Community-based Science Teaching: A Journey of the Mind?
By Jim Martin
CLEARING Associate Editor
he young woman carefully pours hydrogen peroxide into a graduated cylinder, presses a key on a computer keyboard, then measures ten drops of liver homogenate into the cylinder. The surface of the hydrogen peroxide seems to leap at the first drop of homogenate, then the drop begins to froth and spin as it is carried deep into the cylinder, trailing a growing, spinning plume of bubbles. Each drop increases the frothing turbulence in the cylinder until it seems enveloped in a pulsing explosion of bubbles. Meanwhile, the young woman’s glance moves from a developing graph on the computer’s monitor to the activity in the cylinder and back again. Science is being done.
If we could see into her mind, what kind of thoughts must we find there? What must she have done and thought to get to where she is at this moment? How will her thoughts change when the reaction has gone to completion and she reviews the data? One thing is certain: this young woman has a history of doing process science. Another thing is certain; her work presents her with conceptual schemata which require filling out with specific facts; the work she does generates a need to know. This need can drive her into the books and the web to find out. Can we capture this kind of science in our classrooms? Can we accommodate her experiences into a model of science pedagogy?
How might this scenario play out in a stream, where the young woman is measuring water quality, collecting and identifying macroinvertebrates, and entering her data into an iPad? Is there any substantial difference in her experiences in the two environments? Certainly there are logistical differences, but I submit that these are an emergent phenomenon which arises from our traditional concept of what school is. Is school a journey of the mind, or is it a place with boundaries, where we learn to pass tests? In both places, she is engaging similar mental concepts, and procedural processes. Our bodies and brains are able to work in both environments. The significant thing is that what the mind and body are doing has to be meaningful. In the case of this young woman, what she is learning is related to what she knows of other knowledge; it is being learned within a familiar context. If she were learning for a test, she would learn the facts, but they wouldn’t necessarily be learned in order to understand. The kind of learning this young woman is engaging is active learning, in which she is constantly comparing her experiences with what she knows. Whether she is consciously aware of it, she has learned how to learn. That’s a powerful skill.
In school, we tend to move from one topic directly to another as if this is what education is about. Many of us do this in our personal world, racing through life, leafing through it as we would a magazine in the doctor’s office, never pausing to contemplate what it is, what it means. We should take the time to absorb life so we can live within it. The same goes for school. Instead of zipping on to the next topic as soon as we’ve covered the current one well enough to test on it, we should probe for students’ attainment of the concepts embedded in the topic to see if they’ve nailed them down. We ought to give students a chance to think about what they’re learning, and design a repeat investigation to nail down their understandings. We need to explore ways to transition what we have just learned to what we will be learning. Even though they can parrot words we’ve used, they may entertain misconceptions and may well not actually understand what we assume they know.
This applies also to teachers. Our pre-service preparation and most of our in-service learning was done with this industrial assembly line model, zipping us through a ritual that eventually placed us at the head of a classroom. About twenty years ago, I was doing a wetlands ecology institute for teachers, and a question came up among the staff about what to do after the teacher participants’ first afternoon in a local wetland. One opinion was, “Okay, they’ve done their first study. Let’s get them ready to go to the coast for their second study.” The other opinion was, “They’ve done what amounts to a casual observation, which might have raised some questions they could follow up with a second investigation.” Fortunately, the second opinion won the day; the participants asked questions which arose as they processed their observations, and they used these to design the following day’s study at the same wetland. Having done that inquiry, once at the coast they hit the beach running, the well-oiled machine, and they nailed down what they had been learning about wetland ecology. It took time, but it moved them further up the learning curve.
After their original casual observation, we could have left them where they were, some in the Acquisition phase, some entering Proficiency. This is what many in-service educators do. We assume the teacher will move to Mastery, but only a few have the self-confidence to do so. Instead, we leave them knowing that they could know, but not ready to take the next few steps. Dryas and I had a mutual friend, who was in late middle-age. Let’s call her Sarah. Sarah had decided to leave an emotionally abusive relationship, but had no idea what to do, nor did she have the confidence to try. A few of us located a place where she could stay, and I agreed to meet with her once a week to help her develop a business plan for using art to explore relationships as a way to earn a living. Over a period of three or four months, we’d meet once a week, and she’d bring out what she’d accomplished on the plan. Her Acquisition phase was long, about six weeks, but then she started accelerating into Proficiency. Sarah had been making collages to express her feelings then interpreting them. This is what she planned to teach others. After moving into Proficiency, each week her collages portrayed a bird, first totally enclosed in a sealed room becoming a bird looking out the window, seeing life outside the window, perched on the window sill, and finally freedom – soaring in the air toward the Sun. The slow but steady movement from locus of control far outside the body, to deep within and freedom to live her life. It takes time, but moves us up the learning curve. We need this in our emotional life, but also in our cognitive, conceptual life.
What’s the difference in insecurity about living in a relationship and insecurity about teaching in a content area? You could leave the relationship because the other isn’t likely to change. But, understanding the science means you’re in a win-win situation, and don’t have to leave, much as you would be in the relationship if the other decided to go into counseling. The young woman pouring hydrogen peroxide obviously understands what she is doing and why. She’ll continue this relationship. That’s what we want.
Are we adrift now? The point is that, like all things we do, they’re done by humans. We bring our small, effective human arsenal to bear on a large number of issues, all manageable with what a well-understood arsenal contains. In school, the secret is your confidence in your capacity to teach, just as in your personal life, the secret is your confidence in your capacity to manage a relationship. Likewise, a student’s confidence in the content and concepts determines her ownership of her learnings. We need to bring them to confidence, then we’re all ready to move to the next topic. How do we do that?
Working with Meredith, the middle-school teacher who takes her class out to the creek at the edge of the school yard, we’ve seen how she has learned to have her students repeat investigations to move along the learning curve. Like a booster rocket, they’ve got altitude and velocity; just need that extra push to get them into orbit. The first time through their work on the creek, they figured out how to do it. Setting up more than one station per group, one at a riffle, at a glide, and at a pool, would ensure students had ample opportunity to move to Mastery. At each trip to the creek, students might repeat their observations more quickly, and could move in to explore new curricula in the time saved. While moving their understanding of, say, macroinvertebrate collection, identification, and interpretation to Mastery, they could be moving their understanding of the roles of the rest of that ecosystem in generating a healthy habitat for the animals they are studying through Acquisition into at least initial Proficiency. That puts Meredith in charge of her curriculum. Which is where she should be; on the road to building competent, empowered minds.
This is a regular feature by CLEARING “master teacher” Jim Martin that explores how environmental educators can help classroom teachers get away from the pressure to teach to the standardized tests,and how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula. See the other installments here, or search Categories for “Jim Martin.”
Nature Connection Pyramid
Coyote Teaching
by Connor O’Malley
reprinted courtesy of Alderleaf Wilderness College
http://www.wildernesscollege.com/
oyote teaching is a phrase popularized by Tom Brown Jr. and Jon Young. Similar teaching methods however, have been used by indigenous people, philosophers, psychologists, and wise individuals all over the world. A “coyote teacher” is one who encourages the student to delve deeper into the mystery at hand, rather than ending the learning process by providing a quick answer.
This form of teaching is most effective with a student that you are in a mentoring relationship with. Trust between the student and the teacher is a crucial ingredient to success. This kind of teaching happens when a teacher is hyperaware of their student and knows their students’ knowledge base, personality, comfort zones, desires, current mood, family situation, upbringing, etc. Using this abundance of knowledge, the teacher can creatively challenge and inspire their student to look deeper. The more you know about the student, the more effective you will be as a coyote teacher. The most common failure I have seen (and caused) with this form of teaching happens when the teacher does not know the student well enough, or is not aware enough of how the student is doing in that moment.
One aspect of this kind of teaching, in certain situations, is withholding an answer from an eager student and forcing them to look closer. This can obviously cause problems with a student who is impatient, not in the mood, or has become accustomed to quick and easy answers. It is a balancing act to use this technique with students who are paying money for a class. They may feel that they aren’t getting their money’s worth if they don’t get all of their questions answered immediately. One of my great mentors, Dan Gardoqui (White Pine Programs) would navigate this slippery terrain with one simple line: “Do you want me to tell you the answer or do you want to look it up for yourself?” If I wanted the answer right there and then, he’d tell me – thus earning my trust. At the same time, he was challenging me to put in the hard work.
Let me paint a picture of a successful coyote teaching scenario:
A group of students are walking along the beach and they come across some tracks. Before anyone talks about the tracks the teacher asks them to take a minute and just look at them. Then the teacher asks someone to say what they see (but NOT what the animal is). One student says “I see 5 toes” another student says “I see long claws and a triangular heel pad”. Now before anyone can say the answer, the teacher has the students follow the trail. It leads them down the beach and to a dumpster where it chewed up a greasy paper bag. Then it leads to a small scat with blunt ends that is full of insect parts. Finally they lose the trail and discuss their findings. What was the animal? A skunk! Rather than tell everyone who made the tracks at the very beginning, the mystery was kept alive and the students were forced to remain engaged until the end of the trail.
You can see that by tactfully holding out on some answers, it can greatly enhance the learning experience.
So how does one learn to be a coyote teacher? In my opinion, it is very simple.
Step 1: Develop yourself. Practice your skills, do sit spots, look-up mysteries, expand your awareness, do the things that ignite that feeling of inspiration inside yourself.
Step 2: Have genuine relationships with people.
The majority of teaching is role-modeling. All of my favorite teachers were people who were always striving to improve themselves, always looking for answers to things, looking for creative solutions to problems with an open mind and then they “gave their gifts” to me just by being my friend. They reached out by inviting me over for a beer or they gave me a job; asked me to babysit their kids. To me this is true coyote teaching and what mentoring is all about.
Recommended Books
Coyote’s Guide by Young, McGown and Haas
Next Generation Science Standards:
Should they direct students’ educations, or would they be better applied to teachers’ educations?
by Jim Martin
CLEARING Associate Editor
icture this: Science teachers with a strong background in doing science, working in a collegial environment, building their own independent curricula. Will they do a better job than those who, working alone in their classrooms, implement top-down national standards? I like the collegial model. Where it describes how teachers in a school actually work, students do best. To accomplish a collegial model means science teachers must organize themselves to do a better job of overseeing their pre- and in-service educations and the way they deliver their curricula; they need to be in charge. Publishing sets of science standards isn’t how to improve science education. The people who teach science need to be comfortable with it, to know and use science, and pass this capacity on to their students. That, by itself, will do the job.
We’ve been following teachers and their efforts to look outside the classroom for their curricula. This isn’t a smooth process for most teachers. For many of us, our pre-service educations didn’t prepare us for it, the work itself entails a set of skills and knowledge we haven’t practiced, and it produces an emergent set of outcomes which generalize to all disciplinary areas. The world outside is the subject of K-12 education, but it isn’t taught as if it were. Before there were schools, we learned about the world by living it. That’s how our brains are organized to learn for understanding and empowerment. Learning by memorizing puts facts in our brains, but doesn’t empower the brain to use them to navigate the real world. If it did, we’d do a better job at the helm. In spite of perennial rhetoric about the outcome of science education in the US, it still resolves, for the most part, to specific knowledge of scientific facts. Science offers much more than this.
Photo copyright 2014 Jim Martin
One thing I noticed during my years in the classroom is that scientists who decide to become science teachers become very good science teachers. They aren’t limited by the words and illustrations in the teachers’ edition. They know, understand, and do science, and use that as their foundation to teach from. How would science and environmental education look if science teachers had also done science? What would we have to do to explore this model, decide how to use it, and begin to implement it? There have been initiatives like this that were very successful, but which died at the end of their funding. They made a big dent in the way a number of teachers teach, but made no impression on entities like state departments of education, or most school district superintendents. Because, by using the real world to generate curricula, teaching science by doing science doesn’t rely on standard publishers’ offerings, it doesn’t appear to be education. To the inexperienced.
Politicians, citizens, and educators have been addressing the use of standards and benchmarks, and standards-based tests in K-12 schools for at least two decades. While they are still on the hunt for the magical set of standards and benchmarks which will guarantee improvement in science education, to date a fruitless search, some of the words they utter may have practical use. Once in a while, words like analysis and synthesis, problem solving, reading for understanding, are spoken. Do we teach to these words? Or do we teach to memorize these words and their meanings.
While the words aren’t the customary ones we read in science text books (critical thinking, analysis and synthesis, etc.), they speak more clearly to science than acquiring a set of memorized words and facts. A checklist of standards addressed but not learned for understanding. Used in an authentic way, these words have the capacity to speak to involvement and investment in science, to empowerment as persons, to minds immersed in the real world that K-12 education is supposed to prepare us for. It’s up to us to see that this is what emerges in our classrooms and on our sites.
Here is a list of processes engaged on college campuses, and which are proposed by some for middle and high school students: critical thinking, analysis and problem solving, scientific and quantitative reasoning, writing, critical reading and evaluation, writing effectiveness and mechanics, and the ability to critique and construct arguments. Might they be goals for us to shoot for, an effective set of standards? How would you use them to teach science or environmental education topics?
While we continue to try to improve science (and all) education, we produce only words; standards and benchmarks. Just the title, Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), one recent initiative to improve science education, is a clear indicator that we continue to parse words to fit what we are already doing, and call that change. It’s true that some standards proponents acknowledge that we have to do a better job of preparing teachers, but offer little to provide funding and education resources to do the job.
The intentions of the NGSS to stimulate new curricula, train pre- and in-service teachers, foster students who do science as science is done, and students who master science concepts, could be a sign of hope if you take them at face value. But if you look at the flip side, this could simply be more of the same with a newly calibrated vocabulary. A vocabulary which can be didactically taught and memorized, changing little that we actually do. And which may not be funded to supplement the necessary pre- and in-service training to implement the meat of the proposed changes. According to the National Science Teachers Association, 3.2 million teachers will be affected by the NGSS. Can we expect their real needs to be paid for?
There is a sense among people that, if you “just use the words, you’re doing the thing.” I’ve sat in in-service presentations that do this. In one, at the end of my K-12 teaching career, we were being asked to use words like “why” and “how” in multiple-choice question stems in order to induce critical thinking. How much critical thinking can you induce in a multiple-choice question stem? We need to do better than this. You have to experience the cognitive processes the words refer to. That’s how our brain learns for understanding. College teachers purport to do this. What if we explored what they do? I know that even very young children learn very well when they are allowed to use their own brains to do the learning. What would happen if you used your own brain to organize and deliver your curriculum?
Do we ask all colleges and universities to teach to the same science standards? Or, do we allow them the latitude to teach what they think ought to be taught? What emerges from this? Why? Why they and not us? What would emerge? How would K-16 collaborations work out? Would they improve education? Impoverish it? Make no difference? For instance, college courses often involve students in critical thinking, analysis and problem solving, scientific and quantitative reasoning, writing, critical reading and evaluation, writing effectiveness and mechanics, and the ability to critique and construct arguments. In other words, they know that brains can learn for understanding, and those thought processes use the parts of the brain that are engaged during learning for understanding. Or, at least, one would hope that they did. The standards remind us of conceptual areas we need to address, but we must do a good job of giving our students quality time to engage them, to reflect on what they experience, and learn for understanding and empowerment. There is no teachers’ manual on this, but the process can be learned and used. It’s up to us to learn how to do it.
This is a regular feature by CLEARING “master teacher” Jim Martin that explores how environmental educators can help classroom teachers get away from the pressure to teach to the standardized tests,and how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula. See the other installments here, or search Categories for “Jim Martin.”