Science, Education, and Science Education

by Luann

I just began year 23 of classroom teaching.  My goal is never to become one of those “old” teachers, sneering at innovation while pulling an ancient worksheet from a dog-eared folder. I’ve asked younger colleagues to alert me should they observe these tendencies in my practice.  I actively seek and provide a variety of professional development for myself and my colleagues.  I’m active in various professional learning communities. My paper and electronic files are pruned and revised regularly.  And I listen to students, with a focus this past year on the learning skills of a particularly interesting class of intentional non-learners.  You know the type.  They enter the classroom with their minds on everything else; pencils and paper, it they have any, remain in their backpacks. Their faces say, “Teach me.  I dare you.”  They have little respect for anything, often including themselves.

Not wanting to characterize myself as one who resists change, I strive for a balance between actively seeking out and employing practices that merit trying because they likely will help students learn and having the good judgment to recognize strategies I recognize as unlikely to result in a successful outcome with students for some reason.   I’m also pretty willing to take risks in my classroom so long as the risks lead to student learning, er, being able to meet a standard. Lately, though, I’ve been questioning more and more teaching practices that are new to me. Is the voice in my head directing me to the retirement line or is my well-seasoned malarky detector speaking?

The newest, loudest voice questions the new (?) practice of assessing (read: grading) students strictly on the meeting of a standard. Time is not a factor, nor work ethic, not academic integrity. Multiple retries on all tests and quizzes must be allowed. The number 50% replaces zeros in gradebooks, because a zero is mathematically invalid as a score and puts the student so far behind that he loses all hope of success. Homework is never part of the grade, if students are asked to do it at all, because practice should never be graded. Much formative assessment is done and perhaps checked off but like homework, is never a part of the grade. Change your assessment, they promise, and presto! student learning increase measurably – by a new assessment standard. A huge piece of this puzzle is missing: student learning. Where, in this new system, do students learn?

The past few years, I implemented some practices promoted by well-known and respected, but apparently pretty much self-proclaimed, assessment gurus.  According to them, my grading practices are broken and need to be fixed, because some students still “fail”. Failing as defined at my school is not achieving an average of 70%, or having earned 70% of the points available to be earned. Nevermind that every opportunity to accumulate points was also demonstrating the degree of mastery of a standard; my method of measuring student success is broken because failure is a possible outcome. So, I allowed due dates to be extended into infinity, recorded so many I’s that our school secretary hunted me down prior to closing grades, and made many formats of assessments for retakes.

I’ve honed my assessment system over the years, changing it appropriately with an eye toward showcasing student achievement with each upgrade. I’ve made changes based on feedback from parents, practiced teachers, most of all, students.  My late work policy is not without compassion for a student who is genuinely working hard for mastery or who has extenuating circumstances.  I will excuse a student if an assignment is clearly busywork for him/her. I offer options for students to demonstrate mastery of a standard. I know my students as people and am a trained professional; I am skilled in making decisions about what is best for each student, at this time, in this setting. My intent is to help each student show success. Fixing broken grades assumes that all assignments are scored on a weighted 100% scale, that students make a fairly continuous and honest effort to learn, and that there is no compassion or second chance.  None of those assumptions are true in my classroom. Every student who is willing to engage in a way demonstrating the meeting of standards not only passes, but by default earns a “good grade” on his or her report card. I ask, then, what is broken?

Proponents of this system are making a lot of money selling professional development (of the sit-n-get variety) and accompanying resource materials to school districts harboring large numbers of low-achieving and/or failing students.They draw crowds of educators and administrators desperate to mask the clear evidence of student disengagement.  In numerous conversations this past summer with academic and industrial scientists,all mentioned serious concern about the changing focus of incoming college freshmen. A common theme was the lack of preparation with respect to thinking skills, unwillingness to engage in more difficult academic work, willingness to put in the hours needed for understanding, and interestingly, a complete disregard for due dates (to be addressed in a later post, so please save your comments for that post .

If this tactic were employed in the private sector and school districts were retirees, the salespeople would be branded as scam artists. There is no solid, empirical research to support the methods these people promote.

By the way, my experiment with these “fixes” did not result in a difference in student grades.I’d wager that significantly less student learning took place with these policies in place. I only regret that I hadn’t been so consumed with producing a zillion alternative assignments and assessment retakes that I had no time to gather any meaningful data.

Stay tuned for my fix.

Beginning my 23rd year in the classroom, I still get a bit nervous that everything will go well. I walk through each class at least 20 times in my head and tweak things until the last minute.  Classes begin on September 6.  Every day except for 2 until them, I have meetings or some random duty, or prep work scheduled.

My goals for the school year are to bring more relevance to our learning, better help each student reach his/her potential, and to do so without working 23 hours a day and all weekend. This partly stems from the stress last year of finishing the dissertation while starting a new job. I was either teaching, grading, planning, writing, crunching data, moving, or sleeping, in that order. (I ate while working on something. Couldn’t figure out how to work in my sleep.) I’d like my classes and my life to move at a pace that allows time for reflection and revising and laughing at least a little.  And I never, ever want my desk to look like this again:

Here’s my first day so far:

Learning Targets:
1. Science: Remember that? (A little science on the first day never hurt.)
2. Learn roles and protocols for group work (because 9th graders usually don’t know what to do in a group.)
3. Explain what we will learn this year, why and how we will learn it.

Most of all, I want students to learn and have some fun. The learning targets are to keep students engaged (and to keep their notebooks from looking like this:).

I shamelessly stole the Subversive Lab Grouping Game from @fnochese. I will use it much as he does. Students are given one card when they enter.  Biology classes will use this set, and Chemistry classes will use this set. (Enter subject area content.) Students will learn to form groups while having a little fun, and then we’ll learn to have a whole-class discussion.

We will discuss what they learned about the groups, both the obvious and the subversive, about science in general.  Biologists will discuss the characteristics of some major groups of living things. Chemists will note they grouped themselves by locations on the periodic table and understand that they are grouped in this way because they have some things in common. (Learning Target 1)

Each group will receive an appropriate set of role cards as described here.  Today’s task will require the Leader/Manager, Reader, Document Control Specialist, and Communications Specialist. Students will work through this activity, meeting Learning Target, 2 and 3. Here is the Career Skills reference. Prepare a basic version of the standards you are using (don’t get me started.)  Student advice is on your own, collected at the end of last year. Always frank; Frequently hilarious.  If you email me, I’ll get some to you.

Reminders about roles throughout helps keep everyone contributing and helps make sense of collaborating.  Roles also make is clear that everyone’s input is not only needed, but welcomed. At the end of each part in the What, Why, How work, we stop and share responses, making a list on the board. Perhaps this year, we will also write some specific, individual goals to check in with occasionally.  I tried this once with SMART goals.  I love goals that are achievable and specific, but get lost after that.  Maybe we’ll just do SA goals.

These activities will also let me see quickly who are leaders, clowns, academics; who is quiet, who might not know much English, who will need help focusing, who is willing to read aloud in a group, you get the picture.  Students understand quickly that they are to do their best, listen to others, that it’s safe to speak up, and begin to see that mutual respect is the MO in my classroom.

Neurology Students in Berlin, a long, long time ago.

My introduction to assigning student roles in group work came in 1994 at a Project Discovery summer workshop. I didn’t question the value of this practice. More experienced teachers and university professors shared their expert guidelines.  As teacher participants in the workshop, we used these canned roles as we worked our way through canned labs intended to inspire student discovery. They appeared, we decided, to be a pretty effective method for managing students in lab settings and for facilitating student communication about their work. The checkpoints added strategically to canned procedures helped me check for understanding while students were working. The system seemed to be pretty slick. I implemented the practice and revised the duties for each role a few times over the years.  I was careful to rotate roles among students so everyone had the opportunity to hone his or her skills. Groups always had the flexibility to re-create roles so long as they were safe, equitable, and productive. Once the basics of working together were clear, the mechanical roles that had perhaps played a part in their learning were done automatically, while student thoughts were occupied with learning.

Recently, someone who I remember as teaching physics (please refresh my memory, whomever you are!) on Twitter asked about group roles.  I replied that yes, I found them helpful but didn’t really use them much in 12th grade Physics…. and then it struck me. I’ve worked in 2 small school settings since adding the use of roles to my practice, so I get to see students more than one year during their high school careers.  I noticed that it took a while to teach 9th graders how to work with one another in lab.  When I saw them again as 10th graders, many already had great lab group skills.  Lest I give the impression that I am a drill sergeant who believes that compliance = success, I’d like to clarify that often after a few months, student groups were coming up with their own norms for group roles.  So long as their norms embraced safety and learning, I encouraged this. When I saw students again in 11th grade, I spent almost no time dealing with group communication skills.  By 12th grade, kids had  perhaps learned enough about collaboration to transfer that learning to a new lab situation on their own.

Something is still missing. I want to help students learn to work together in settings outside of the laboratory.  Students could use role guidelines to learn to be supportive, contributing members of a collaborative group learning experience. By modeling roles for other types of collaboration, will students be able to transfer those skills to other situations, courses, and real-world situations? A colleague at my new school gave me a copy of a set of roles she uses in implementing POGIL activities.  I reformatted them and am fairly pleased with the way they feel at this time.

Suggestions for use:
There are currently 8 roles in all, allowing a teacher or students to choose the roles needed for a collaborative group to begin working together. One group member can play more than 1 role.

1. Choose a random way of assigning the leader/manager.  Ask the student in each group who has his back to the door, the oldest, youngest, first alphabetically by last name, or some other criteria to be the Leader/Manager.
2. The Leader/Manager can then distribute the remaining roles.  Early in the year, I sometimes choose in such a way that each student has a chance to play each role at least once during the first few weeks.
3. The first time role cards are used, I will ask all the Leader/Managers to raise their hands.I ask one of them to read aloud the purpose and responsibilities.  Often we will do a mini-fishbowl with an example of one of the responsibilities.
4. When finished with Leader/Manager, chose another role.  Repeat, until each role you are using has been explained.
5. I will sometimes call all the Leader/Managers together for a moment to check progress or to ask if there are questions.  This gives the students a chance to hear what others with the same responsibilities are doing.  I’ll sometimes ask Time Managers to hold up 1, 2, 5 fingers to let me know how much more time they might need with a certain task.

The current draft is now open for public comment I’d like permission to incorporate your ideas into my work, with credits, of course.  I’ll publish word or google docs of the final product, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License as always. Please share your thoughts.

I’m analyzing data from pre-service elementary science teachers who are working on an inquiry learning project.  I’m a bit surprised with the results.  Before I share, I’d like to hear from some elementary teachers about your current teaching of science and your teacher preparation program.  What do you feel you teach really well in science?  Where and how did you learn to do this well?  In what areas do you most want to grow?

I can’t wait for your comments.  In the meantime, I’m back to data analysis.

A meeting today in our district made me aware of 3 things:

1. Our K-5 kids need books.  Informational books, storybooks, any books.They have no books to take home to read.
2. Our K-5 teachers don’t have any science materials.
3. Our K-5 kids, many of them anyway, are reading way below grade level.
4. We have nearly no intervention materials.

Here’s my plan:  High school students create books for these students, personalized, individual books, books about science or scientists or nature.  The high school students personally hand-deliver the books to a student, then sit and read with the younger child for a bit, then give the child the book to keep.

I’ve spoken with the elementary principals, written a blurb for DonorsChoose.org for paper, ink cartridges, etc.  Now, I need topic ideas for the books.

So far, I’m thinking:

• animal stories
• nature stories
• biographies of scientists
• fiction
• alphabet books

and I’m brain dead. (I also just poured a gallon of agar for lab).  What ideas have I missed?

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Steve Jobs
US computer engineer & industrialist (1955 – )

Sometimes, a little attitude can go a long way.

Awhile back, I read a list of 13 ways to raise a non-reader.  If you know where I might have read it. please let me know so I can give credit where it’s due.  THe list inspired me to create the list below.

1. Tell your child that you were “never good at science” or thought it was hard.

2. Join your child in questioning why he/she “needs to know this stuff.”  After all, you didn’t learn it and you did just fine.

3. Encourage your child to spend as little time outdoors as possible.

4. Discourage your child from taking things apart and any activities resembling “tinkering.”

5. Never, ever allow a mess to be made, inside or outside of your home.

6. Don’t allow friends and relatives to purchase gifts such as tool boxes, chemistry sets, bug boxes, or microscopes.

7.  Focus all family outings around movies and sports.  Never consider a museum, zoo, aquarium, nature center, camping trip, hike, or walk along a beach or through a woods.

8.  Discourage questioning of any nature.  It takes too much time to look things up.  That type of activity should be left for school, anyway.

9.  Encourage your child to choose a profession or vocation on the sole basis of how little education it will require.Education is expensive and *you* aren’t paying for it.

10.  Scientists and science majors are geeks and nerds and have no hope for a normal life. Be sure your child realizes this.

Got any you’d like to add?  I’d love to hear.

We learn about data in our teacher-preparation programs; at least I did, 20+ years ago.  I learned how to count up my students’ correct answers and compare them to the incorrect answers to pinpoint areas of difficulty among these students.

I next saw “data” in my educational leadership program.  My thesis attempted to correlate students’ report card grades with their anonymous, self-admitted use of cigarettes, alcohol, illegal drugs, after school sports and extra-curricular activities.  I saw the (expected) correlation between substance abuse and lower grades, and higher grades among athletes, cheerleaders, and officers of classes and the student body.

I have collected, analyzed, reported, presented, and published empirical data on mussels, oysters, chironomids, and most recently, behavior of sun stars in the Puget Sound.

My doctoral dissertation seeks relationships between inquiry learning, construction of knowledge, and scientific misconceptions held by pre-service elementary teachers with the void in scientific literacy in elementary students.  More data, but this time with questions about the validity of the data and the reliability of the methods used to collect the data.

I know data, various types of data, and what makes the data valid, what makes it reliable.

As teachers, we are bombarded with data about our students.  We have MAPS scores, (insert name of state high-stakes test here – my state used the WASL and next the MSP) scores, ACT scores, SAT scores, RIT scores, ITED scores.  We have reliability and validity data on some of these instruments.  What we don’t have is that same reliability/validity data for students themselves.

There is no measure of who had breakfast before the test and who didn’t. No measure of who got thrown out of the house the night before, or who didn’t have a house in the first place.  Who has only been speaking English for a few years or months? Had a fight with a boyfriend or girlfriend on the way to school? Who has test anxiety? And who has been told that they “don’t need to pass this test to graduate?”

When I went through the National Board process, I learned before all else to know my students. I learned that all the things listed above and more matter very much in assessing student achievement, and we haven’t even gotten to learning differences yet. In 20 years as a classroom teacher, I’ve learned that there’s often another side to classroom data, especially data from those students about whom we are most concerned. These data are gathered while meeting the “know the student” standard and while selecting a major idea, developing learning goals, a set of appropriate  instructional activities to help students reach those goals in a sequence appropriate to each student, and letting students show that they have reached those learning goals.  This sequence now has a fancy name for what we used to call a seat-of-the-pants thing that told a teacher when students were “getting it” and were ready for an assessment.  We now call this formative assessment, still the best source of authentic data I know.  The rub is that I don’t know a standardized test that includes any of this in its data.

Drive these data. Straight to the legislature.

It’s day 2 of the Science WASL.

Most students finished an hour or so early.  I brought Starburst® candy for my group, who stuck through the torture yesterday like troopers.

Today, they quietly and gratefully consumed the candy after completing the test.  It took most of them no more than 1 hour.  Walking around, I noticed that students at one table quietly  made a fleet of tiny boats from the wrappers.  Students at another table appeared to be having a silent-movie version of a candy-wrapper-airplane contest.

I would have taken a photo to share but cell phones weren’t allowed.

From Kelly Hines, RT @eduinnovation: “Courage does not always roar. Sometimes it is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, I will try again tomorrow”

I just liked this today.