February 28, 2002
Unearthing classroom success
| Steve Hill |
| University Week |
By teaching middle school teachers about the earth sciences, Liz Nesbitt hopes she’s sowing the seeds of the discipline’s next generation.
Nesbitt, a curator at the Burke Museum and an affiliate assistant professor in Earth and Space Sciences, is leading the UW’s effort at training middle school teachers to teach earth sciences. The 20 or so educators meet on campus once a week in an effort to learn about science and how to best teach it.
These are experienced professionals, quality teachers by any standard. But most were trained in disciplines having little or nothing to do with science. Instead of teaching English or physical education or history, these educators have become the school districts’ answer to a shortage in earth science teachers.
Nesbitt puts it more bluntly: “The vast majority of these teachers have no background in earth sciences.”
Obviously, that creates some problems, especially as the discipline is moving more and more toward an inquiry-based approach. It’s the sort of pedagogy that turns the traditional classroom on its head. Rather than drilling students on the definitions of various scientific terms, for example, students and teachers now work more and more as active collaborators, exploring the mysteries of science.
That may sound abstract and postmodern, but according to many teachers, the inquiry-based approach is better summed up in one word — difficult. And for a teacher with only a vague understanding of the subject matter, inquiry-based instruction can be downright harrowing.
“If you’re a teacher and you feel a little insecure about your subject, you’re not going to push for these inquiry-based approaches, because the kids are going to come up with questions that are totally going to floor you,” Nesbitt said. “So the more content they’ve had and feel comfortable with, the more chance they’re going to do inquiry-based science.”
Kathleen McNeill, a science teacher at Odle Middle School, is the exception in Nesbitt’s classroom. McNeill took the class last summer even though she already has a master’s degree in geology. She said the inquiry-based approach was new and valuable to her and she even learned some new content.
“The UW class was very helpful for me,” she said. “It was exciting to be taught by teachers who are at the cutting edge of a very changing field. I used the presented curriculum in my own class and having been through it can say it was invaluable.”
That’s no surprise to Nesbitt. She and a colleague in Earth and Space Sciences, Tony Irving, have searched five years for resources on the UW campus that would help teachers overcome their fears by giving them a better understanding and appreciation for earth science, as well as an effective means for teaching the discipline.
Within the last year, it all came together. Nesbitt partnered with Mark Windschitl, an assistant professor in the College of Education, and Caroline Kiehle, who directs the UW’s Middle School Science Partnership. Together that threesome organized the class for teachers that is run with financial support from the National Science Foundation — teachers don’t pay to take the class — and institutional support from the chair of Earth and Space Sciences, Mike Brown. Irving is serving as a guest lecturer and valued adviser.
The class is being taught this quarter for the second time. It debuted last summer during a five-day intensive.
Windschitl, himself a former middle school science teacher, and Nesbitt team-teach the course. They openly model the inquiry-based approach for the educators in their classroom. During a recent session the students in the Johnson Hall classroom broke into groups to discuss the effectiveness of two prospective test questions. Specifically they were trying to determine what the students would need to know to answer the questions and if these particular questions really shed light on a student’s understanding of, in this example, asexual reproduction.
After a boisterous 10 minutes in their groups, Windschitl brought the teachers back together. One thought the questions were full of too many “distracters.” Another disagreed and shortly thereafter, chaos had erupted again. The teachers were debating everything from the effectiveness of the questions to the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) tests.
It’s not hard to take that exercise and see how it might be applied in the middle school classroom. For Windschitl and Nesbitt, the science classroom should be just such an active place, emphasizing process over product.
“We talk about evidence, developing and critiquing scientific models and theories,” Windschitl said. “That’s important because it’s the language of the discipline. Most people don’t see science as a living, growing thing in which theories are constantly being developed and picked apart. But that’s what it is. Science is a process not a conglomeration of facts and figures.”
And approached that way, it’s also more engaging for the average middle-school student.
Another way Nesbitt and Windschitl have chosen to emphasize the process of science is by inviting guest speakers to lecture. One recent speaker was Professor Ken Creager, a seismology expert who has been studying the February 2001 Nisqually Earthquake. Such interaction with practicing scientists, Nesbitt has found, is inspirational to the teachers.
“It was just fascinating to watch the teachers listen to him even though they didn’t understand half of what he was saying,” she said. “He was so enthusiastic and so terribly excited about what he was doing, that they just felt that.”
And getting the middle-school teachers interested in earth science is half the battle. Once they’re interested, Nesbitt says, they’re bound to develop a good understanding of the discipline.
“Our motivation really is to teach the ones who were not trained in science in the first place,” Nesbitt said. “They are teachers. They know the basics of teaching and the fundamentals of running a classroom, which is very difficult in itself. All they need is to learn the content.”
