U.S. ranks number 11 in Newsweek’s list of the top 100 countries to live in (perhaps he should be using education rankings - 35th in math & 29th in science - instead of quality of life).

Friedman notes that, unlike the “Greatest Generation,” the “Baby Boomers” are facing incremental challenges and failing to rise to the occasion…why?

So much of today’s debate between the two parties, notes David Rothkopf, a Carnegie Endowment visiting scholar, “is about assigning blame rather than assuming responsibility. It’s a contest to see who can give away more at precisely the time they should be asking more of the American people.”

There is some truth to this, but I don’t think it is quite right.  The thing that politicians need to ask is for more patience.  The American public has the attention span of a 3 year old.  With constant access to information and a standard of living that allows us to move from one stimulus to another, we demand quick fixes.  Yet, our most pressing problems have no quick fixes.  We can’t just “race to the top” to fix education.

Friedman decries this need to place blame and wants us to “ask more” of ourselves.  As he enters into the education reform debate, he seems to want to move us past blaming “bad teachers, weak principals, or selfish unions” — which is a good thing.  Instead, we should…blame the students!

“The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation,” wrote Samuelson. “Students, after all, have to do the work. If they aren’t motivated, even capable teachers may fail. Motivation comes from many sources: curiosity and ambition; parental expectations; the desire to get into a ‘good’ college; inspiring or intimidating teachers; peer pressure. The unstated assumption of much school ‘reform’ is that if students aren’t motivated, it’s mainly the fault of schools and teachers.” Wrong, he said. “Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don’t like school, don’t work hard and don’t do well. In a 2008 survey of public high school teachers, 21 percent judged student absenteeism a serious problem; 29 percent cited ‘student apathy.’ ”

Patience…and perhaps a bit of critical thinking should quickly debunk this.  Kids haven’t liked school for as long as there have been schools.  In a Washington Post Op-Ed this summer, Alfie Kohn wrote:

If the subject is kids and how they’re raised, it seems our culture has exactly one story to tell.  Anyone who reads newspapers, magazines, or blogs — or attends dinner parties — will already know it by heart:   Parents today, we’re informed, either can’t or won’t set limits for their children.  Instead of disciplining them, they coddle and dote and bend over backward to shield them from frustration and protect their self-esteem.  The result is that we’re raising a generation of undisciplined narcissists who expect everything to go their way, and it won’t be pretty — for them or for our society — when their sense of entitlement finally crashes into the unforgiving real world.

He continues by citing numerous examples from the popular press about kids’ lack of motivation.  Then, the zinger:

Powerful stuff.  Except now that I think about it, those three indictments may not offer the best argument against today’s parents and their offspring.  That’s because they were published in 1962, 1944, and 1911, respectively.

The revelation that people were saying almost exactly the same things a century ago ought to make us stop talking in mid-sentence and sit down – hard.  In fact, the more carefully we look at the cranky-wistful conventional wisdom about how children are raised, the less there is to be said in its favor.

Patience….  For 30 years, federal education policy has been led by the U.S. Secretary of Education.  For the last 30 years, the Secretary of Education has been a lawyer, coach, political theorist, or policy adviser…NOT someone with a strong connection to the realities of the classroom. Perhaps we should start listening to people that actually know something about classroom teaching. We have excluded educators from the reform discussion in favor of politicians and CEOs. It should be no surprise that in a society driven by “quick fixes,” we have had an incoherent education policy that focuses superficially on accountability via testing instead of tackling difficult issues.  In an article for The Nation, Linda Darling-Hammond writes:

Also unlike high-achieving nations, we have failed to invest in the critical components of a high-quality education system. While we have been busy setting goals and targets for public schools and punishing the schools that fail to meet them, we have not invested in a highly trained, well-supported teaching force for all communities, as other nations have; we have not scaled up successful school designs so that they are sustained and widely available; and we have not pointed our schools at the critical higher-order thinking and performance skills needed in the twenty-first century. Some states are notable exceptions, but we have not, as a nation, undertaken the systemic reforms needed to maintain the standing we held forty years ago as the world’s unquestioned educational leader.

She continues by showing how long term investments in teacher preparation and curricula focused on problem solving instead of test-taking have driven reform in high-performing countries like Finland, Singapore, and North Korea. It took these countries 30 years to race to the top. Darling-Hammond adds:

The pace at which many nations in Asia and Europe are pouring resources into forward-looking systems that educate all their citizens to much higher levels is astonishing. And the growing gap between the United States and these nations—particularly in our most underfunded schools—is equally dramatic.

Unfortunately, the current “Race to the Top” reform efforts are pushing more of the same — investments in unproven charter schools, increased punishments for schools - and teachers - based on standardized testing, increased competition instead of collaboration between states, and other corporatist tinkering around the edges.

As Yong Zhao writes in Catching Up or Leading the Way:

Instead of instilling fear in the public about the rise of other countries, bureaucratizing education with bean-counting policies, demoralizing educators through dubious accountability measures, homogenizing school curriculum, and turning children into test takes, we should inform the public about the possibilities brought about by globalization, encourage education innovations, inspire educators with genuine support, diversify and decentralize curriculum, and educate children as confident, unique, and well-rounded human beings.

In his op-ed, Friedman concludes that until we expect more of our parents and kids, we will remain Number 11. This is one more superficial answer from an “expert.”  We need to do more than just ask more, we need to patiently enact long-term, coherent reforms. We should enact policies that invest in recruiting and keeping high-quality teachers in our most challenging schools.  We should enact policies that treat teaching as a profession - policies that recognize teacher development as a career-long endeavor, not one that ends with certification. We need to implement policies that ensure equitable access to quality k-12 and post-secondary education. And, most importantly, we should enact policies that stop treating learning as an accumulation of testable facts and skills and start focusing on critical thinking, problem solving and creativity

Update via @RosenbaumSteve — As clearly shown by the ONN (NSFW), Friedman is right.

The journal Nature published a fantastic editorial about the growing trend towards denying science in the U.S.  The last two paragraphs of the editorial, Science Scorned, are very powerful-

US citizens face economic problems that are all too real, and the country’s future crucially depends on education, science and technology as it faces increasing competition from China and other emerging science powers. Last month’s recall of hundreds of millions of US eggs because of the risk of salmonella poisoning, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, are timely reminders of why the US government needs to serve the people better by developing and enforcing improved science-based regulations. Yet the public often buys into anti-science, anti-regulation agendas that are orchestrated by business interests and their sponsored think tanks and front groups.

In the current poisoned political atmosphere, the defenders of science have few easy remedies. Reassuringly, polls continue to show that the overwhelming majority of the US public sees science as a force for good, and the anti-science rumblings may be ephemeral. As educators, scientists should redouble their efforts to promote rationalism, scholarship and critical thought among the young, and engage with both the media and politicians to help illuminate the pressing science-based issues of our time.

This is cross-posted at Edutopia.

–Announcements–

1.     Don’t forget about the #scichat challenge. Connect your students to a STEM Expert!

2.     Do you blog about teaching science? Consider submitting a post for the Science Inquiry Blog Carnival.

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The newly released Common Core Standards for Mathematics and Language Arts included a set of standards for literacy in science and social studies. For example, these literacy standards state, “Students must be able to read complex informational texts in these fields [science & technical fields] with independence and confidence because the vast majority of reading in college and workforce training programs will be sophisticated nonfiction.” These standards are intended to be in addition to normal “content” standards in science.

To see how the draft Framework for New Science Education Standards incorporates literacy as a key science practice, go here.

The following project illustrates one successful way to engage students with a variety of high-quality science tradebooks.

Mock SB&F Prize Election

Each year in late October, Science Books and Films, a journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, identifies finalists for their “best book” prize.  In January, the top book in each of the following categories is awarded the SB&F Prize.

• Children’s Science Picture Book;
• Middle Grades Science Book;
• Young Adult Science Book; and
• Hands-on Science Book.

Here are the 2010 finalists and award winners.

In 2008, Tim Gerber, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse, and I decided that we wanted to increase the number of high quality science books that our elementary science pre-service teachers read.  To do this, our pre-service teachers read all of the finalists in the children’s picture book and middle grades categories.  They evaluated these books using the actual SB&F judging criteria.  At the end of the semester, we held a Mock SB&F Prize Election. Since 2008, Mock SB&F Prize Elections have been held in elementary and middle schools in Wisconsin, Illinois and Washington D.C.

Results from the Mock SB&F Prize Election include the following top books:

• 2008 Children’s Science Picture Book: Where in the Wild
• 2008 Middle Grades Science Book: Being Caribou
• 2009 Middle Grades Science Book: What’s Eating You? Parasites: The Inside Story
• 2010 Children’s Science Picture Book: What Bluebirds Do
• 2010 Middle Grades Science Book: Bodies from the Ice

Interestingly, Where in the Wild is the only book chosen by participants in the Mock SB&F Prize Election that actually won the official SB&F Prize.

Hosting a Mock SB&F Prize Election

To host a Mock SB&F Prize Election at your school, you need to acquire at least one set of finalists for the appropriate category (e.g. the 4 finalists in the Children’s Science Picture Book Category for elementary students).  Provide each participating student with evaluation rubrics and determine a schedule that will allow each student to read and evaluate all of the books.  After students have read the books, bring them together to discuss their evaluations and vote on the books that they think deserves the SB&F Prize.

Resources, including multiple evaluation rubrics and two articles describing our implementation of the project, are available from UW-La Crosse Murphy Library.

I haven’t been happy with my grading practices for a long time (like 15 years).  Grading is usually arbitrary and leads to an artificial “points mongering” attitude in students.  Can’t we all just get along and learn? I’ve tried different point schemes, I’ve tried contract grading (complete with oral interviews), but it really didn’t feel right. So, I spent some time reading blogs (yes, you can learn from them) and finally decided to jump on board the SBG Express (Coined by Sean Cornally)

Special thanks to these folks (and many more): Ms Gajda, Shawn Cornally, Frank Noschese, Ms Bethea, and Jason Buell.

So, here is the grading section from one of my syllabi this fall.  It isn’t perfect, but classes start on Wednesday, so it will do!  I would appreciate feedback.

Assessing and Grading Science Methods

The “Standards Based Grading” approach is an alternative to the scramble to collecting “points.” It is very common in elementary schools and emerging in middle and high schools. Standards Based Grading provides a more accurate picture of what a student understands. In addition, it helps students monitor their learning as they can see where they are and where they need to improve. My variation on Standards Based Grading (SBG) is informed by many resources and classroom teachers. It is also rooted in the research-based practices described in Marzano’s Classroom Assessment and Grading that Works. However, I think the term “standards” presents some problems since it is used in many contexts. So, instead of confusing you with another set of standards, I will assess you based on 4 learning goals for this course. Each learning goal has a set of criteria that I will be looking for in your work. I’m not interested in your grade – I’m interested in your learning. So, your scores are not fixed. You can resubmit or we can identify other ways to demonstrate your understanding.

The four learning goals include:

1. Designing effective instruction

2. Assessing student learning

3. Demonstrating an understanding of science inquiry

4. Being a lifelong learner

Usually, SBG eliminates the need to give a formal grade because you have a report card that shows individual standards. However, that isn’t always possible (like in higher education). At the end of the semester, I will need to assign you a letter grade. Averaging scores often masks student learning by allowing a high score to hid a low score. Therefore, I will use Marzano’s conjunctive scoring approach. Criteria will be averaged to give you a score for each goal. Your grade is determined by looking across all four learning goals and matching to the table below.

In addition, absences and habitual tardiness, and late assignments may negatively impact your grade.

Late assignments – The unit plan (and lessons) MUST be completed on time. Deadlines are described in specific assignment overviews. Please contact me prior to the due date if you need an extension. Late assignments may result in the lowering of one grade step (A to A-, B- to C+)

Habitual tardiness is simply inexcusable. If you are going to be late, let me know. If you are late often, expect to have your grade lowered at least one grade step.

We only meet a limited number of times for this course. Therefore, attendance and participation is mandatory. If you have an emergency and need to miss class, please contact me. Unexcused absenses and any more than 1 excused absence will result in lowering your grade by at least on grade step.