Yesterday I talked to my students about the value of doing science – asking questions, predicting, observing, describing, measuring, classifying, generalizing, inferring, communicating – and I told them that I never did science in school. Science, for me, was reading the textbook and answering questions at the end of the chapter. We practiced none of the process skills, and we did not use a learning cycle model in our lessons.
Science was an alien discourse for me, something that was viewed through the keyhole of a textbook. I learned that science was knowledge that other people had which I should accept as given. When I got to high school I avoided science courses, and took only the required minimum because it seemed dull and alien. When I got to college, I wasn’t prepared for even basic level science courses. I suppose I could have applied myself if I’d wanted. But I didn’t.
This past weekend I spent several hours in mandatory orientation training for participants in a university/school district partnership for science education that places graduate students in the classroom to provide science expertise and to assist with gathering materials and resources for science lessons. This partnership looks very promising. For one thing, we have a budget that supports field trips. And the scientist we’ll be working with has a great rapport with my students.
My hope is that my students will get comfortable with scientific thinking. I want to see whether their familiarity with science process skills, and getting to know a working scientist, might have an impact on their curiosity about the world around them. I want to hear their questions, and to see them test their ideas against whatever truth the world can offer. I want them to become inquirers.
Scientific thinking need not be limited to questions that are empirically testable. It’s interesting that most of the science process skills are language-related, and not necessarily technical. Asking questions, predicting, describing, classifying, generalizing, inferring, and communicating can be taught in the context of any subject area. The most important part of science is in framing questions and forming conclusions, work that requires effective use of language. It could be applied to any domain that requires problem solving and analysis.
Teachers can use scientific thinking to make sense of classroom observations. Good teaching requires all of the science process skills. Effective teaching is fundamentally about learning to inquire into our own practice, and not the adoption of cookbook methods. We have to learn to observe closely and ask good questions. We should become conscious of the inferences we continually make about why students respond as they do to whatever challenges are presented. Journaling about our observations, questions, inferences, and generalizations is an excellent way to develop this kind of thinking.
I am skeptical of easy explanations and claims of scientific certainty about education. My growing interest in complexity theory springs from my dissatisfaction with recommended methods that rarely work. Alice Mercer recently did an interview with Dave Cormier on the limitations of scientifically based educational research. One specific issue they discussed was the problem of scalability based on randomized field trials. The longer I teach, the more I see that every class is different. The shared knowledge of every group morphs and transforms according to a logic of its own. What works one year might fail miserably the next. Education research has to begin accounting for the self-organizing nature of learning communities before it will be of much use for explaining or predicting what happens in the classroom. Education research, as it stands, is mostly a tool for making policy recommendations and political grandstanding.
From Cormier’s Notes on Scientific Research in Education
Any test, or any research, no matter how ‘randomized’ is immediately ‘framed’ by the person who has defined the research questions. The common response to this is that there are ‘rules’ governing the framing of research questions that reduce the risk of this. I agree, some research questions are awful. Some less so. Some very interesting.
The underlying assumption that truth is sitting there, waiting to be discovered, however, informs this kind of research. It assumes that THERE IS A PERFECT education system out there to be discovered. That there will be a solution if we look hard enough. This is highly unlikely. The unified educational theory that will support all students is a windmill, nothing more. It is an artifice that looks like universal education, and is mostly normative. It is designed by those in power, designed to serve the skills that those people value.
Yes. We need to find what works in the context of its need. The perfect education system is the one that serves the specific needs of the people who use it. Inquiry should begin at home.
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I’m reading Kliebard’s “Struggle for the American Curriculum”. Why? I’m not American, nor live or work in the U.S. I read to try to make sense of what is happening in my classes, in myself, and to put that in the context of what is happening in the country I work in and in the world at large – the big picture. What are the forces at work in my particular work environment?
I agree with the last two sentences of the Cormier quote. What seems pretty clear is that we humans don’t really know what the hell we’re doing when it comes to teaching and learning – there’s so much going on and it’s all waaayyyy more complex and wonderful than we can imagine. Another thing that’s pretty clear is that 99.999% of the plethora of methodologies all have some kind of agenda, usually political, i.e. furthering the original purpose of compulsory education – manipulation of entire populations (and not just while they’re in school, of course, but looking beyond).
Your 6th paragraph therefore describes what seems a reasonable approach. I would only add the importance of seeing the big picture: we are all impinged on by much bigger forces, not just the interactions between the people, materials and environment of the classroom/school itself.
One example is that we are (unless you are home-schooled or born before 1900!) products ourselves of compulsory education and the ideas and assumptions that come with that – the value of a centrally planned and organized educational system.
Here’re some quotes from the chapter on Dewey in Kliebard’s book:
1) As long as the grouping of students, the selection of teachers, and the system of rewards remain the same… reform is doomed. “We forget,” Dewey said, “that it is precisely such things as these that really control the whole system, even on its educational side.”
2) “as long as the teacher, who is after all the only real educator in the school system, has no definite and authoritative position in shaping the course of study, that is likely to remain an external thing to be externally applied to the child.”
3) With remarkable prescience, Dewey predicted that, without considered attention to the process of change itself, “we shall be forever oscillating between extremes: now lending ourselves with enthusiasm to the introduction of art and music and manual training, because they give vitality to the school work and relief to the child; now querulously complaining of the evil results reached and insisting upon the return of good old days when reading, writing, spelling and arithmetic were adequately taught.”
4) Dewey saw as the basic function of education the development of the kind of intelligence that would lead to a command of the conditions of one’s life and ultimately to social progress, which put him at odds with a lot of thinkers of his time.
5) In designing a course of study for his school, Dewey… rejected both of the alternatives that were presented. One was “to follow the traditional arrangement of studies and lessons”; the other was “to permit a free flow of experience and acts which are immediately and sensationally appealing, but which lead to nothing in particular.” (p. 71)
(Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Struggle-American-Curriculum-1893-1958/dp/0415948916/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-8223439-0389402?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1188442474&sr=1-1
Your point about seeing the big picture is well taken. One of the things that complexity theory contributes to the discourse about learning and change is that it gives education research a much broader reach than merely psychological investigations. In Complexity and Education, the authors show a set of nested systems, and theoretical discourses that grow from a level of “bodily subsystems” (immunology, neurology), to “the person” (psychology), to “collectives” (bodies of knowledge, sociology), to “society” (anthropology, cultural studies), to “species” (biology, evolutionary theory), to “the biosphere” (ecology). We are all most definitely the products of formal schooling, but we are also influenced by what happens at those other levels. Who can say which is most important? One of the great fallacies in any discussion about systemic change is the belief that working on one level alone will have any significant effect.
I ran across Kliebard’s book a while ago, though I haven’t read it. It’s online as a google book, here.
I really enjoyed this post. I share your same experience with how science was presented to me, which was really just rote memory of facts. Yet scientific thinking permeated my life in other areas “non academic” real life, training my dogs, gardeniing, taking care of a mother who had cancer. I was always observing creating hypothesis, testing hypothesis, and adjusting my perspective and behavior based on my own mini-experiments. This type of thinking was not dull, the way it was to memorize the periodic chart of elements or read a chapter on Niels Bohr. Later in life I connected to Science writing in Scientific American and began reading science books. I really look forward to your posts.
Meredith, the “later in life” connection is one that I found myself wondering about as I wrote this. I wonder how the investigative habit was formed, and whether it really did happen later in life. Or was it just that I eventually graduated? Many people believe that scientific thinking is a natural part of human learning, and that it’s either ignored or suppressed in school.
I really enjoyed the post, and it certainly applies well beyond the Science Classroom. In my K-12 education I was presented with a body of knowledge, and it was my job to memorize. The inquiry and investigative processes were completed by those who came before me, so it wasn’t necessary (or convenient) for schools to try to manage the productive chaos that can become of investigations.
Now that body of knowledge we toiled to memorize is accessible with a few mouse clicks, yet many schools maintain the same structure. Perhaps it is driven by a need to standardize schooling so that accountability can be measured by standardized assessments. Many of the schools I visit are so busy “covering” the curriculum that they feel they have no time to be inquisitive.
Standardizing is good for comparing, which is good for ranking. Inquiring is not so neat and orderly. I’m thinking that inquiry can be taught as a function of language, focusing on how we form abstractions. Most of the literature frames inquiry in terms of project based learning. But I wonder if that’s the best way to teach it.
Doug,
You’ve stretched my thinking process today with this post. Thanks not only for your sharp insight, but your willingness to share it in such a direct and clear way.
Doug-
I have recently grabbed your feed and read many of your blogs. How would you feel about adding a link to your blog on my blog(http://amykenyon.edublogs.org)? As I am new to the blogging world, I don’t know if it is required that I ask permission but I think it is polite.
What do you think?
Amy
Amy, thanks for your interest in the Borderland blog, something that started out as an experiment, but which has turned into….well, that’s hard to say, exactly. By all means, link to it. And the “rule” for blogging is to link freely to whatever appeals to you. Welcome to the read/write web.
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