Teaching Science During a Pandemic

Teaching Science During a Pandemic

A science course is a complex thing: it is a means of sharing information and developing skills, it is a steppingstone towards further studies, it is a social environment for students, and it is an outward manifestation of the teacher’s inner world. And so there are many factors to consider when deciding what and how to teach. In our current circumstances, I feel we need to boil these factors down to two important goals:

(1) Students have a positive experience with science.

(2) Students practice good scientific thinking.

Other valuable goals and aspirations for a course should be secondary to these, which helps our decision making when faced with tough calls. I argue that these goals should always be the priority, but the challenge of meeting these goals during the pandemic is new.

Learning is a social process

The social aspects of learning are experiencing the greatest disruption due to the pandemic. Humans are social animals and the quality of our social interactions has a deep effect on learning. This is the main reason fully virtual teaching is so different from teaching where we see students in person part of the time. Social interactions in a virtual environment are different in important ways which results in different student behaviors. We need to find ways for the “normal” social interactions experienced by a student to continue, both in-person and online. A great way of doing this is with well-structured cooperative groups. We have had considerable success with this in the first quadmester. Learn more about our group work approach. Here are a few ways to increase the quantity or quality of social interactions with students:

• Regularly use cooperative groups in-person and online – it’s worth repeating! Learn more.

• Think-pair-share strategies help students process what they are learning using quick random pairings or consistent pairings.

• Use collaborative tools like Jamboard with multiple frames or Google docs for individuals or groups.

• Create a separate Google Meet or Zoom breakout room for student questions or extra help; break-up instruction to allow students opportunities to work and ask questions while still in your learning environment.

• In Zoom, set the chat controls so the student chat messages are private messages for the teacher.

• Add regular interaction to teacher-led lessons by requiring frequent one word or one letter responses from students, online or in-person! (e.g. “Is this object positively or negatively charged? Type + or – in the chat!”)

• Encourage the use of cameras, in appropriate settings, so students can be seen. Being invisible is socially very uncomfortable. We are all still kind of monkeys and need to be seen in the group.

• Come out from behind your PowerPoint!

• Here is a short presentation I gave on interactive techniques for Zoom.

The final point is this: students should not be “alone” during important parts of their learning – this is one reason why asynchronous learning is challenging. They need to feel that their learning is taking place within a social environment that values what they do, whether they are in school or at home. The more responsive that social environment is to their immediate learning needs, the better students will learn!

I do want to share how hard it was for me to learn this basic lesson about learning: as a student I was a very isolated learner and became a physicist who fit the stereotypes, so the social nature of learning was far from obvious to me! However, the social environment we create is a critical part of the positive experience we want for our students.

The Challenges of Content

One of the toughest conversations to have with teachers is what content to include in or remove from a course. We like our science! It’s very interesting and valuable stuff! These conversations are especially important now because the pandemic has made our teaching less efficient and reliable, resulting in students learning less and learning less well. As a result, content and learning expectations need to be cut. If we don’t, we are left with a real mismatch between our teaching and our two goals for learning. When we attempt to teach more “efficiently” to squeeze in all that past content, we likely provide fewer opportunities for students to practice good scientific thinking. Students quickly perceive whether the expected pace of learning matches the quality of their learning experiences and often disengage or struggle when there is a strong mismatch.

Making Content Choices

The content decisions we are making are tough ones; we hope they serve our students well now without leaving too many problems for the future. I happened to teach 11 physics during the first quad and while many of my examples in this article will have a physics theme, I will provide examples from our junior science courses as well. Here is one content conundrum we faced: the electromagnetism content I have cut from my grade 11 physics course will be needed in the second term of a first-year engineering or physics program. But I also know that the time we save will help students: (1) learn their basic physics well in grade 11, (2) help them do well in most of grade 12 physics, (3) and prepare any life-sciences, engineering, or physics students to do really well during their first term of university. Here I see several plusses and just one much more distant minus. Grade 10 science presents an interesting choice: what to do about the climate change unit? It can be tempting to cut the unit entirely since its content is not really needed in the next grade. But if there was one topic that every well-informed citizen should be scientifically acquainted with, it is climate change! In fact, I recommend completely removing the optics unit (one of my favourite!) and doing a good job on the other grade 10 units.

A University Perspective on Content

A while back I asked the Undergraduate Chair at the U of T Department of Physics about student preparation in high school. Here is his reply:

“I've been teaching first-year university physics for 20 years, first in California, and for the past 14 years at the University of Toronto. I have seen many thousands of my students go on to complete a variety of science degrees, and many hundreds have gone on to complete a degree specifically in physics. I've paid attention to what kind of background, preparation and attitudes are most helpful to students when they first walk through my door in September of their first year. From my observations, the three main traits which lead to success in physics and other sciences are:

· The ability to think creatively to solve problems, both mathematically and in the real world.

· Practice at forming study-groups and working with others in teams of 2-4; peer instruction and completion of group projects and presentations.

· A skeptical nature, and a desire to check things with their own observations and calculations, as opposed to trusting an authoritative source.

In general, I actually find that most students (about 60%) who completed grade 11 and 12 physics at an Ontario high school come quite well prepared in these regards. There are significant exceptions, though. Among the other 40%, I find students who believe that physics is a list of mathematical formulae to memorize and apply in order to find a numerical answer. Some believe that excellence in physics can only be demonstrated by high marks on tests done in isolation, and that working with other students is a waste of time. Some believe that the purpose of an experiment is to minimize the percent error, which is a comparison of what they measure to an exact "known value". For these minority of students to succeed, there is a rocky road over the first year or two at university of unlearning what they have learned in high school.”

Dethroning Content, Founding a Republic of Scientific Learning

The pandemic can lead to useful upheaval in both society and teaching because it makes longstanding problems more apparent and encourages quicker action to find a solution. In science teaching, content needs to be dethroned as our leader and replaced with the goal of students engaging in good scientific thinking. Content will always have a vital role to play, like an esteemed counselor whose advice we should not ignore; but it does not make the executive decisions. There is a growing body of educational research that shows the benefits of depth over breadth in learning: students tend to be better prepared for future learning and have a better-quality learning experience. In particular, when the goal of scientific thinking is emphasized, students better understand:

• how learning is driven by the desire to explain what we see around us

• the process of science and its role in generating and testing knowledge

• the value of scientific thinking and what it’s like to do science or be a scientist

• how people outside of schools use scientific knowledge

• the science content itself, because they personally construct their understanding rather than receiving another person’s facts to remember

• the thrill of figuring stuff out

There needs to be a good balance between content and scientific thinking: one really is not possible without the other. During a pandemic, our students need a pace of content that matches their ability to learn under these circumstances. This match is different now compared with a year ago, which means we need to adjust and reduce content.

What is good scientific thinking?

Simply put, these are the habits and practices that scientists and engineers productively use in their professional lives. When we break these down for students, the skills that make up good scientific thinking are:

• Observing the world with curiosity to spot surprising things we cannot explain

• Carefully describing things using observations and measurements

• Creating ideas that might explain the surprising things we observe

• Evaluating and eliminating ideas based on observations and evidence

• Testing ideas to see if they work in new situations

• Refining ideas using mathematics to make them more precise

• Using well-tested ideas to do interesting or useful things

And this is how we generate content! Each new piece of scientific knowledge should be the result of students using a number of these elements, otherwise students will not understand the significance of the new knowledge or its connections with their prior knowledge. The pace of learning and the comprehension of new content is then set by students’ use of these scientific thinking skills. Based on this understanding, there is no conflict between content and process; one begets the other.

Good scientific thinking promotes equity

When we start atomic theory in grade 9 science, we begin with the ideas of the particle theory of matter that students were taught in grade 7. One way of doing this would be to ask the class what they remember. Another way is to ask students in their groups to write on a whiteboard the ideas they remember about the theory. Both strategies strongly favour students who can recall facts about the particle theory of matter; those who can’t are likely not contributing and might have reinforced in their mind a perception about who is “good” at science. The approach we take is to show students a video of milk under a microscope, ask them to describe what they see, and create multiple explanations for why. This task is accessible to everyone and involves many more students in good scientific thinking. So how do we encourage good scientific thinking during a pandemic?

The Value of Hands-On Activities

Students and teachers love hands-on activities, but so do pandemics! Fomite transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a (low) possibility, so we need to be careful with the science materials that students touch. The efforts required to do this are worthwhile due to the value of hands-on experiences, which is greater than we often realize. I would like to share one anecdote. In my grade 11 physics class during the first quadmester, students were measuring the height of a stairwell that they were walking up in order to calculate their leg power. One student extended a long measuring tape from the upper level to the floor below and another read off the height of the upper landing. “It's 83 centimeters tall”, the student down below said. The other students were ready to accept that result, so I made a chuckling/coughing sound to encourage their reconsideration. There was hesitation and a bit of discussion. I pointed out that 83 centimeters is “this tall” and separated my hands. “Oh, the numbers keep repeating. It's 2 meters and 83 centimeters tall.” More than one group of high-functioning students had this same experience. Other groups were confounded by the units of feet and inches on the measuring tape only to discover, after my prompting and to their surprise, that there were different units on the opposite side. These are our future engineers and life scientists! There are so many things that students learn through their casual interactions with tools and objects that it is hard to overstate the value of hands-on experiences.

Managing Materials and Activities During a Pandemic

• Groups: I deliver one set of materials for the group of four. This does make it more challenging for others to see what is happening. The person recording the observations might need to use a whiteboard to share the results with the other group members.

• Teacher only / Group Representative: We have a lot of activities where groups would come to the front of the class to use specialized equipment. Instead, we have one member of the group come to the front, clean their hands, and work with the equipment. I usually have a document camera set up so the others in the group can observe what is happening. In other cases, only the teacher uses the equipment and the group or whole class observes with the help of a document camera.

I typically deliver the materials to each table before class, to minimize the need for students to move around the room. Other times, I push my cart around the room to make deliveries or pick up used materials. The quantity of materials our schools have presents an added challenge:

• Shared materials: In some cases, we needed to share some materials. We placed these at the front of the class and students would clean their hands before and after using them. Students are used to moving about in mobs, so it took a lot of reminding that only one person at a time should be at the front! The teacher can also make sure the materials themselves get cleaned.

The physical use of materials in class is an important part of learning science and the pandemic adds a burden that many other teachers do not have. We need to look for creative ways to make the best use of our limited science materials: change the order of units so different teachers are using materials at different times; stagger a unit by four days or so; spend time regularly cleaning materials; alternate between physical activities and virtual ones. All of this requires time and planning, but the value of these experiences makes it worthwhile – find ways to do less of something else instead, like marking!

Simulating Scientific Experiences

An important part of teaching science, under any conditions, is simulating the workshop of a practicing scientist. In fact, this is a good way of thinking about our job: turning our classroom into a simulated laboratory with students as our apprentice scientists. This pedagogical strategy is called a cognitive apprenticeship and because of the pandemic, many of our apprenticeship tasks need to be virtual.

Virtual experiences can take the form of videos or simulations. Good ones will provide lots of opportunities for students to practice a variety of scientific thinking skills. A good video or simulation should show the “raw” observations and do little explaining or talking at the student. Here is an example from our grade 9 electricity unit. The structure of the lesson or video should provide the scaffolding for students to work through their own scientific thinking and explaining. Here is a set of experiment videos from the grade 9 chemistry unit that do this and offer many opportunities to practice scientific thinking skills.

Feedback is the heart of learning

To learn scientific thinking skills, students need regular (i.e. continuous) and immediate feedback on both their thinking and their work. This means feedback that focuses on both process and product. This crucial element of learning suffers greatly during the pandemic when we see students only 40% of the time or not at all for completely virtual students. Most scientific skills are complex, requiring feedback on students’ thought processes at many points during a typical lesson.

We manage our time like this: once we have planned our lessons and led our classes, any remaining time goes to feedback. There might be busy days when we can only give a quick glance at student work, but there are many others when we can provide quite a bit of useful feedback and check on the development of our students’ thinking and skills. We also weight the daily work submissions very high, at 50% off the course mark. The process of learning is important!

After the first quadmester wrapped up, I was reflecting on my students’ marks and found myself thinking, “what if we hadn't had any tests at all and I had to predict a final mark for my students, how close would I get to these marks here?” I had seen so much work from each student that I felt I had a very good sense of what they learned in my course. I began to wonder if my course could have worked just as well without any tests at all ... this is a time when testing can be very problematic, so how necessary are tests, really?

Feedback for science - science is feedback

Another valuable way to think about feedback is to compare how scientists and how students get feedback on their learning.

Typically, students get little feedback from any source other than the teacher, which encourages all sorts of behaviours that are counterproductive to learning.

Another important feedback loop for scientists involves comparing their work with new evidence from experiments (nature). This suggests another important experience in our simulated scientific workshop. Students should subject their understanding to an experimental test and use the observations to evaluate their understanding. Here is an example from the grade 9 electricity unit: students have learned about the behavior of charged conductors and now test that understanding in a novel situation; notice in the example that these are called application experiments. We have more complex examples of these for grade 12 physics. The best part of these experiences is the powerful motivating effect they have on students when they see their predictions realized in the experiment; if the experience is well-structured, they are almost guaranteed to get it right!

Routines and Training

Our learning routines have been disrupted by the pandemic; things that were habit or second-nature last year are no longer allowed and need to be replaced with new practices. We can help students become comfortable with their new learning environment by carefully training them. Even though we are into the second quadmester of this school year, we should assume that our learning expectations for students are new and unusual; it is likely that you do things differently from other teachers in your school. Assume the technology you use is strange. Assume the productive behaviors you expect for in-person or virtual learning are foreign. You might be able to train them and go from 0 to 100 very quickly, but do start pretty close to 0. If the elements of your new routines make sense and feel meaningful, students will pick them up quickly. For my teaching, that meant training students to:

• use our classroom meeting software

• work in groups both online and in person

• talk to one another and share their ideas without worrying whether they are correct

• stay in their seats when sharing ideas and use other means of explaining detailed thoughts

• move carefully around the classroom to get the materials they need

• not share physical materials

• perform activities and experiments while maintaining a distance from one another

• organize and manage the pace and volume of work in a quadmestered course

• produce high-quality work that shows their thoughts and understandings

• scan written work using their phones and submit it online

• make improvements to their work and resubmit it

• write tests involving group work and quizzes involving blue-pen work

• focus on learning and understanding rather than marks

• perform all the science skills!

A reinvention of science learning

In the span of a few weeks or months teachers have been reinventing how to learn science. At first our goal was damage control; just trying to keep some sort of learning going. Some of us are still in this stage as we juggle new courses and new challenges, and that is OK. But as we get used to our circumstances and hopefully find a chance to catch our breath, we can think about how to teach better. We don’t need the pandemic to end for the bustle and energy to return to our classrooms. If we think carefully and creatively about meeting our two goals of a positive experience and good scientific thinking, we can restore much of the best of our past teaching and even bring about innovations that will outlast the pandemic and serve us well for many years to come.