At the beginning of the year, I wrote in my “Autobiography of a Science Learner” that science was pretty much a subject I took so it would look good on transcripts. I had no idea what teaching science to elementary students would entail, but I figured I would give it a shot. Over the course of the last two months, TESLA has transformed my perception of teaching science and even science in general. I experienced how rewarding it is first hand to discover scientific truths after building from what I knew already. After our experiments and discussions, it became much easier to grasp what I would need to do as a teacher in order to give my students the same experience with science.
My vision of teaching science places emphasis on building off of children’s prior knowledge. We read an excerpt from Harlen about why children’s ideas matter, and this really struck a chord with me. We should introduce science to children starting at the bottom: their own (quite possibly misguided) ideas. For many years, it was common practice to approach science ideas by asking students to know definitions and then following up a reading on a scientific concept with an experiment. This practice results in students blindly accepting facts that they do not actually understand.
In the article on KLEWS, I learned how to properly structure a science lesson so students develop a deeper understanding of science. In the KLEWS model, teachers begin a science lesson by asking their students what they think they know about a topic. There are no wrong answers here, which I think is crucial in encouraging full participation. The lesson goes on to include claims, evidence, reasoning, remaining questions, and finally, the scientific principles and vocabulary that help explain the phenomena. They finish with the broad definition of a concept once they have a personal experience (the experiment) to which to compare. Students maintain an active role in filling out the KLEWS chart, which is important because once they interact personally with the experiment, they can accommodate new information into their worldview and adjust their perceptions. This adjustment is true learning.
In class, we did a magnetism experiment that followed the basic steps in KLEWS. At the beginning, Mark asked us to shout out what we thought we knew about magnets. Sometimes we said simple facts such as “they attract to each other” and sometimes they were far more complex. Then, we performed an experiment to test how the orientation of magnets affects their interaction. After recording our data, we filled out a planning matrix where we listed our claims, evidence from our experiment to support those claims, and the reasoning behind those connections. I got to see first-hand how effective a strategy it is when we start with personal experiences and build from there.