SCIED 552: Science Teaching and Learning Developing Models of Science Teaching

This weeks wrap up blog will consider the following questions:

1) teaching; 2) any remaining burning questions you have. Here are the specific questions to think about:

What are some teaching practices that you either thought were valuable before or think are valuable now and how can you justify them in terms of learning theory? Choose a specific learning environment and talk about how this will change the way you teach/support learning in that environment.

Before taking this class I had experience teaching as a graduate student in my MS and as an adjunct faculty after I graduated. My motivation for a PhD was always to teach and do science, but never in my career had I taken any courses like this. I thought that because I loved what I taught, and was super enthusiastic about it, that teaching would happen naturally. I am so grateful to have had this class, especially as a new transfer to the science edu department. I was happy to see that a lot of the practices I had in my classroom were grounded in theories.. I just had never heard about them. I find myself most aligned with situated learning, but I think I still have a lot of questions. As I continue to edit my framework, I still struggle with how situative learning can be brought successfully in to a college lecture and not depend solely on the lab to do so. I think, however, that this, like everything will take more experience and exposure, so I am super excited to continue to learn and research these theories as I move through my program.

My experiences with learning and education were such that knowledge was abstract, and information and activities were delivered out of context.   I believed that teachers were the expert in their respective fields and “learning” was defined as the acquisition of knowledge.  I now understand there is much more to science education and teaching.  I have come to appreciate the situated theory, and understand that learning is much more than the transmission of abstract and decontextualized knowledge from teacher to student.   

Situated learning will influence my teaching and learning environment.   I know that it is important to incorporate scientific practices in my lessons.  An example of this is that of observing and recording observations during an activity.   Such an activity could be watching a demonstration or video, or doing an experiment.  The skill of observing changes, and knowing what information is important to record is a practice that newcomers must learn in the context of what is happening.  Making meaning together by interacting as a community will be an important practice as well.  I know that student interactions are just as useful as my interactions with the students. 

This semester’s class has been my first exposure to learning theories.  I have appreciated the near-peers and masters in my attempts to unpack and understand all this class has had to offer.  I believe our community and the situated perspective of learning was the design of our classroom environment.  I know that the group discussions, blog posts, readings, and so forth were all situated in the context of these theories.  As I said at the start of this post, my classroom experiences have been “traditional”.  I have struggled with unpacking the complexities of the research articles and am still a newcomer to this community.  This leads me to the wonder how I will better help my students who have had no prior instruction within the framework of situated learning.  I would like to better understand the strategies we can use to provide the guidance and support to students struggling in our classrooms when instruction is not “traditional”.  I have been searching this semester for someone to just “tell me” the key points of the theories and give me examples of the teaching practices.  This is how I have learned to learn.  I know now that I have gone through a class which used situated learning theory and teaching strategies.   The class itself was a community and I am happy I was able to be part of it.  Thank you everyone, and I wish you all the best.  

What are some teaching practices that you either thought were valuable before or think are valuable now and how can you justify them in terms of learning theory? Choose a specific learning environment and talk about how this will change the way you teach/support learning in that environment.

Some teaching practices that I think are valuable and can now justify in terms of learning theory include: think-pair-share, co-exploration, project-based learning, inquiry-based learning and involving students in community science projects. Think-pair-share supports legitimate peripheral participation, co-exploration supports LPP and students negotiating collaboratively and project- and inquiry-based learning assists with incorporating authentic activity. Of course, all of these practices are justified by theory, providing that they are implemented with the necessary techniques and nuances. I can think of and am already seeing ways in which my new understanding of theory will change the way that I work at Shaver’s Creek, including my work and training with our education interns, program development and undergraduate teaching experiences. I’m also thinking more about how we work with formal teachers, and the need for unification between formal and informal ed and how we can bridge the existent gap, potentially with some professional development opportunities for teachers. 

What are the things you are still not clear about that you want more clarity about? Are there parts of specific theories? Are there applications to teaching? Are there specific concepts or quotes that still have you puzzled? What things do you want to be clear about before we part ways?

I think my framework draft made it clear that I still have a lot of questions or thinking to do about how theories apply to teaching. I’m working on thinking more about: how authentic practices look in informal ed, what it looks like for students to negotiate explanations and to negotiate them collaboratively, how teachers create an environment that welcomes and encourages diverse identities in science. As I mentioned above, I’m also thinking about how we can curve the cycle by starting with training early in educator’s careers, as well as intervene later on. I’m still working on how to talk about transfer (or rather not talk about transfer) from a sociocultural perspective, and instead thinking about making learning environments more authentic. I’m also working to be more critical of my own field (informal outdoor ed) and balancing that with suggesting practices for formal classroom implementation. It’s all connected and maybe that’s part of the problem – formal and informal ed should be much more unified, but I’m having to think about it separately right now because that’s how the modern education system is structured. 

Like Sarah, my favorite high school class was also Chem 2, and one particular unit will stick with me forever for a bunch of different reasons. During the Redox reaction unit, our teacher had us all pair up and recreate our choice of redox reactions in lab. The catch was that this was the first time we would receive no direct instruction aside from a pretty rigorous safety plan on what to do. Basically, we picked a reaction and our teacher said “go”. My partner and I picked Tannerite, a dangerous explosive (like this if you are unfamiliar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XW2A0BLUN4). We had to figure out the chemical reaction, figure out which parts oxidize and reduce and all the paper work Chem stuff, but we also had to be scientists to figure all of it out. We had to make prototype mixes and revisions not because we had to for the grade, but because we had to make it work, and knowing the kind of teacher he was, it was entirely intentional. Within this short memory I see a ton of learning theory working in this classroom. We as students had to engage in authentic science activity; we researched a phenomenon that we thought was cool and executed it. At the end of the unit each group presented their work, and looking back, it resembled a jigsaw method. However, the best part about that class was the community by far. Most of us would hang out in the chem lab during lunch or free time and many of those times pushed me to want to be a scientist in some capacity, but my teacher facilitated all of it. A couple of class communities brought benefits to me as a student, and I want to extend that as a teacher.

Now that I have seen behind the learning theory curtain I have been able to kind of assess what the teacher/prof had in mind when designing the lesson. Its no secret that Scott runs on a sociocultural mindset, and he conducts his classes accordingly. I’ve started to see the connection between Scott’s class methods and theory, but I can’t really understand why the schooling I have been through justified the way they taught. Specifically, why throw 300 students in a quantum physics lecture when 1.) the likelihood of using this information across most MechEng jobs is rather low, and 2.) the method of delivery makes learning mildly interesting at best and downright discouraging at worst? I understand that finances are at play and likely have something to do with it which complicates things, but is it the view of a cognitivist to stand and deliver style lecture all the time? With the complexity of things I doubt the answer is a yes or no, but I wish I had a better understanding of cognitivists and their justification of their class procedures.

Finally, I want to show my appreciation for this class and everyone in it. I have taken my fair share of very hard classes in the engineering school world, but the content and delivery of this class really challenged my thinking about plenty of things aside from learning theory. The more time I spend in an AST style classroom the more I begin to understand it and appreciate the benefits of it. Thank you all.

Before coming into this course, I had a lot of opinions about teaching, and what constitutes a good teacher.  I rarely, if ever, stopped and thought explicitly about the ways individuals best learn, although implicitly, my ideas about teaching were rooted in learning theory.  This course has allowed me to be much more introspective about my own thoughts and feelings about teaching and learning, while additionally, feeling better equipped with the proper language to discuss benefits and disadvantages of specific pedagogical practices.  I am now able to justify my beliefs about certain practices using theoretical backings.  The perspective that I have gained by participating in this course will be invaluable to my future teaching experiences.

I personally thought it was really eye-opening during the class when we discussed behavioral theory, and had an extremely difficult time grasping it.  The fact that we kept getting it wrong really showed just how ingrained our thought processes and our ideas of what constitutes “knowing” are.  It was also nice to then understand this theory and its presumptions about learning, and how it connected to pedagogical practices that I personally disdain (i.e. wrote memorization, fact regurgitation).  It helped me to understand that these practices did not emerge from nothing, and the theoretical ideas behind it are simply different than how I consider learning to occur–they aren’t necessarily bad.

Although at this point, I don’t feel as if I have any one thing I’d like to be cleared up, I do find myself wondering how certain learning theories would be applied to certain kinds of assessments, and vice versa.  For instance, if the goal of an exam is to assess readiness to engage in research, what kind of assessment would be best to accomplish this goal?  How would it differ between assuming a cognitive theoretical framework versus a sociocultural one?  Currently, I’ve put much more thought into what pedagogical practices I think would best support learning, but not how best to assess this change in knowledge.  Even if we can’t discuss this in the last class, I’d definitely love any reading material that addresses these questions!

I absolutely adored this class, and plan to recommend it to anyone who even has a mild interest in science teaching (and possibly to people who don’t have any interest!).  I definitely think many science graduate programs don’t have nearly as high an emphasis on pedagogy that they should, considering that many students end up teaching in some capacity.  Introducing people to learning theory seems to me like a great place to start people becoming introspective about their own teaching and teaching as a practice.

I’ve been thinking about practice/real-world problems and their place in the science classroom. One of my favorite classes in high school was chem 2, in part because we had a lot of hard creative problems and labs. Our midterm was a single problem test and we spent the last month of the year synthesizing aspirin from teaberry leaves we picked in the forrest. I think both of these experiences are rather atypical and I was very thankful my teacher didn’t make us do busy work. I have the language now to describe these activities as routed in cognitive learning theory. We did these activities after our teacher had taught us all the required chemistry. The class worked from simple to complex, but if I wanted to teach something similar but under a sociocultural framework, I think I would go complex to simple. By using techniques like jigsaw teaching that A. Brown recommended, we scaffold the big picture but it’s the students job to learn and teach each other the details. But is it as “simple” as saying: we start with aspirin synthesis at the beginning of the year and then work through the details as needed, learning content chemistry?

One question I have is lingering from our discussion last week. I said I would die on the hill that science knowledge is equally as socially constructed as race. I thought a lot about this over the weekend and while I still agree with myself, I am curious and a little stuck dealing with the idea of “disproving” in each community. My very messy thought process is: how do learning communities go about disproving ideas? In the science community, you can’t prove anything but you certainly can disprove things. A specific example: plate tectonics is the best theory right now to explain continental drift, but before that people (aka anti-mobilists) thought cycles of heating and cooling caused expansion/contraction of land masses (I had to read a lot of wikipedia to kinda sort myself out here). I’m confused though about how disproval works around race? We know that race is a start to racism and doesn’t explain anything productive. So why wasn’t it forgotten along with the anti-mobilists? Because race perpetuates power? Because the science community has settled on a specific set of rules to say what is and isn’t science but those rules don’t translate outside the community? Both communities have the same rules for disproving knowledge but just because something (i.e. race) is ‘disproven’ doesn’t mean the social ramifications disappear as well? I’m likely not comparing fair points across science and race. What is the equivalence in the ‘race’ world to disproving a theory in the ‘plate tectonics’ world? What do I even mean by disproving something?? I don’t know. So yeah I think this is my question.

My main idea about where we go from here is how do we identify specific instructional elements as cognitive or situative or socio-culturalist, and so on. I feel equipped to examine these theories in the abstract, and when the buzz words are present they become much more identifiable- but I still feel I’d have a hard time looking at an assessment a teacher gave and seeing those theoretical elements for what they are. I understand where AST lies within these different broad theories, but I wouldn’t be sure about too much else being honest. And AST in and of itself is more a framework than anything, but I’m talking about knowing how to examine and identify specific instruction choices we make and link it to certain theories. Like when a teacher utilizes mock interviews, what kind of framework are they leaning on? Or when a teacher decides to have students teach other students about a topic they are personally interested, what does that fall under? I would like to know these things so when I see other successful educators doing assessments and techniques, I can identify where to place them within the theoretical frameworks I know and then use that to help me consider if I will bring them into my teaching and how so.

Speaking of AST, its good that now I can situate that within the greater teaching elements and theories that have led to the development of education- specifically science education- as it is today. It’s nice to see what family of ideas its in, because now as a teacher I can go look in that same category of ideas (legitimate peripheral participation) for more methods and instruction ideas to benefit my students in the classroom. Legitimate Peripheral Participation is definitely something I believe in- I’ll spare space on that here in this blog post and save it for my essay- but knowing where to look for things that are similar to what I know works is going to be something I definitely utilize in my future teaching career. Because of this class, I feel more equipped to look at all of the different ways people view knowing and learning and how to interact with such loaded ideas as the theoretical frameworks have presented over the course of the semester.

I think I am very unclear about the notion of transfer and I think recapping that would be a good thing. I noticed this in writing my final framework that I am not certain about a lot of different elements concerning it. I definitely could use a transfer for dummies or something, cause I understand the basic notions, but talking about it at a deeper level than previous in my framework made me realzie that I still have a lot of confusion. What dictates transfer? How does transfer work from a situated perspective versus a cognitive one? Anderson and Greeno talked about that a little, but msotly ended up aruging about the way the questiosn were worded instead of specifics.

Before this class, I think I had a view of teaching that was a transaction.  I had the information, and I give it to my students.  I think this view of learning is certainly justified when you think of learning from a cognitive or conceptual change perspective.  However, situated learning does not justify this view.  To me, situated learning is a more helpful theory of learning for classrooms.  Of course, a lot of this is the subject of our theoretical frameworks, but I’ll give an example of how I would support situated learning theory in my future science class.  If knowledge is situated in practice, then it is not a transaction.  The teacher won’t ‘give’ their knowledge to the students.  Instead, students will participate in an environment that is an approximation of the practice, in this case the science community.  These are very broad terms, but I suppose this involves students doing what scientists do.  Scientists try to figure things out, they try to explain things they see, and they change these explanations based on other things they may see.  By participating in the community the same why scientists do, I think students will learn science.

One thing that I think I would like clarity on is the way we talk about situated learning theory.  We have said that learning is situated in practice, so classrooms should be an approximation of the science discipline (well we didn’t say this but still).  I am wondering if science class should be authentic to something else.  Instead of being approximations of what scientists do, could they be approximations of something else?  For example, instead of being like scientists, could the class be an approximation of how to make everyday decisions using science?  Or, how citizens make choices based on science?  Maybe there isn’t much difference in these two things, but it was something I was thinking about.  Maybe that is all part of the community of science.

A final thought that I didn’t know where to put, but something I have thought about in this class.  It’s about science, and the way I think about science.  It’s also about soccer.  Two years ago, the soccer world implemented a Video Assistant Review, VAR for short.  Finally, soccer games could overturn incorrect decisions given by the referee mid game.  This was going to be the end of incorrect results: no more offside goals, no more incorrect penalty decisions, no more diving.  All of these were going to be eliminated by VAR, it was a logical system:  watch the replay, make the correct decision.  Fast forward two years, and VAR has done none of these things.  There are still incorrect decisions being made, diving is rampant, and offside has become a topic out of the scope of this response.  How could this happen?  We have a perfect, logical system to erase these inconsistencies.  I think the problem is that this system is still prone to human error.  Humans are still in control of the VAR, and to me, VAR is like science.  I am not sure what this analogy means, or if it’s even accurate, but I am interested to here people’s ideas.

What are some teaching practices that you either thought were valuable before or think are valuable now and how can you justify them in terms of learning theory? Choose a specific learning environment and talk about how this will change the way you teach/support learning in that environment.

I have to say that the change that knowing about learning theories produced in my way of teaching is not too much that I am going to use different teaching practices but it is the awareness with which I am going to use them. Even before this class I tried to implement AST, an approach based on situated theory but now I understand it better. The need to have students using the 8 science practices described by the National Research Council is rooted in the situated view and in its belief that knowledge is a set of tools that can be fully understood only using them. So, I would guide my students to explore a phenomenon in a way that could allow them to develop explanations of the phenomenon engaging in science practices and discussing as a community. The belief that learning happens through social relationships is another aspect of the situated theory I became more aware of during this class. I would promote small group and whole-class discussions in order to give students the possibility to negotiate meaning and to contibute to generating ideas in the community. I would try as much as possible to have my classroom be like an authentic science community, non only in the use of practices and collaboration but also fostering distributed expertise. This is an important aspect of an authentic science community according to the situated perspective but I feel it is not always perceived as a value in school. Also, I would like to assess my students in ways that are more authentic. Instead of providing multiple-choice tests, I would like them to talk about their phenomena’s explanations and to make models as the explanations develop during a unit, in the same way scientists present models and explanations in papers or at conferences. I think that now I would feel stronger in justifying the practices I believe are right or wrong in front of colleagues and administrators while in the past I was afraid that they could think that my ideas were just strange.

After 14 weeks of readings and discussions about how people learn, what are the things you are still not clear about that you want more clarity about? Are there parts of specific theories? Are there applications to teaching? Are there specific concepts or quotes that still have you puzzled? What things do you want to be clear about before we part ways?

I think I don’t have big questions. Maybe I would just like us to go through everything, like reviewing things briefly.

Gender & Race Revisited

This weeks blog will revisit the papers we read on gender in science education while trying to keep in mind the following questions:

1) How do these articles help me better understand race and gender and their role in science education learning environments?

2) How do these authors operationalize (that means defining something in a way that can be measured or analyzed) the concepts of race and gender?

For me, one of the biggest conceptual take-aways from the race and gender papers was the concept of identity. It seems intuitive to assume that ones race and gender are components of ones identity, but I had never stopped to consider the larger impact identity has on learning. These components are two of many that compose ones identity and many of these are intersectional – and as we read in #BlackGirlMagic, can have detrimental impacts on your Black girls. These multifaceted, intersectionalities are so important to embrace as educators to make sure that we understand out students first. The authors used lived experiences for data and the overall take away I had was that the educators first have to be able to acknowledge the components of students identities, and then be able to confront the challenges that those identities face while trying to build their own science identity. This seems such a huge, overwhelming, task to train educators.