Learning to Teach Science for Understanding: Intern Year Version
Andy Anderson, August, 2002
Approaches to Teaching Science: What Works? 1
Traditional Didactic and Discovery Teaching 2
Project-based Learning 2
Standards-based Teaching 3
Understanding Needed to Teach for Understanding 3
Understanding Understanding: Relationships between Knowledge and Practice 3
Understanding Science Content 4
Knowledge of Science 5
Practices of Scientific Understanding 6
Scientists’ science vs. school science 7
Understanding Students 7
Understanding Students Socially 7
Understanding Students Academically 7
Understanding Pedagogy 8
Creating and Managing a Classroom Learning Community 8
Managing Dilemmas and Tradeoffs 9
Teaching Strategies for Project-based Learning 9
Standards-based Teaching Strategies 10
Working at the Intersection of Different Kinds of Knowledge 10
The Practices of Teaching for Understanding 10
Clarifying Goals for Student Learning 11
Big Ideas 11
Real-world Examples 12
Objectives for Student Learning 13
Why Is Clarifying Your Goals Important? 14
Classroom Activities: The Learning Cycle 15
Stages of the Learning Cycle 15
Lesson Planning: Objectives, Materials, Activities, and Post-lesson Notes 18
Learning from Experience: The Assessment Cycle 20
Purposes of Classroom Assessment 20
Developing Assessment Tasks 21
Making Sense of Students’ Responses 22
Adjusting Your Teaching and Assessment 23
Revising your plans for the next time you teach the topic 24
Reflecting on your Learning 24
Building Knowledge and Support Systems 24
References 25
Appendix A: Transforming Scientists’ Practices into School Knowledge 26
Scientists’ Knowledge and Practices 26
Scientists’ Knowledge: Experiences, patterns, and explanations 26
Scientists’ Practices: Inquiry and application 27
Written Scientific Communication 27
Journal Knowledge: Experiences, patterns, and explanations 28
Journal Writing Practice: Persuasive communication 28
Science Textbooks 28
Textbook knowledge: Explanations, patterns, and examples 29
Textbook writing practices: Summarizing authoritative conclusions 29
Students’ Interpretations 29
Students’ Knowledge: Facts, definitions, and algorithms 30
Students’ Practices: The performance for grade exchange 30
Illustrations of how scientific knowledge is transformed to school knowledge 30
An Alternative Approach to School Science 32
Developing students’ knowledge: Expanding experience and reducing it to order 32
Developing students’ practices: Cognitive apprenticeship in inquiry and application 32
Appendix B: Introduction to Michigan Science Objectives 34
Introduction 34
Scientific Literacy for All Students 34
Use of the Objectives to Promote Scientific Literacy 36
Dimensions of Scientific Literacy 36
Knowledge: Describing Ideas, Strategies, and the Connections among them 38
Activity: The Social Nature of Understanding 38
Contexts: Knowing the Real World 39
Important Characteristics of the Objectives 39
Appendix C: Example Lesson Plan on Heat Transfer 41
Objectives 41
Materials 41
Activities 42
(OH) Ice Melting: Your Predictions and Explanations 43
(OH) Summarizing What You Read 44
(OH) A Good Explanation of Heat Transfer 45
Appendix D: Designing a Clinical Interview 46
Introduction 46
Getting Started 46
Developing Tasks 46
How to Conduct Interviews 47
Starting the Interview 47
Questioning 47
Ways of Probing for More Information 48
Documenting and Analyzing Your Results 48
Questions about Students’ Perceptions of the Class 49
8/19/02, Page XXX
Learning to Teach Science for Understanding: Intern Year Version
Andy Anderson, August, 2002
Our goal for the intern year is to help you make substantial progress toward teaching in ways that help all your students learn science with understanding—teaching science for understanding for all. This is not an all-or-nothing goal. You know enough now to help some of your students learn with understanding, while not even the best teachers succeed in reaching all their students. We hope that by the end of the year you will be able to help many more students learn with understanding than you do now.
This paper has four purposes. First, it explains why we think that teaching for understanding is so important, and what kinds of general approaches work best. Second, it introduces many of the key ideas that we will be using over the next two years—the knowledge and skills that you will need to teach science for understanding for all. Third, it introduces the practices of teaching for understanding—what successful science teachers do. Finally, we introduce the basic structure for many of your field assignments—what you will be doing as you learn to teach for understanding.
Approaches to Teaching Science: What Works?
Teaching science for understanding is important. We are in the midst of a revision of science and mathematics curricula that has as its stated goal “understanding for all.” This revision is represented by the current state and national standards (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1989, 1993; National Research Council, 1996, Michigan Curriculum Framework, 2001). This is a new goal for American education; we used to expect that learning science with understanding would be reserved mostly for the few students headed toward scientific and technical careers. We cannot afford to continue teaching in this way, though. More and more careers require scientific and technical expertise, and students in schools today will participate as citizens in many critical political and economic decisions that involve scientific issues (think of global warming, the preservation of biodiversity, or our energy needs). It is your responsibility as a science teacher to prepare all your students for their future responsibilities as workers and citizens.
You are also beginning your teaching career at a time when you can expect to be accountable for student learning. This is a relatively new development in American education. Teachers have traditionally been accountable mostly for content coverage, for classroom management, and for satisfying their students and their parents. Large-scale attempts to assess students’ understanding were relatively rare, and the results of those assessments had few consequences for teachers and administrators.
These circumstances are changing irrevocably. The standards movement is here to stay. The impact of standards is enhanced by large scale assessment programs such as the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (Beaton, Mullis, Martin, Gonzalez, Smith and Kelly, 1996), the National Assessment of Educational Progress (National Center for Education Statistics, 1999), and assessment programs in almost every state (Elmore, 1997). Accountability for student learning is becoming a fact of life for teachers and administrators.
Teaching science for understanding is also hard. Think about all the science teachers and professors you have had. How many of them managed to make science class interesting? How many really helped you understand the content? What about your classmates who weren’t going on to become college science majors? How many teachers helped them to learn with understanding? Why do you think so many of your teachers were not successful?
We will start answering this question by contrasting three general approaches to science teaching. These approaches differ in the way teachers think about their goals for student learning and teaching activities . They also differ in consequences for student learning.
Traditional Didactic and Discovery Teaching
Should we tell students what they need to know, or should they figure it out for themselves? This seems like a sensible question, but sometimes both answers are wrong. Traditional didactic teaching emphasizes explaining content clearly and giving students chances to practice. Traditional discovery teaching emphasizes creating activities that students will find interesting and that will give students chances to figure out ideas for themselves.
Traditional didactic and discovery teachers often do a lot of things well. They may cover the content they are supposed to in a reasonable and appropriate way. They may be efficient and well-organized in planning and managing class activities. They may make their classes interesting and fun for their students. These are important and difficult accomplishments.
However, if you really want most of your students to learn with understanding, traditional didactic and discovery teaching are not enough. Teaching for understanding requires careful attention to the relationship between your goals for student learning and the activities you have them do in your classroom. Let’s consider a couple of alternatives that do this more carefully.
Project-based Learning
Project-based learning resembles discovery teaching in that students help to determine classroom activities through their needs and interests. It is different from discovery teaching in that the teacher pays careful attention to several critical issues, including the following?
· Creating a classroom environment rich in resources and opportunities for learning.
· Establishing norms and standards for rigorous inquiry that students follow in working on their projects.
· Guiding student projects so that they lead toward understanding of important scientific ideas.
Thus project-based learning requires careful attention to learning goals, thorough planning, extensive resources, and careful attention to developing norms and standards in your classroom community. Project-based learning is important, but not something that you will be able to practice during the short teaching opportunities you have in TE 401-2. We will therefore leave most discussions of project-based learning for your intern year.
Standards-based Teaching
Even the best science teachers cannot rely solely on project-based learning. There are some important ideas that all students should learn, even if their project-based inquiries don’t lead them in that direction. Many of those ideas are included in our state and national standards (refs.) When teaching activities are carefully “wrapped around” critical goals through learning cycles, most students can learn these important ideas with understanding. Learning cycles are discussed extensively below.
Understanding Needed to Teach for Understanding
Teaching for understanding is hard because you have to know a lot and because you have to do a lot. You cannot teach for understanding without some complex and difficult essential knowledge. Even after you have that knowledge, though, teaching for understanding requires continuing dedication and hard work. It never becomes easy or automatic.
In this section, we begin with a general discussion of the nature of understanding, with special emphasis on relationships between knowledge and practice. These relationships are important both for understanding your own learning and for planning learning activities for your students. We then discuss the knowledge you need in three essential domains: content, students, and pedagogy. We discuss the practices of teaching for understanding (and your learning activities during TE 401-2) in the following section.
Understanding Understanding: Relationships between Knowledge and Practice
How well do you understand understanding? When you say that you understand something—a scientific concept or how your car works or another person—what does that mean? There is no single correct answer to this question, but we will try one that should be useful to you as a science teacher.
First, understanding is not an all-or-nothing thing. When you are talking about something complex like a scientific theory or how your car works, there are degrees of understanding—you can understand more or less. Two qualities that we look for in people who understand more are connectedness and usefulness. Someone who understands a scientific concept well, for example, can connect that concept with other scientific concepts and with ideas outside the realm of science. We will return to ideas about connectedness below. First, though, let’s think about usefulness.
Our knowledge is useful when we can do something with it. Useful knowledge, in other words, is closely connected with practice. You can’t have one without the other. Everything we do requires knowledge. Everything we know is useless and invisible unless we do something with it (even if what we do is just repeat it on tests or Trivial Pursuit games). As the graphic on the left shows, learning also requires doing. We engage in practices (learning activities) to acquire new knowledge, then we use our knowledge to engage in practices.
This may seem obvious, but it is very easy to lose track of the connections between knowledge and practice when you are planning and teaching. If you think about “covering content,” then you are thinking of knowledge but not practice. It is also easy to think about classroom activities without being clear what knowledge they are supposed to build. If you want to teach for understanding, though, you always have to keep the connections between what you want your students to know and what you want them to do in mind.
We are using the terms knowledge and practice in a broader sense than they are sometimes used. Knowledge refers not only to facts and ideas, but also to skills, attitudes, beliefs, etc.—anything that we have inside our heads that helps us to act. Similarly, practices include not just physical activity but also verbal activities such as reading, writing, explaining, describing, and predicting.
For a more thorough discussion of the knowledge and practices of learning and doing science, see the introduction to the Michigan Essential Goals and Objectives for Science Education (MEGOSE) in the Appendix to this paper. This paper is about the knowledge and practices of teaching science.
So let’s consider what this criterion of usefulness means in the context of science teaching. If you want to teach for understanding, then you will need to understand science yourself. That means that you will have to apply your scientific knowledge to the practice of science teaching. You will have to make your knowledge useful for teaching.
Now let’s consider connectedness, the other characteristic of understanding besides usefulness. What kinds of connections among different types of knowledge will you need to teach for understanding? Our way of thinking about knowledge for teaching is illustrated by the Venn diagram to the left. The work of teaching takes place at the intersection of knowledge of content, students, and pedagogy. This is our way of thinking about what Wilson, Shulman, and Richert (1989) referred to as pedagogical content knowledge. We will discuss each of these domains of knowledge separately, then think about what it takes to put them together when you teach for understanding.
Understanding Science Content
The fact that you are reading this shows that you have some understanding of science content. You had to pass a lot of science courses to get here. However, that doesn’t mean that you understand science well enough to teach it. The practices of passing courses are different from the practices of teaching, so they demand different kinds of knowledge. We will discuss the practices of science teaching more specifically in the next section. For now, let’s consider the knowledge and practices of scientific understanding more generally. What do scientists know and what do they do with that knowledge? What kinds of understanding might we want for our students or for the citizens of our country in general? The great physicist Niels Bohr wrote something that helps us to consider these questions: