O ut with the old and in with the new. Last year, the Centennial Ave. Elementary
School in Roosevelt, NY received a new shipment of the New York State Science 21 kits.
The new science program from the previous year was out, and the new science program for this year was in. Our task, as consulting university professors, was to help the third grade teachers bring Science 21 alive in their classrooms. Here is what we learned.
We found that while engaging the students in inquiry based science lessons, the children themselves would bring all the other subjects into the lessons. We saw groups of children studying a clock, trying to pinpoint the exact minute that they put their ice cube into their newly designed “ice cube keeper.” Some children were studying their thermometers, counting by two’s to determine the accurate temperature of the water melting away from their shrinking ice cube. Some children were pointing to the thermometer arguing that one line could not mean two degrees. The children’s own thinking and interaction brought them to use and develop their expressive language, mathematical rea soning, and technological skills into the problem-solving task in which they were engaged.
Here is how the adults helped them along.
Our introduction to the school came about because of state funding authorized by NCLB; this on-going endeavor is called the Teacher
Leadership Quality Program (TLQP). It aims at improving the academic success of New York
State students by enhancing the quality of their teachers’ work with them. TLQP at Hofstra University centers on systemic and ongoing professional development with a focus on the integration of science, mathematics, and technology education.
We started with the premise that none of us knows how to teach a child until we work with that child and understand his/her thinking about the concepts. So we proceeded with two questions: How can we work together to better understand the children’s thinking, and how can we tailor the Science 21 materials to further their thinking? We established a schedule of lessons throughout the year in which we would engage the children while small groups of teachers watched or participated. Periodically, all the third grade teachers would congregate in one room to observe the same lesson and children for a later discussion. We began with a specific plan using a specific curriculum. It quickly morphed into a larger examination of how to provide an engaging classroom environment by integrating the subjects through standards-based problems.
We began with the unit “How a Scientist
Investigates Water Cycles.” In one class, we had the students first make their own thermometers from straws, colored water, and little reused film canisters. We tried to see what happens to the liquid in the straw when warm water cools. From there we went to the conventional, calibrated thermometers from the Science 21 kit, and tried the same task. But this time we tried to measure
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60 TechTrends • May/June 2008 Volume 52, Number 3 the exact temperatures at different times. That created a huge measurement challenge: time and degrees! Counting by two’s was problematic, and determining what the minute and hour hands on the clock were telling us was difficult, all great problems for a third grade class.
Then we asked the children to make an “ice cube keeper.” Given a choice of materials that included plastic cups, polystyrene pieces, tin foil, newspaper, tape, and ice cubes, students were charged with designing a container that would keep their ice from melting as long as possible.
Once the ice cube keepers were complete, the students placed ice cubes in them and recorded their observations of the ice cubes at different time intervals. We ran into another set of great problems, all of which provided learning opportunities for measurement, spelling, vocabulary, addition, subtraction, writing, and a host of other skills and concepts.
As an additional learning station, we created a class website that included readings from the
Science 21 kit and other related online interactive web resources. Bringing this resource into the classroom was a challenge day to day: screen time-outs, batteries not charged, ordered laptops that were not on site, electric cords that were too short, passwords that were unavailable, security measures that disallowed access to necessary features. This was a barrier to our startup and a confirmation of the need for timely technical support in new programs requiring technology.
Does the technology need to be flawless? For novice users, yes!
We decided to try a different approach in another class. Instead of children trying to make their own ice cube keeper first, we asked them to explore related concepts using an online simula tion, “Keeping Warm,” from Science Clips (BBC,
2006). In this simulation, the children determine how different materials affect the temperature of water in a container (see Figure 1). The main reason we selected the online simulation was because it provided a safe environment for the children to manipulate the variables, see results in a short period of time, and look for patterns. Additionally, we selected the interactive simulation because it had the following characteristics:
1. It was age appropriate.
2. It was a tool for teachers, not replacement of teacher instruction.
3. It was an already existing high quality re source, relevant to learning about the water cycle and temperature,.
4. It was a web-based interactive simulation of how different insulators can prevent water from changing temperature or changing state.
5. It provided immediate feedback.
6. It included an assessment of student learning.
We began by asking the students to close their eyes and think of a place where it was cold and to imagine that they were there. We asked them to state the location they were thinking of, and they responded
Student 1: “The North Pole!”
Student 2: “Alaska!”
Student 3: “Antarctica!”
We then asked, “If you had three items to choose from that might keep you warm, which would you choose: sheets of cardboard, sheets of aluminum foil, or a piece of polystyrene?”
We asked them to write their predictions in their science journals. A few hands raised with
“What is polystyrene?” As we walked around, we saw that many students interestingly had written “polystyrene” as their prediction in their journals.
With their predictions jotted down, we introduced the focus question: “What happens to a glass of warm water when we use different materials to try to keep it warm?” We used the teacher computer station and projector to show students how to use the online simulation.
(Figure 1 shows the experiment setup on the screen.) The students were eager to begin work.
They sat in pairs to share one wireless laptop for each pair. The teachers were surprised at the students’ level of engagement and skill with the technology. One teacher commented that this was only the second time that she had seen any computer technology in any of the classrooms.
Students were asked to record their results on paper (see Table 1).
Temperature
No
Material
0 minutes 70°C
10 minutes
20 minutes
Polystyrene
70°C
Cardboard
30 minutes
40 minutes
50 minutes
60 minutes
Table 1: From BBC Science Clips, “Keeping Warm”.
70°C
Metal foil
70°C
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Figure 1: From BBC Science Clips, “Keeping Warm”.
In the center of the screen, students see a beaker filled with water and a thermometer in
it. The left side of the screen is the room temperature; the top of the thermometer is the current temperature reading. On the right side of the screen, students can press a button to start and pause the clock. In the bottom center of the screen, students can choose from three different materials.
After experiencing the simulation, the stu dents went about designing an ice cube keeper based on the information they had gathered from their online experiment. Through our work with these two classes and through the children’s own words, we found that the students who learned about the insulating properties of the materials in the simulation participated in the three dimensional experimenta tion with greater purposefulness and enhanced strategizing.
There are many educational websites that include great interactive activities for children.
For instance, in an online water cycle simulation we used, students could trigger an animation to see the consequences of increasing or decreasing vegetation or the amount of snow and ice. This provided a focused activity and good opportunities for students to see the water cycle at work and how it changes under varying conditions.
However, the website developer also included a great deal of vocabulary and the results that we were hoping the children would discover on their own. The teachers were critical of the vocabulary, stating, “It was too sophisticated for our 3rd graders,” and were disappointed that the website was telling the children what they ought to be seeing for themselves. The teachers concluded that the animation on the website would have been a better teaching tool for them had the text not been present and visually distracting.
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Many websites are designed as stand-alone sites, but teachers need web-based teaching tools, not teaching replacements. We are coming to understand that when designing online educational resources for use in schools, web developers need to include the capability of turning on and off certain critical features so that the teacher can scaffold the learning in ways that are responsive to his/her students.
The Hofstra University TLQP project is clear in its goals; the New York State Science 21 kit is clear in its goals. The teachers are clear with what they want to see happen and what they want their children to learn in their classrooms. The district administrators are clear about what they want the school to achieve. But amidst all of this clarity enter the children, each of whom brings a different story to the classroom, and each of whom needs and deserves integrated, differentiated lessons based on big ideas.
We conducted a number of lessons that were observed and critiqued by groups of teachers. In one lesson, a young girl was trying to get
200 milliliters of water in a cup with only 100 milliliter graduated cylinders available. She questioned, after much contemplation, whether or not she could pour water twice into the cup from the 100 milliliter cylinder. We told her that it sounded reasonable, and encouraged her to go ahead with her plans. When she poured the second 100 mls into a much wider cup, she was disappointed that it didn’t work. We asked her why she thought it didn’t work. She pointed and said that there was less water in the cup. We asked her how much water she thought was in the cup, and, to our surprise, she replied, “about
25”. Together, we poured the water back and forth a couple of times, but each time the 200 milliliters of water appeared as a shorter column in the wider mouthed cup, and she claimed the water was “about 25”.
Responding to this girl required us to integrate science, math, technology, and language arts. She had the idea that she might be able to apply the adding algorithm she learned on paper to real life water in a cylinder, but her mathematical idea proved, in her eyes, to be wrong. She had not learned the concept of conserving volume, which led her to conclude that her very correct idea was not correct. We and the teachers who were observing the lesson suggested types of experiences that might help her understand and articulate conserving volume, a critical cognitive structure for much of the mathematics and science to come. Our discussion of the lesson and of this girl led us to understand when a math skill during a science lesson needs to take over, or when a writing concept in a science journal needs to take precedence. What is important to teach and how to
sequence it is a contextual decision.
When teaching with any curriculum, teachers need to be able to extract basic organizing principles from the many concrete questions, activities, and events in the classroom. With the big picture in mind, teaching and learning is, by default, integrated and multi-disciplinary. It is real and it is meaningful.
Roberto Joseph is Assistant Professor at Hofstra University in the Curriculum and Teaching Department, School of
Education and Allied Human Services. His research interests focus on culturally relevant technology-based learning environments, issues of technology access and use, videoconferencing in education, and systemic change in education, He may be reached at roberto.joseph@hofstra.edu.
Jacqueline Grennon Brooks is Associate Professor at Hofstra University in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching, School of Education and Allied Human Services. Her research interests focus on constructivist learning theory and its transformation into inclusive educational practice.
She may be reached at jacqueline.grennon.brooks@hofstra.
edu.
BBC Science Clips. (n.d.). Keeping Warm. Retrieved
December 15, 2006, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/ schools/scienceclips/ages/8_9/keeping_warm.shtml
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