by editor | Apr 4, 2012 | Questioning strategies
“Lessons for Teaching in the Environment and Community” is a regular series that explores how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula.
Part 16: Effective Work Groups
When you know them, they will change your world
by Jim Martin, CLEARING guest writer
e left the last blog with a note about effective work groups. I asserted a continuum of work groups from one in which each student is answering questions without talking with other students in the group, to one in which students carried on a continuous negotiation of meaning and organization of work assignments until the job was finished.
Let’s return for a moment to the Dimensions of Inquiry to visualize scenarios in which the quality of student interactions experiences a developmental change from isolated work to effective cooperative work. Look at Figure 1, which is a depiction of the three Inquiry dimensions arrayed in a three-dimensional graph whose axes are connected to form a cube. The dimensions range from Verification to Inquiry on the X-axis, Structured to Unstructured on the Y, and Description to Experiment on the Z. Each black dot inside the cube represents an activity performed by a student or group of students. Taken together as pictured, they represent a trajectory from rote didactic to interactive constructivist learning, a plan for where a course or unit should begin and end.
Figure 1. Three-Dimensional array of the Dimensions of Inquiry. Starting at the upper left, and moving around to the right, U = Unstructured, S = Structured; V = Verification, I = Inquiry; and D = Descriptive, C = Correlation, and E = Experiment.
You can see that some activities are structured, and clustered around the Verification and Description sides of the X and Z axes. These would be teacher-centered, and didactic, and hopefully activities in which students were learning to use equipment, read technical manuals, or work like that. But, try to imagine an activity in that lower left cluster in which students were trying to determine where juvenile salmon might congregate based on measured water quality parameters. It is possible to imagine this scenario, but the picture I see is one of a very neurotic teacher controlling every aspect of the students’ thoughts and actions. Certainly not conducive to critical thinking, one of the products which should emerge from science education. Unfortunately, it usually doesn’t emerge, and we all need to learn to rectify this situation.
The most effective way I know to do it is to move my students through that cube so, instead of doing lots of ineffective small activities, such as those publishers seem to favor, they spend most of their time on a few complex activities that entrain and encourage critical thinking, involvement and investment in their education, and empowerment as persons. These outcomes are as important, at the very least, as is touching ever so briefly, mandated science benchmarks. (I had a very small part in developing science benchmarks. So, I should talk. I don’t wish to belittle benchmarks; they make wonderful organizers, but have morphed into swords, held over teachers’ heads. Unfortunate.)
Effective work groups facilitate this movement toward students who routinely use critical thinking to navigate the curricula they are assimilating. Developing effective work groups is an ongoing process in which you move from Teller of Facts to Facilitator of Minds. Students working together in groups is a dynamic phenomenon, one which can be frustrating or invigorating, depending on how you approach the process. Like raising children, you have to learn to live with a balance between freedom of decision and action, and respect for boundaries. And, like parents, you accomplish this by creating structures within which your students move.
One thing that helps is to start the school year off with students working on an interesting problem in dyads. The problem should be one in which students make some things interact, and the interaction produces interesting results. (Our primate heritage: We’re easily drawn to novelties! Piaget called them discrepant events.) For instance, they can add an indicator dye to several liquids you’ve collected, and observe for a color change. (If you’ve practiced beforehand, you’ll almost always find one thing which doesn’t produce the color change you expected. Fun. And, discrepant.)
As they work, you can make suggestions that help them work well together, but don’t tell them any answers. Their brains have to do that. Having them report their results to the class helps them to learn some valuable lessons about working together. (If you include things in this activity which will act as openers to segue into your first unit, you’ll be able to see right away the power of assimilation to involve students in their learnings.)
I start with dyads because they minimize problems of acting out, refusing to help, etc. Once students are working well in dyads, then you can merge dyads to form tetrads, groups of four, to work on larger problems. Occasionally move the memberships around. (I learned a nice trick at a workshop; Make up a blank ‘day timer’ page, with the hours from 9:00 to, say 6:00, and an underline after each hour. Have students move around, signing up students they know and don’t know. Then, when you change group memberships, ask them to get together, say, with their 4 O’clocks to form dyads. This keeps the ownership ball in their court, and also gets students to know one another the first or second day of class.)
We’re going down this road toward effective work groups for a reason. There’s a dynamic that is generated within groups of students who have experiences in working together effectively which will raise the capacity of all of your students to become very effective learners. You’ll see this emerge as you work. The person who first described this dynamic was Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist, who developed the concept of a Zone of Proximal Development, which he hypothesized as a place where all students could learn a particular concept, but don’t because most students haven’t developed the capacity to identify key elements of the concept that bring everything together. Practically all students understand the components of the concept, but haven’t developed the skills to identify the key elements and bring them to bear on solving the problem.
When they work in groups, students, in a real sense, share their minds, their brains. And they are very good at recognizing and exploiting cues from the environment. As either a bright student in their group, or you, the teacher, elucidates a key integrating component, most of the students will see it. Eventually, continuing to work in this mental negotiating environment, all, or nearly all of your students will have assimilated the skill of identifying key elements, and will be working at a higher level of cognitive function. This is how you raise the performance of your bottom 25th percentile. The secret is to begin with groups who learn to negotiate meaning together, and who work well in small or large groups. That sets the stage. The hardest part for you, once you begin to notice student dynamics in groups, is having the patience to move at a pace which allows your students to develop these capacities. I always felt frustrated when I would consider that I had to wait three or four months until we did the activity which I knew would bring everything together.
If you’ve already developed effective work groups, this is probably old hat. If not, try a small piece with dyads, and observe their interactions very carefully. What are they doing and saying that moves them forward? What inhibits them? Later, work with them by starting with strengths you observed. We don’t always recognize our strengths, and begin to favor them when they’re recognized. And, we resist change when our weak areas are brought up. So, build on strengths, then ask yourself and your students how to use these strengths to shore up the weak areas. You’ll all learn valuable lessons about group dynamics from this. You know by now that you are modeling adult behavior and attitudes in your classroom. You don’t have to tell them much. What you do is like planting seeds. You may not see the plant that eventually grows, but you can rest assured that you will enhance students’ lives by modeling how to be an effective member of a group.
This is the sixteenth installment of “Teaching in the Environment,” a new, 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.”
by editor | Feb 24, 2012 | Questioning strategies, Schoolyard Classroom
“Lessons for Teaching in the Environment and Community” is a regular series that explores how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula.
Part 11: Assimilation Continued
by Jim Martin, CLEARING guest writer
e’ve been talking about assimilation, where we start in the real world, integrate new learnings into old concepts, then use this auspicious beginning to move into the abstract. It’s like building a boat that lets you explore an uncharted ocean. It helped our hunter-gatherer ancestors to navigate changing environments. It is still embedded within the brain that was selected for by the consequences of its activities.
And it served us well until our environments became brick, steel, asphalt, and concrete. Now, instead of learning about the world in the world, we learn in rooms. Not that that’s a bad idea. It helps us to focus and concentrate our thinking. But, because it’s generally only an extended exercise in developing short term memory, twelve or thirteen years of it doesn’t leave a student well equipped for the environment he or she will inhabit. (more…)
by editor | Feb 1, 2012 | Environmental Literacy, Questioning strategies
“Lessons for Teaching in the Environment and Community” is a regular series that explores how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula.
Part 10: Assimilation
When the world outside becomes the world inside
by Jim Martin, CLEARING guest writer
tarting in the world outside our skin, our personal tegumental boundary, I have claimed, is the best way to learn. By ‘learn,’ I mean integrate new material into old understandings so that they become a part of you. Part of you because they begin their synaptic lives with you by adding protein to the synapses they innervate, piles of stones along a new path, so they can find their way again. Becoming protein within you, they are you, a part of yourself that will travel with you wherever you go.
An enchanting thought, that, one that all teachers could give to their students in every class they teach. Learning for understanding, carried through each person’s life. I would think that thought would drive education, but it doesn’t. Even so, I’d like to talk about it for a bit.
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What happens when we engage some concrete piece of the world outside our bodies with the intent to learn? Or, at least the teacher expects us to learn. Let’s say we’re on a streambank, collecting, identifying, and counting the macroinvertebrates (macros) we have netted in the stream. You empty the net into a tub of stream water, then use a pipet to suck one particular macro from the milieu, place it into one of the depressions of an ice cube tray, and use your macro identification book to attach a name to it. These activities are all coordinated by your brain, the organ system which will do the learning and, hopefully, the eventual remembering.
While you are hovering over the basin, pipet in hand, your parietal lobes begin to pay attention to what is happening where the skin of your hand ends, and the rest of the world begins. That’s one of their jobs. Another thing they do is to alert other parts of your brain about what you are doing. The Gnostic area (in the parietal lobes) integrates sensory interpretations with memories from most of the brain to formulate a common thought and devise a single response to the incoming information. Cells in your parietal lobes are stimulated and in turn stimulate neurons connected to parts of the midbrain associated with attention, instinctive and procedural skills, and episodic (past experience) memory. Other neurons are stimulated in the frontal lobes, where working memory is organized and where stored memories advise and guide current behaviors, in the temporal lobes with their stores of general knowledge memories, and in the hippocampus, which has the capacity to turn experiences into long-term memories.
So, what does this mean? When we use our hands to net macros, use a pipet to transfer a particular one to an ice cube tray depression, then grab a book and try to identify it, the parietal lobes turn on our wonderful autonomous learning machine. It automatically focuses us on the subject of our actions, brings all relevant knowledge and concepts to bear on it, and sets up a working memory room for us to work in until we’re ready to incorporate the gist of this new experience into knowledge, concepts, and skills already stored in our brain.
As the Learning Machine continues its work, it does so by firing impulses across synapses, connections between nerve cells involved in this activity we’re involved in. A neat thing about cells is that they build more parts when one is used. So, each of the nerve cells which fire during this learning add to the size of a synapse each time it is used. This increases to the probability of firing when stimulated again. Later, when one of these neurons is stimulated, others will more than likely be stimulated too, and you’ll remember significant pieces of the objects and related concepts that you worked with originally; in this case, a visual image of the macro, its name, and relevant facts you discovered about it. If you build from hands-on activities, in May or June you can remind students what they did in October, and they’ll bring the concepts and relevant facts out spontaneously. That’s because the knowledge and concepts are in the brain proteins that are part of them.
And to make this even simpler: What I’ve described is the process of assimilation, starting with concrete objects to develop new understandings which are incorporated, integrated, into previously held concepts and thus more likely to be remembered. This idea has been around a long time, a part of the psychology of learning, but is not used by most educators. Instead, we ask students to place new learnings in working memory until they have passed the test. Once the job is finished, working memory flushes itself out. Then we wonder why they can’t remember enough to pass the SAT.
Once you’ve started in the real world with concrete objects, then you can milk this opportunity by tying these learnings to new material the class learns from books, and other standard sources. If you’re clever, you’ll find that you can stretch this a long way. Start with concrete experiences, move to the abstract. This is one of the reasons that community and environment based education works so well. It is based on the way the human brain works. Since the brain is the organ of learning, we ought to know something about how it works.
When you take your students into the community and natural areas, plan your curriculum with assimilation in mind. Talk with the people you work with in these places. They can help you find what you need to get started, the curricular starting places that are embedded in the places where they work. While your students are working, observe them for evidence of the pieces of assimilation. You’ll find that, once you get a handle on it, your teaching will begin to move in an interesting direction.
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This is the tenth installment of “Teaching in the Environment,” a new, 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.
by editor | Jan 22, 2012 | Questioning strategies
“Lessons for Teaching in the Environment and Community” is a regular series that explores how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula.
Part 9: Digging Through the Brambles
by Jim Martin, CLEARING guest writer
t last writing, I’d decided to explore a place outside for the curricular content which was embedded in it. I planned to do a natural science inquiry, and decided to also look for social studies and creative writing curricula units there based on an area near a dog walk. The area is fenced off from the dog walk, and has entrances to several animal runs along its edge. At its outer edge, this undisturbed area ends at a sharp precipice on the edge of a working quarry. Now, my job is to turn this place into a lesson that will release and exploit the curricula embedded within it.
I’ve decided to start each discipline the same way, a casual exploration and discussion of the animal runs. The discussions will direct the students into each of the three disciplines. First, though, an operational definition of what I’m calling animal runs. If you walk on a path that has tall grasses, shrubs, or other plants parallel to it, every now and then you’ll notice small, oval or round openings in the wall of vegetation. They vary in size from awfully small to large enough for a cat to crouch through. If you look beyond the entrance, and can see, this is probably a run. Exploring further, you can find signs of particular places animals go, but this takes patience and skill to locate in many runs. In others, the paths are clear to the eye.
So, I’ll assume that some runs will only be observed as entrances, with no particular destination other than safety. Others may reveal some indication they travel to a destination. And, in the best of all possible situations, one will have a clearly defined path. When I see one of these, I’m thrilled. (If you are observing in a place where large mammals, deer-size, live, then the runs are true paths that you, yourself, can use to move from one place to another. And learn a lot about the animals who made them.)
So, here’s how I’ll build my curriculum for each discipline. I’ll start with science, since that’s what I know best. Since I want this inquiry to focus on transportation, after the casual observation, I’ll call up the observations reported on runs, and ask what students think animals use these runs for, and use this to get ideas out for consideration, and then to suggest students organize into groups to word a science inquiry question and design an investigation.
Science standards I’ll focus on are: (Central Focus) Design a scientific investigation to answer questions or hypotheses. (Most ‘hypotheses’ sections in publishers’ materials ask the student to formulate an hypothesis about something she has never experienced. Hypotheses are formulated after many question-driven inquiries suggest them. I think we’re best to work with questions. They perform effective work.) (Supplemental Focus) I’ll also see that their experiences partially support the standards: Analyze data, while being mindful of observer and sample bias; Acquire information from print and not-print sources, including the Internet; and Describe cause and effect relationships in biological and physical systems. I could also include the standard, Collect sufficient data to investigate a question, clarify information and support analysis, but think there will be lots of uncertainties in their data.
So, I’ll have them do the casual observation on the runs detailing any evidence of animals or animal movement they find, develop a clean inquiry question, design their investigation to answer the specifics in their question, collect and analyze data, then interpret their data and communicate their inferences to the rest of the class in a symposium. There may be next steps that emerge from the reporting, and we’ll have to decide what to do about them at that time. Given the importance of their work to their understanding and comprehension of science and science inquiry, extra time, and perhaps an extra field trip, may be worth it.
Creative writing standards I’ll focus on are: (Central Focus) Write a narrative piece that establishes character, a situation, plot, point of view, setting, and conflict using a range of strategies to create dialogue, tension, and/or suspense. (Supplemental Focus) I’ll also see that their experiences partially support the standards: Engage the reader by establishing context, creating a persona, and developing audience interest; Include sensory details, personal thoughts, and feelings in developing topic or plot and character; Write sentences that flow and vary in length; and Revise writing to improve clarity and effectiveness by adding relevant details, changing or rearranging text, as suggested by others.
After the casual observation, we’ll report our findings and brainstorm the possibilities embedded in them for story plots or elements. My expectation is that, because they started with concrete referents, their stories will emerge easily, with significant detail. For this unit, I want each student to write a story, so I’ll group them for all the other work but the writing of the story. They’ll first share their thoughts in group, then write a synopsis of the story as they see it. Then, in groups, they will sell their synopses to the rest of the group, receive feedback, and use this to assess any changes they feel they’d like to make to the story. As they work on their stories, I’ll ask which of the Central Focus elements they would like advice on, and I’ll do a lecture/discussion on that piece. In groups, students will share progress made, ask for feedback, etc. The stories have a 3,000 word limit, and do not have to be finished all the way to the end. (At the end of the unit, if several stories aren’t finished, then I’ll arrange time for students who would like, to finish their writing.) When all stories are complete, we’ll share them, either as readings or as written documents.
Social Studies standards I’ll focus on are: (Central Focus) Understand how human modification of the physical environment in a place affects both that place and other places. (Supplemental Focus) I’ll also see that their experiences partially support the standards: Understand how changes in a physical environment affect human activity; and Understand fundamental geography vocabulary such as concepts of distance, latitude, longitude, interdependence, accessibility, and connections.
After the casual observation, we’ll take a tour around the humane society neighborhood, and through the quarry to see what ‘runs’ we find there. Then, I’ll divide the class into three large groups who will focus on human modifications to the environment at the site which affect that place and other places. One group will focus on the animal runs, another on the quarry, and the third on the streets and roads around the humane society. We’ll use communication and transportation as topics which will coordinate the three groups’ work. At the end, we’ll build a communication and transportation map of the area which will hold relevant information for each use.
You’ll notice that my description of the social studies unit is the briefest of the three units. Think of that fact as an analog or metaphor for what our teaching is like when we’re asked to teach content we’re not prepared for. We don’t have enough synaptic connections among neurons in our brain to raise up words that provide detailed descriptions of our thoughts. And we subsequently don’t pass many understandings on to our students. The best way I know to build these synaptic pathways is to start in the real world, engage real things with our bodies and senses, and connect them to concepts and understandings already housed in our brain. Perhaps we should talk more about this.
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This is the ninth installment of “Teaching in the Environment,” a new, 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.
by editor | Jan 13, 2012 | Questioning strategies, Schoolyard Classroom
“Lessons for Teaching in the Environment and Community” is a regular series that explores how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula.
Part 8: Where is Curriculum?
by Jim Martin, CLEARING guest writer
We’ve been talking about our ‘Locus of Control,’ the place where the authority for what we do lies. That authority can be outside ourselves, or within. What determines where we find it? Nothing more than experience.
By experience, I mean having done something in a way that lets me understand it once and for all. Most teacher inservices introduce us to new learnings, then let us go, as if we had mastered it. Many field trips do the same; we go out, experience something neat and invigorating, then return to our classroom not understanding it well enough to incorporate into our curriculum. I think we might do well to revisit environmental education, and its partner, K-12 education.
Before environmental education was a household word, most people abused the environments they inhabited and traveled through. There were lots of reasons for this, and someday we might visit some of them. The first environmental education project I remember was Lady Bird Johnson’s campaign to reduce highway litter, which was an atrocious problem. She opened our eyes, and we soon began to generalize the concept and become more aware of what was happening in our forests, plains, wetlands, and waterways.
Environmental education brought this to our attention, and we learned. Today, a large fraction of the population recycles, and votes for environmental legislation. I think it might be time for environmental education to begin an exploration of its place in the average U.S. K-12 school system. It has a lot to bring with it, and our students’ educations might better prepare them for the world they inhabit. Let’s look at some pieces of such a possible future merger.
We’re already moving in that direction. Many teachers, and some schools, have been using the natural world, and its embedded curricula to drive their deliveries. With great success. Some schools organize their entire curriculum around the environment and community. In other schools, individual teachers have built their curricula around the world outside the classroom. They all use environmental educators and local experts and organizations to partner in their works. Both environmental educators and teachers had to modify their practices to make it work, but all seem to have benefited from the adaptation.
Here is what each brings to the table. Environmental educators bring natural environments with their plant and animal populations, a great place to begin learning for understanding via assimilation. They bring an intimate intuitive knowledge of the curriculum embedded in the places where they work. And so far, all those I have known are quite willing to work with teachers to develop projects and programs which meet their needs. They also often have equipment and resources that school classrooms don’t.
Teachers bring students who are, at the very least, happy to be out of the classroom, and are willing to work while they are on site. Teachers have intimate knowledge of the strengths their students bring to the work, and are great behavior managers of students who are working on their own. Those who have been doing this work for awhile carry with them the certain knowledge that their students grow in this work, and most important for their job security, score very well on standard tests.
The interface piece which holds this together for both groups is the embedded curricula residing in the sites the environmental educators work in. Classroom curricula and real world sites; a dynamite combination. I can give you an example from a project a bright first-year teacher did. Her class was working on a restoration project in a ‘natural’ urban park. One day, she had her students stand on a high spot where they could see all of the trees on site. They counted the number of each species present, and she then showed them how to convert these numbers into fractions, and the fractions to percents. Suddenly her students could see what 13% and 48% looked like. And, when they and a class which didn’t work on the project took the tests on percents, all of the ones who worked on the project passed; far fewer in the other class did.
We’ve all been to school, and many of us have gone to college. We know something about each of the major disciplines taught in our K-12 schools. Here’s what we can do with this knowledge we’ve carried with us all these years. We can find a natural place, or a place in our community, and begin to get to know the curriculum embedded in it.
When you think of it, everything we learn in school is about the world outside the classroom. Those disciplines originated somewhere, and that somewhere is in the world we’ve inhabited. Pick three disciplines, one that you know intimately, and two you know, but not well enough to teach from scratch. Go into that place you’ve chosen, and find examples of each discipline you picked. When you’ve done that, think of how you would teach it.
Here are the disciplines I’ve chosen: Biology, creative writing, and social studies. I’ve listed them in the order that I’m familiar with them. For instance, one part of me has been a biologist since 1963; another part likes to write, but has never taken a course in creative writing; and, the third part appreciates history, but doesn’t know what a social studies curriculum contains other than history.
So, I’m going to go out right now and find the place where I’ll find my disciplines embedded in. I’ll search for the learnings, and when I find them, I’ll think of how I could get a classroom of students to locate and exploit them. I feel comfy about biology, okay about creative writing because I appreciate the power of metaphor (Which I don’t use often enough!), and am feeling pretty shaky about social studies. If you know about learning levels, I’m at my Instructional Level. The learning load isn’t at my Frustration Level (where I’d just give up), nor is it all at my Mastery Level (where I’d be bored to death).
. . . Two days later . . . .
Okay, the place is the area just off the dog walk at the Southwest Washington Humane Society in Vancouver, WA. A few yards from the dog walk, there is a chain link fence at the edge of the shelter property, and on the other side brush and brambles cover several yards before reaching the precipitous edge of a quarry. Not really a natural area, except that humans don’t tend it. Nor is it a developed urban area. But, it resides in the world outside the classroom, so fits my criteria. I’m going to check it out, and report back on the biology, creative writing, and social studies curriculum I found embedded in it. See if you can’t do the same so you’ll have some concrete referents to refer to as we continue this exploration.
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This is the eighth installment of “Teaching in the Environment,” a new, 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.
by editor | Dec 31, 2011 | Environmental Literacy, Questioning strategies
“Lessons for Teaching in the Environment and Community” is a regular series that explores how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula.
Part 7: From Hand to Mind
Concrete experiences generate learning for understanding
by Jim Martin, CLEARING guest writer
ver the past few blogs, we’ve walked through a science inquiry done in a natural area. First, we noticed something there, then asked a question about it, and used the question to develop an investigation. We did the investigation, collecting data that we hoped would answer our question.
We’ve analyzed and interpreted our data, and now we need to communicate it. Most science standards and benchmarks overlook this piece of science inquiry, but scientists don’t. This is the place where you really nail down what you’ve learned. Something we often don’t do in American education
Communicating findings is an important piece of science inquiry. Preparing for this phase gives you a chance to look back on what you’ve done; where you started, what you did, how that affected your thinking, what new questions emerged from your work. A check to see if you understand, and, hopefully, appreciate what you’ve done. You know what one part of the world is, and what it does. I’m sure you’ll never pass that place, or one like it, and not think about what’s there and what it’s doing.
A good way to start the communication process is to make a poster with four sections. The first section states your question and provides background information about it, and why you want to find out. The second section lists the steps you took to answer your question. It should be clear enough that another person could follow your directions. (I used to have my students swap directions, try to follow them, and make recommendations for edits, point out pieces that were particularly well done, etc. What emerged was interesting for all of us.) The third section contains the record and analysis of your observations. The fourth section is a statement of your findings (your interpretation based on analysis of the data) and any next steps you would like to take.
When you’ve done this, and if you’re feeling particularly brave, post it where your students and/or colleagues can see it. Get them interested. You’ll find that they are curious about what you’ve done. Some of them may wish to do an inquiry themselves. How would you respond to that? You might find yourself working with a colleague to do a similar inquiry, or integrate yours into an interdisciplinary project.
If you’ve been following this inquiry, you know that it isn’t easy to find time and determination to actually go out yourself and attempt to do this work. We all have important things to do, are pressed for time, and don’t have a clear idea how to incorporate new work into an already full schedule. These are all understandable reasons for not trying this way of doing science inquiry. But they’re not effective reasons. One of the causes of the current dilemmas in education is that we rely on publishers’ curricula and mandates from the bureaucracy of education to organize our teaching, our delivery of one of the most important developmental pieces of each of our students’ lives, their education.
When you engage a science inquiry on your own, something most teachers have never done, you gain a perspective you can only achieve in this way. You can’t learn about it; you have to learn it by doing it. You put something into your head that no one can take away; that changes your view of science as something that is cluttered with disparate facts and processes that you have to somehow teach, and your students have to try to memorize long enough to pass the test on. You begin to see clearly that science isn’t just an extremely large compendium of facts and concepts, science made, but also an invigorating, exciting way to learn, science in the making. If you actually do an inquiry, you’ll know first-hand that it drives you into the books to find information – the seemingly disparate facts that we try, and largely fail to teach our students. You control whether you take the steps to gain this view of teaching. There is very little in your environment compelling you to do it.
So, what has this long exercise been about? Using the world outside your classroom to involve and invest your students in their educations, to develop their capacity for assimilating new learnings into conceptual schemata which are already there in their brains.
The important piece in the inquiry we’re working on is first going into the community to do work, then returning to the classroom after the outdoor work to follow up. It’s easy to let the second piece go, especially if you’ve never done work in the community with your students. Your students use these real-world experiences to establish concrete referents in the community; following up in the classroom allows them to use these referents to develop coherent symbolic concepts, that are part of the curriculum you deliver. There is a continuum from the community to the classroom, just like a road connects the country with the city, making a continuum of travel, and experience, from one to the other and back again.
Many teachers who venture out into the real world miss that opportunity. They allow the environmental educators they work with do the work, then return to the classroom and pick up on section 18.b.3 in their textbook. You can always tell environmental educators what your students are doing, and what you would like to do, and they’ll nearly always be able to work with you. The idea behind environmental education is to instill knowledge about environments into people’s world views. Doing inquiry in environments guarantees that new learnings will be assimilated, become part of the person, along with her concomitant views. As long as you follow up on them in the classroom.
This is a win-win situation. Most environmental educators rely on people (read school buses) to come to their sites, and most teachers rely on effective student learners to bolster their records for the number of students passing standards tests. Here’s the connection: If you turn your field trips into student-driven inquiry activities, then their brains, which are built to learn best in the real world, will begin the job of preparing them to pass tests.
When human beings use their hands, their brains become very active. Especially when they use their hands to learn something new. The parietal lobes keep track of where we end and the rest of the world begins. This place is our skin. When we see and touch things in the real world, outside our skin, and know we’re there to learn, the parietal notifies other parts of the brain that are involved in this new learning. Concepts and knowledge already in memory are opened up, storage is set up for the new learnings, and these activities generate ‘needs to know.’ The needs to know drive them into the books and internet. That’s power.
Reflect on your experience if you did the casual observation in a natural area; do you recall your mind opening up? Recognizing what living things were there? What their names were? What information you already knew about them? Did you want to find out more? This is all set up for you when you start learnings in the real world. Then you use your teacherly skills to use this auspicious beginning to engage your students in real learning that will stay with them for a long, long time. Because it will become assimilated into concepts and understandings which are already there, in their brains. You can’t ask for better.
When students engage in self-directed inquiry in natural places, they become involved and invested in the work. Especially those students who aren’t seen as being ‘academic.’ Becoming invested in the work – a natural function of the brain in the real world – students want to know about what they are experiencing. This leads them to search for clarifying and amplifying information on their own. In the end, they learn for understanding, not just so they can pass tests. And they do pass the tests, especially those in the bottom 25th percentile.
Teachers whose students do this know it’s true. For the rest of us, it takes courage to free ourselves enough to give it a try, to start something like this, but we can do it. Start in your own school yard. Who lives there? Simple question; it can be answered at many levels. You’ll find that the main difference in grade-level approaches to answering this question are just in the vocabulary, complexity of sentences and paragraphs used, and the nature of details contained within the concepts. The main facts elicited will be very similar. Take ten minutes to ask this question in your school yard. Hard to squeeze in ten extra minutes, but worth the effort.
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This is the seventh installment of “Teaching in the Environment,” a new, 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.
This is the sixteenth installment of “Teaching in the Environment,” a new, 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.”
