It’s been a while since I’ve written here, mainly due to hassles managing a classroom full of 12-year-olds full of holiday cheer bent on early celebration. It’s exhausting to maintain a focus right now. We have another week to go, right up to Dec. 21. And despite pressure to join the merriment, I push back and still celebrate reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic. And science.

The best thing going on in the classroom has been a year-long science project I joined. It’s a fairly simple concept. The NSF provides funding for graduate students in science, technology, engineering and math to “improve communication, teaching, collaboration, and team building skills while enriching STEM learning and instruction in K-12 schools.” The kids are enjoying science in a way I’ve never seen in all the years I’ve taught.

A graduate student (in my case, a biologist) comes in for 10 hours a week to assist with math and science lessons in a team teaching arrangement where he provides the content knowledge, and I help with lesson design and classroom management. He also does support work for me outside the classroom. He brings in demonstrations, gives lectures, and sets up experiments. The kids take notes, ask questions, measure stuff, make graphs and write reports. He gets a stipend, and I get some money, as well. The kids get to see how a scientist works and thinks, and they pump him for information about any number of things. Communication and mathematics skills are supported while science process and content knowledge is built, all seamlessly as part of the package.

Project participants from the various schools have monthly meetings where we all sit around and talk about what we’re doing. One of the things that keeps coming up is the question of how to sustain this after the grant money runs out. I say it can’t be done without the scientists. Having a live person from the field who can meet with the kids directly on a daily basis is the most powerful curricular initiative I’ve ever been a part of.

I’m thinking about how this project could serve as a model for curricular reform. Instead of tackling the problems of achievement and motivation from a skills and accountability position, we’re providing the kids with experiential opportunities to use the science process skills. Rather than hiring consultants and instructional aids, or investing in more tests and pre-packaged reading and math programs we could pay more graduate students for their time in return for their expertise, and we’d be enriching the system simultaneously on both ends.

We’re using the curriculum and state standards to guide our planning, which allows the program to remain responsive to local needs and limitations. There are no tests other than the ones we make. The kids are all excited to study science, and they’re using academic skills along the way.

It’s not a boring subject in school for them this year. Interestingly, as I come to think of it, the instructional approach we’re using is pretty standard. Nothing fancy, just lots of time and energy.