It would be great if students had a chance to do science that matters. It would be great if students had first-hand experience with the work and concerns of their communities. It would be great if we didn’t lose so many clams to green crabs and if we could return clam flats to something like their former productivity. Maybe we can put those three ideas together. Continue reading
Many educators feel that the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) should become Maine’s science standards. There is no question that the NGSS have already had a positive impact on science instruction across Maine. But some of us who help schools and teachers engage in authentic scientific investigations that matter to their communities are concerned that wholesale adoption of NGSS without modifications could lead to more “school science” and less authentic science. In this post, my colleagues Jenn Page (Hurricane Island Foundation) and Yvonne Thomas (Island Institute) and I share our thinking about how to retain what is good about the NGSS while avoiding what is problematic. Continue reading
I have been invited by a National Academy of Science committee to share some of what we have learned at the Schoodic Institute in more than 10 years of designing and implementing citizen science programs in schools. The invitation was an opportunity to review our work, see how we addressed design problems and encountered new ones, and to consider what we learned from all of that. In this post I summarize Schoodic Institute’s work with citizen science and schools over the past decade and then use that summary to propose 8 key elements that should be considered within a design framework for citizen science in schools . Continue reading
“I touch the future … I teach” — a quotation associated with Christa McAuliffe — captures something essential about the motivation and hope that keeps most of the teachers I know doing what they do. One of the things that makes teaching about climate change difficult is that it can seem to cast a shadow on that hope. Continue reading
Back in September I wrote about the different understandings of what makes “authentic science learning” authentic and therefore engaging for students. Since writing that post, my Schoodic Institute colleagues and I have started a project that involves students in forest ecology and intertidal ecology research. And, yes, we have already seen how “authentic” work can quickly make a difference for some kids. In this post I want to sketch out some ideas for a research design that might give us insight into what “authentic” means to students and how it interacts with other features of the students’ personal and educational context to create outcomes. Continue reading
“Authentic” science learning is generally considered to be a good thing that might help engage students who are otherwise not interested in science. But … what makes science education authentic? Continue reading
Last Friday I was participating in a panel discussion about connecting informal science learning and classroom science–and the question of connecting informal science to standards came up. It’s a perfectly reasonable question. After all, teachers are expected to pay a great deal of attention to standards. But the question struck me as somehow missing the point — headed in the wrong direction. But I didn’t quite understand my response. What was so wrong about thinking about informal science in terms of standards? Continue reading
As I was reading this morning I ran across this:
As the great nineteenth-century mathematical physicist Lord Kelvin famously said, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” We need real-time data to understand our performance: are we getting better or worse? And we can use quantitative benchmarks–specific numerical goals we want to achieve–to focus our efforts and motivate us to try harder.
Hogwash. Worse … dangerous hogwash. Continue reading
Last week I joined a group of science and math teachers to talk about how the new school year was going. One of the teachers is working in a school where the administrative directive is to shift to “proficiency based” and “student-paced” learning. (I put the words in “quotes” because they seem to mean different things to different teachers.) The students in this teacher’s seventh-grade science classroom are now working at substantially different paces as they proceed through investigations. Some of what he sees happening is exciting. He said, “I am feeling a lot of discomfort, but that is also kind of exciting because when I am uncomfortable I am usually learning to do new things.” But some of the discomfort does seem related to real collisions between ideas about teaching and about what we value. Continue reading
How do we measure progress as we improve schools?
In a blog post this past week week Brian Drayton noted that while you can look at the improvement in performance of a business by looking at its bottom line, this doesn’t make sense for schools. They don’t have a bottom line. He suggested that it makes more sense to think of them as watershed systems.
What an interesting idea! Continue reading
Thinking About Schools 