Students and Teachers Exploring the World Together!

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Developing Teacher Voice Through Inquiry

by

Judy Sidileau

"Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand." ~ Chinese proverb

A Brief History of Science Pedagogy: Teaching science has traditionally been viewed from a "teacher as knowledge provider" standpoint. Students did not "know enough" about science. Therefore, they would be a danger to themselves and to others by learning to "explore" science concepts by making discoveries for themselves. Instead, it was left to the teacher to “impart” that knowledge directly to students. Thus began the vicious cycle of students learning to abhor science because they could not easily grasp ideas that they had never practiced, but, instead, had purportedly learned by copying pages of notes and then been traditionally assessed. Students could not make science their own, because they were not given the opportunity. Teachers were similarly constrained by a lack of instructional freedom in that they were required to meet imposed expectations/objectives within the curriculum.

Then a new science methodology, "inquiry science", arrived upon the scene. The idea was that students would arrive at the same conclusions as other scientists if teachers  guided them toward the "correct" results within the science laboratory. The problem was that too many teachers throughout the K-12 system did not have sufficient science background themselves to fully understand the scope of this undertaking. Elementary school teachers, who generally had a smattering of science college courses, were simultaneously being told by their districts to be more focused upon imparting literacy and numeracy skills to their students. Additionally, in typical elementary classrooms there was little or no infrastructure in place to actually perform science activities. Science instruction was being placed haphazardly into the school day whenever it "fit" around all of the other mandated, higher priority curricular demands and constraints. Sometimes that meant having science once or twice per week. Middle school teachers typically followed the same pattern until seventh (7) grade; at this level general science, state licensed teachers usually only taught science. They had the appropriate infrastructure, but may have had little or no training in inquiry learning. Without specific training in the inquiry process, and by not allowing students to understand what it meant to be a scientist (by trying to answer their own questions), inquiry methods fell by the wayside and quickly were replaced with "cookbook labs." Lacking appropriate co-planning time, as well as self-confidence, teachers could not effectively allow students the latitude to take risks and to explore the science concepts creatively and experientially. At all levels, from teachers on down to students, there was a complete breakdown in creative thought and systemic instructional stratification. Teachers and students alike were afraid of failure in their endeavors. 

Reflective Practices Through Inquiry Teaching: Throughout each session of the Rivier grant we, as teachers, approached the program from an open inquiry standpoint. Inquiry was taught as a three-stage process: exploration, investigation/data collection, and sense-making. At the start of each session we were given an initial question to investigate, such as "Which fabric will keep Teddy warmest?" or "Which container is best to transport ice?" or even "What is an ecosystem?" These topics were chosen due to the vertical spiraling of content knowledge throughout each grade within the State Science Frameworks as articulated by the Grade Level Expectations (GLE’s). The goal was for each of us to experience the learning process our students do; to understand their misconceptions, to learn to explore; investigate, design experiments, collect and make sense of data. One insight, an eye-opening initial discovery was that teachers were apprehensive about obtaining data different from other groups, as if that were some strike against our credentials to teach! Try to imagine how our students feel each day! Quite often we got bogged down in minutiae and weren't ready to present our data to the group. It was enlightening to be a “student” for a change, and freeing for us as teachers. We've learned why our students always watch what other groups are doing. They don't care if everyone else is "correct." They do care that their own results conform to everyone else's findings.

Mentoring has been an integral part of this process from the teacher standpoint. The program’s approach integrated the phases of inquiry into the mentoring cycle to focus on assessing and refining teaching practices. This was done through three (3) mentoring goals: building trust in self; learning through partnership with one's mentee; and engaging in ongoing reflective teaching practices. These goals were achieved via three (3) steps similar in scope to the inquiry phases. First was a pre-observation conference in which the mentor asked  the mentee about the upcoming lesson and agreed on the focus for the mentor's attention during the actual observation. Second, at the conference the mentor observed the actual class, acting solely as recorder and not as judge. And last, in the post-conference, both parties discuss what occurred during the observation. The entire practice facilitates nonjudgmental reflective conversation between teachers. The success of our students as engaged learners means that we can no longer afford to teach in classroom bubbles, isolated from our colleagues, from the sharing of best practices and innovative, creative ideas. As teachers we need to abandon teaching only individual lessons and begin to plan integratively, around the big picture, a continuum of unit(s) employing inquiry based instruction.

Developing Teacher Voice: The need for science mentors are many: to provide a forum to connect teacher and student experiences; to allow teachers to become comfortable with changing delivery of instruction; to provide support to new teachers; to more effectively engage students learning science in new ways; and to ready teachers and students for the newly introduced science tests, known as the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP), a common set of grade level expectations and assessment targets that was developed for the Departments of Education of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont in science, mathematics and reading which are given locally and assessed at district and state levels.

In addition, mentoring provides support in content knowledge as well as encouraging inquiry-based classrooms. It allows teachers to trade roles and interconnect with other teachers in their building and/or districts.  Programs in mentoring encourage teachers: to build confidence in themselves by taking risks in inquiry learning; to incorporate various forms of technology into the curriculum; and to keep the importance of engaging methods of science instruction on teacher radar as well as integrating science into lower grade curricula. Though the program was originally implemented as planned, we found mentoring quickly gave voice to new ways of thinking of ourselves as creative architects of curricular units, instead of disaffected professionals being stifled by prepackaged instructional materials. Although both practices, the direct delivery model and the inquiry science model address state and local frameworks, our inquiry process approach allows for spontaneous exploratory behavior in both teacher and student that drives student learning.

As participants, we began to use our meetings as an opportunity to evolve our focus. We quickly came to realize that we are not in mentor/mentee relationships so much as we are in collaborative partnerships with one another sharing the strengths between and among ourselves. This is evident from the nontraditional makeup of our original teams. In many cases the original "mentee" was the teacher who came to us with many years of teaching experience. In more than one instance, it was the less-experienced partner who was to serve as the mentor. The words "mentor" and "mentee" seemed ill-equipped to describe the partnership which was evolving. "Mentor" conjures an image of an older teacher imparting wisdom to the new arrival. Yet, in this instance, the team represented an ongoing dialog in which both members had much content knowledge, new ideas as well as old, experience, mutual questions, and even the courage to overcome reluctance and contribute.  Roles often flip-flopped back and forth, sometimes with an even give-and-take, sometimes one-sided. But what the group, as a whole, was able to see were possibilities for teaching in this manner, and an increasing hope that the confidence that we, as teachers, now felt would give rise to a similar “confidence-infusion” in our students regarding their own abilities to engage with and "do" science.

When Should Inquiry Science Be Implemented in the Classroom? The time to introduce inquiry-based learning is now! K-12 teachers must be encouraged to buy into this method, and must be willing to work collaboratively with other teachers for this to be effective. We must be catalysts for change and use each other as sounding boards. Our task is to use the input of our colleagues when our "best" approach has gone awry (unplanned things do happen in the classroom!). We can fly by the seat of our pants on those occasions when equipment has failed. We have the confidence to forge ahead when a student has made a real world connection between his investigation and why ice cream comes in cardboard cartons. We understand the ideas and experiences with which our students enter our classroom. Moreover, it is imperative that once we begin this process with our students, that they be allowed to continue along the inquiry path. Our main fear now is that our students will not have teachers trained in this approach next year. What will happen to our newly confident learners? We are the inventors of curriculum. Our goal is to create enough of these science teams to infuse each grade level of our districts with a new way of learning science. In the next phase of the grant we will develop transportable inquiry-based units to help other teachers begin this process.

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