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.