Ryan Batkie (Science Teacher)

Post date: Nov 18, 2018 1:32:26 PM

I would make school engaging by making authentic problems the center of learning. “Authenticity” or a problem worthy of effort is subjective. I think students and teachers and the community need to collaborate on this. Really “this” means curriculum development.

Which makes that ‘authentic problem’-based approach fully integrated with your student voice question. I would add “authority” and “agency” to your voice question. Because having a voice that doesn’t have power is not very useful. That said, I feel strongly that your school should take it as given that students should have these things: voice and authority. “Knowing” is not the prerequisite to being able to design curriculum. Your existence as students is. But do not ignore a central tension here: expertise. Teachers have more of some kinds of expertise. What they DONT have expertise on is you. The truth is, no one can be sure what will be “engaging” ahead of time. You can have some best guesses. You’ll (teachers and students) need to change course (literally) as you go sometimes.

So the real need is to establish norms that allow for collaborative discourse on curriculum as it evolves and unfolds. And I’d have you keep in mind that At the heart of every democratic process is ‘reason giving.’ If any person with a stake in the curriculum has a desired goal or process for working toward it, they need to make their thinking visible to the group.

What I’m talking about is democratic schooling. And I really have to warn you that it’s not all rosy. Some people will want to ‘just get on with it.’ There is a point where you can get bogged down in analyzing and discussing everything to death and you can lose some (or a lot) of enjoyment. But of course if it’s just ‘because the teacher says so’ all the time, that is equally deadly to learning. There is a balance to be struck between time for active learning and time for deciding about how to do active learning.

As for science, I would look for a few things in a science teacher. One, they recognize they teach students first and their subject second. A lot of science teachers are in love with science but not student learning. For them learning is a game if ‘catch up’ and knowledge acquisition. Second, and relatedly, they see learning as a growth of skills and thinking, not acquiring knowledge. The ‘acquisition’ model allows for too much seeing of the subject as a list of facts. This isn’t what’s important to know about science. What’s important to know about science is that it’s a social practice of making and defending claims about the world. It is a process of making knowledge.

---------------------------------------

On the idea of a democratic school, you need to have a clear mission and constitution. So you can point to something for new people to understand what you’re about and decide for themselves if they want to join. With such a different kind of school, you don’t want to have misunderstandings about purpose and intentions if you can avoid them. And in this structure you really need protected space and power for students. Everyone involved has been institutionalized to see school a certain way. It’s really hard especially for adults to change their fundamental ideas of school. Think hard ahead of time about (1) what roles and responsibilities people should have and (2) what systems you’ll put in place to keep it going.

Back to science specifics...

I personally strongly advocate for “modeling based inquiry.” Also “project based learning.” These are compatible but don’t mean the same things. My favorite guide that I would hand teachers is “Ambitious science teaching” by Windschitl, Thompson and Braaten (2018). Their core purpose is to get every student involved in authentic science work. It starts with a really rich, puzzling phenomenon. The central work product is a “model,” which is an abstract representation of the phenomenon. Ultimately students can explain the complicated science ideas through their models, which are developed and re-made several times through many experiments and ‘traditional’ science activities that were purposefully selected to uncover different aspects of the problem(s) raised by the class. I’d also just say that the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are pretty good and a fine place to research what ‘skills above facts’ looks and feels like.

I’d also add a pet peeve of mine: science is not synonymous with technology or engineering. I am the first person to advocate for interdisciplinarity. But to my mind the “STEAM” movement is geared way too much toward getting tech jobs. Again, this is not really bad. But in my experience this has subsumed a deep, reflective engagement with what science really is as an intellectual pursuit. Way too often I see robots built with no thinking about why or if you should build robots. I also too often see engineering tasks masquerading as science. I would never refute that work with ‘techy stuff’ and gadgets are both cool and also helping prepare you for the future, but I would urge you to not cut out moral and intellectual reasoning that I think you need to go with them.

Your other question was about “preparing for future.” I always proudly state my goal is liberal arts education. To me it means, at bottom, preparing to work on all kinds of problems with all kinds of people in the future. I also consider it a big part of citizenship education. I think school should primarily be concerned with moving culture forward. I warn against oversimplified, specialization conceptions of culture. Integration and connection is needed most. Which means there is no shortcut and you have to learn enough about everything to at least understand and generously see what other kinds of people are doing. See the value in all kinds of thinking and working. And know how to talk to ad work WITH them. So, again, learning to code in Java (as an example) is wonderful and necessary but insufficient for a vibrant, healthy democracy.