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

This is going to be short, cause after reading two of the articles, I’m not really sure what to say. Sorry in advance for my disjointed post and negativity.

After reading the Pinata and Hamre article and the Connor et al article I’m left feeling disappointed. I felt like these articles could have done a lot more. They started out fine describing observation as a teacher accountability system, but then they were like hey, here’s a couple paragraphs of data that doesn’t amount to anything. I feel like if they would have provided more data of using their respective accountability systems could have added to their argument of using their proposed systems.

I also think I might be a little jaded. As I read through the two papers by Pinata and Hamre and the Connor et al about using observation as a teacher accountability tool and I’m reminded of the IMPACT system that’s in place in Washington DC that led to 241 teachers being fired this past summer. The IMPACT system also uses observations to determine teacher effectiveness by observing them five times out of the year, 30 min. each, to see if they meet a plethora of teaching requirements outlined in IMPACT. Thirty minute observations five times out of the year is not enough to time to gauge how well or poorly effective a teacher is. I think this system illustrates how you can take something proposed in research articles and make give it a bad rap.

Don’t get me wrong, I think observations are a good way to judge teacher effectiveness, we just have to be careful with how we execute it and what stakes are tied to it. 

            As one of our earlier articles this semester (Dewey) pointed out, teaching is an art.  As such, I don’t think you would be able to put it into a plug-and-chug formula for finding the correct teaching solution that will optimize a child’s potential.  Both the Connor and Pianta articles seem to try to do just that. 

            Pianta et.al. says that “classrooms, and teachers, matter” (p109).  They certainly do.  What this article proposes, however, is quite disconcerting for the profession of teaching.  Although I do see the need for accountability in teaching, as in other professions, I believe it is very important to approach these “accountability-driven measures of teacher quality (p110)” very carefully.  Pianta thinks, and I agree, that there is value in using classroom observations of teachers to support professional development.  The real problem is in trying to standardize observation and assessment techniques to compare one classroom, or one teacher, to another.  I just don’t believe that it can be done in a way that would accurately and fairly capture usable results. Thinking back to the LA Times publication of teachers’ value added scores, I felt a bit uneasy reading Pianta.  This is a prime example of how such results may be misused or misconstrued.

            Connor’s goal was to prove that the ISI model could be used to “begin to describe how effective classrooms function to ensure the achievement of their members (p95).”  I appreciated their approach that accounted for the backgrounds, skills, and abilities of the individual students. It makes sense to acknowledge that different students will thrive in different classroom environments, but the idea of using a model to calculate the exact approach that should be used on each student just seems wrong to me.  I suppose that is because I don’t think learning or teaching are that simple. 

            Smagorinsky very nicely defines his approach to literacy development as “grounded in cultural-historical psychology (p552)”.  How convenient.  I had difficulty categorizing the Connor or Pianta articles in their approaches to learning.  What did you all think?

I actually found the articles pretty interesting this week.  It was nice to read about how teachers can be evaluated and different viewpoints on the matter.  Two of the articles, the Conner et al. and Pianta and Hamre seemed to think that there should be a system of how teachers are evalutated and how students learn.

The Conner et al. article discussed the Individualizing Student Instruction technique.  I think the technique itself is interesting, but I have to wonder how well the actual results from the investigatiokn could be applied in a classroom.  I think it would be very difficult to accommodate each individual student in the fashion that the article proposes.  With a classroom full of say 30 students, all of which are at different reading levels and have different, to use a term from the article, distance from recommendation to be accounted for, one teacher may not be able to adjust her classroom experience to tailor to every single student’s needs.  There would probably have to be a happy medium I think; however, I don’t know what that happy medium would be.  Also, I had a few issues with their methods and/or results.  Firstly, they said that their coding system had a limit of how many students it could code, which was 12 if I remember correctly, or at least that is how many they said they used.  I don’t recall that they ever said how they decided which students to use, even when they decided to decrease the number to 10.  Maybe I missed it?  Secondly, they had a bar graph that showed the different areas of literacy and there was a clear focus on some things over others. I don’t know if there would have been a difference but maybe it should have been more even.

The Pianta and Hamre article seemed to focus more on the CLASS way of evaluating classrooms. One aspect of that they talked about that I found particularly interesting was the emotional support.  I think it would be true that students would learn better in an environment where teachers are more supportive and involved.  Overall, they pretty much had the same idea about using data systems to gather classroom information.

The final article, by Smagorinsky, seemed to take a stand against the former articles.  He picked out some key things that I was thinking about while reading the articles and put them into words much better than I could have. He makes asome very good points about reading and the fact that it is not a solitary act.  I particularly agree with the section where he discusses that people read different types of literature in different ways.  I feel that is very valid.  I know I tend to read different things in different ways, be it an article like this or some Nicholas Sparks book I’m reading because I want to.

One final comment, Smagorinsky makes a point that I would like to wholeheartedly endorse. “The most effective teacher will thus be one who can observe, reflect, intervene, and teach as she deems appropriate, even as such singular instruction defies the assessment apparatus that surrounds her work with children” (pg 526).

            I enjoyed reading about the pre-service and first year teachers in the Park et.al. article.  The authors compared the approaches to teaching of three different beginning teachers.  As I was reading I thought of how intimately related the teachers’ conceptions about science were to their conceptions about how to teach science.  For instance, the teacher “Ralph” thought of science as “fact based truths about an external reality (p734),” while Cora thought of it as “a combination of ‘content and scientific process’ (p724).”  These ideas played out in their teaching practices.  Cora tried to get her students involved in the process with many hands on activities that would lead them to more advanced scientific ideas.  Conversely, Ralph embraced a more didactic style where he tried to transfer his knowledge to the minds of his students.  I was really struck by this relationship and tried to think of my own definition of science and how that would influence my approach to teaching.  I appreciated that Park and his colleagues acknowledged the pressures of first year teaching and how those pressures likely played a large role in the teachers’ practices. 

            I had a few questions from the Lopes et.al. article.  I don’t think I would have drawn some of the same conclusions.  For one, the authors conclude that “the teacher’s subject knowledge influences greatly the learning experience of the students (no page number).”  It seems logical enough.  However, I did not see in the article anywhere that they made these connections.  The teacher’s content knowledge was not evaluated or addressed in the main body of the article, so I did not understand how they could claim that this statement correlated to their results. 

            I don’t have much to say about Rivera other than I think they make explicit an important point: that pre-service teachers need to be able to both observe and participate in the teaching strategies that they are expected to use in the classroom.  Otherwise, they may understand the theories of how to teach, but not be able to put it to good use.  “It must not be forgotten that the only direct practical referents our students have are those that they themselves experienced as pupils at school (no page number).”

My entry for this week is going to focus on the Lopes et al. article since it confused me the most. I’m not sure if I’m just plain dumb or if reading while I was tired was a bad idea. Anyway, I had a hard time following their argument and what they were trying to do. I hope that in class tomorrow that you, my fellow group members, can enlighten me.

After reading the paper I’m still confused of why they analyzed their data the way they did. I thought they would have looked at the teacher’s knowledge of the topics covered and the student’s knowledge of the topics after the lesson. I didn’t think they would gauge  student knowledge by seeing how many of the categories of the psychological learning theories they can fit into. I still don’t know how they gauged teacher knowledge.

I’m having a hard time believing their results. The questions that they used to gather evidence are poorly written and confusing. I think the results show low scores because I think the students had a hard time understanding the questions, I know I did. I also had a difficult time understanding some of their tables. Some of the captions on the tables made it seem like they only compared two of classrooms and not all three.

I understand that they were looking at how teacher knowledge and teaching practice affect learning and learning experience and they found that depending on the topic the teacher will change their strategy. But I’m having a difficult time believing this claim when there really isn’t any evidence supporting this. I think they should have compared the two questions and different criteria required to teach and have the students solve this problem.

All I really gained from this paper was that teaching practice and learning experience changes depending on the topic covered. 

    I’m not sure how I felt about the Rivero et al. article.  A lot this study made me feel like they were kind of forcing their ideas on the subjects.  I felt like they were saying “This is how students learn, and this is where you need to be at the end of the study.”  They way they go about it makes it seem as if every student learns the same way and that they level they think that teachers need to be on is the only one that is desired.  However, one good point was that they were very adamant about making sure that the activities revolved around helping students construct knowledge as opposed to the memorize and regurgitate method of teaching that often results in forgetfulness of the information.  I think that it is important to allow students the opportunity to process information and figure some things out for themselves.  It is not effective to just feed them a lot of information and not give them the opportunity to see how it applies and formulate their own ideas about it.

    This idea that students need to be more actively engaged in learning seems to be a running theme in all of the articles.  Especially the Rivero et al. and Park et al. articles, they seem to really emphasize the need for teachers to produce lesson plans and use teaching methods that allow students to be more actively involved in their learning experience.  It is a very important aspect of teaching, I think.  I think that students that are actively involved, as opposed to sitting and listening to lectures day in and day out, are more likely to learn and retain information.  I know that I personally do not learn as much if I just sit and listen to someone talk at me.  I tend to learn more if I am given the chance to discuss and formulate ideas on my own also.

Both the Zimmerman and Bell paper and the Gutwill and Allen paper were about learning in an informal learning setting. In this case, both were set in a museum. The paper by Gutwill and Allen was a good example of how to utilize inquiry to induce learning in a museum. While the Zimmerman and Bell paper explored how parents are the ones to induce learning in the museum through questioning and guidance to find the right answer. Both of these articles held the cognitive and situated theory of learning. I thought this was great because I feel that both of these theories should be combined when used to explain how learning occurs. I think on their own they are missing some critical aspects of learning.

The third article by Roth and Eijck differed from the other two articles in that they were presenting their own theory of learning. To me their theory of learning was building on previous learning theories. Their theory embraced the social aspect of the situated learning theory when they state that when trying to solve a problem, the person will engage others to help solve the problem. Their term knowledgeability was pulling from the cognitive learning theory in that the person is constructing knowledge. Their term Total Life pulls from what Vygotsky said that learning is occurring throughout your entire life. Their theory attempts to make sense of how people use learning to solve problems that they encounter in life. I find this to be similar to apprenticeship because you are immersed within the situation and are using the help of others to help solve a problem.

            Interesting pick of articles from Science Education.  I feel like I definitely have a new perspective when reading research-reporting articles now that I know to look for authors’ theoretical frameworks and consider them against the rest of the article.  Also, the chosen articles helped me to improve my understanding of the situated perspective of learning. 

            I thought that much of the theoretical background in the Gutwill/Allen piece jumped between both cognitive and situated perspectives on learning.  It was difficult to categorize them as adhering to one or the other.  Their experiment design and results focused on family units and family learning (like communities of practice in the situated perspective).  However, they also talk about individualized learning and transferability of skills in a way that would seem more cognitively oriented.  I think that their findings showed the benefit of participating in a learning activity as a family in a way that encouraged sharing of knowledge and verbalizing of reasoning processes.  (I used to go to the Exploratorium as a middle schooler when my family lived in the Bay Area in the mid-90s.  It was awesome!  Every city needs a museum like this! http://www.exploratorium.edu/)

            The Zimmerman et al. article was certainly written from a situated perspective with its “Everyday Expertise Framework” (p481).  I was surprised to see a discussion of transfer in this piece and felt that they tried to talk about transfer not on an individual level, but on the family unit level.  They found “families used various narrative forms… to transfer their understandings across and within knowledge domains” (p500).  This was an interesting way to attempt to fit the cognitive perspective’s concept of transfer into a situated discussion.  I think they were pretty successful at using this explanation. 

            I was excited to read about STEM learning in the Roth/Eijck article – STEM is kind of my “thing.”  These authors tried to focus the importance of what people should learn on how it plays out across the lifespan and in everyday problems.  They brought in the idea of creative problem solving with a French word I can’t pronounce (I took Espanol) – debrouillarde (p1028).  They also put forward the concept of “knowledgeability,“(p1028) also known as learning as you go. These guys like Vygotsky and seem to have evolved their personal understandings of learning to become more and more social/cultural over time.  They said that other frameworks could not explain what they had observed in their laundry list of research projects (p1033).  A good quote summarizing Roth/Eijck is from p1035: “What really matters is what happens in total life interactions not what people purportedly have in their heads.”  The cognitive side of me says that while this may be true when you consider the big picture of someone’s life, that doesn’t change that understanding learning is still fundamentally about what goes on inside a person’s head.  Side note:  from my former life in water quality regulation and environmental engineering, I really related to the opening story of the fish kill find. 

  I had a lot of trouble getting much out of the Roth article, mainly just because I had a hard time getting interested in it, so I will focus on the Gutwill and Zimmerman articles. 

  I found the Gutwill article actually very interesting.  They had an interesting way of going about investigating the use of inquiry.  I can understand why it is important to investigate something of the nature.  I have found myself sometimes going through museums and just kind of passing through and not really putting much thought into it.  I don’t know that I can say for sure if some of that was not due to disinterest in the specific topic, but having the families participate in the way they did was a good way to make things interactive.  It makes sense that after encouraging the PA and IR skills that the families would have increased numbers in those areas as opposed to the families that were not exposed to the ideas.  However, I find one thing about the whole experiment that bothers me is the fact that at the posttest, the families were asked to use the method that they were taught specifically.  There are some issues with this as far as I am concerned.  If they were asked to use it, then it is difficult to know whether they used it because they actually found it helpful and worthwhile or whether they just used it because they were asked to and they didn’t want to disappoint the educator.  I realize that the authors discuss this in the article and also discuss why they chose to do this but I feel that it has sort of a comprimising effect on the actual data and conclusions.

   The Zimmerman article relates nicely to the Gutwill article.  Both are based on the interactions of families in museums and their learning as a result.  The Zimmerman article approaches the idea kind of in a backwards fashion from the Gutwill article.  The Gutwill article first teaches/introduces strategies such as the formulation of questions and interpretation of results; whereas, Zimmerman et al. approach it from a view of ideas and experiences that the families bring with them and connect to the exhibits in the museum.  I think both are interesting to investigate.  I think the approach Zimmerman et al. takes shows a demonstration of how people’s views and experiences may determine how they see things in the world.  The articles clearly states that they have a situated viewpoint and also think that experiences depend on “cultural tools such as languages, technologies, dispositions…” (pg 481).  It is a good example of using connections and different signs and tools to help understand other ideas that they may be less familiar with.