Written Responses to the Questions for the Cecily Selby Event , April 30, 2009, at
24 Fifth Avenue, New York NY
Paul Jablon
Question #1
University Scientists as an Integral Part of the Solution to Pre-college Science Education
Cecily, as part of the 1983 Commision, already saw what was required of scientists teaching at
universities years before, as described below, it was instituted in pre-service science education and found
to be successful, especially in urban areas. In a very controversial statement for its time, scientists and
technologists brought together by the National Science Foundation to assess present practices in precollege science, and to suggest needed reforms, reminded college faculty that teachers teach the way that
they have been taught.
Pre-service education is the key to the supply of teachers for the full [science]
curriculum described. Immediate attention is needed to the redesign of college
instruction to train teachers in the methods as well as the content of the type of
science instruction advocated.
[Strongly advocated is the] modeling in college science and education courses [of]
the teaching techniques expected to be used in the precollege classrooms. This
requires close collaboration of science and education departments.
Educating Americans for the 21st Century:
The Report of the National Science Board
in Commission on Precollege Education
Mathematics, Science and Technology-1983
__________________________________________
In an informal survey in 1990 of seventy two public and private elementary classrooms scattered
throughout the borough of Brooklyn, with both minority dominant and white dominant populations
taught by both veteran and novice teachers, only two classrooms had science being taught through
hands-on, student-designed investigations. This was far from atypical. A majority of urban early
childhood and elementary science teachers were science phobic, lacked conceptual background, and are
pressured by school districts to focus on reading and math performance. Hence, very few engaged
students in appropriate inquiry-based, hands-on, minds-on science on a regular basis, if at all. The
traditional elementary teacher preparation program from which these teachers emerged had one science
methods course and one lecture-based science course. Unfortunately, this is still the case in school
districts and colleges across the country.
However, in 1990 using Science, Technology and Society themes as the structure for courses, combined
with a “teach as you expect them to teach” classroom format, a model was devised by a coalition of
science faculty and science education faculty at Brooklyn College to alleviate many of the causes of the
alienation from science and lack of conceptual preparation amongst preservice elementary school
teachers. This program was created in response to a study of thosnds of our elementary science majors
at the college.
Paul C. Jablon, Ph.D.
Lesley University
pjablon@lesley.edu
It was an interesting dilemma. When the science education faculty at our college surveyed our students
about their past histories and present attitudes concerning science a number of seemingly contradictory
outcomes appeared. More than 95% of the students in our elementary and early childhood methods
classes listed science as “one of their two least favorite subjects in school,” or as their “least favorite”
subject in school. These same students, however, believed it is important to teach science to their
students once they begin teaching. Hence a dilemma was soon uncovered in the first day’s class
discussion: If I don’t like a subject and am not excited about it, how can I get my students interested and
enthused?
A further perusal of these surveys uncovered some other contradictions. Most of the students in the
classes (96% women) had taken at least three years of high school science and two additional lab and
lecture classes of college science. Yet these same students not only disliked science, but were
uncomfortable with the subject. They felt less prepared than in other subject areas and were afraid to
teach it. Likewise, when we surveyed practicing elementary teachers there was a similar attitude about
science, consequently, few taught science as part of their daily routine.
The surveys, conducted both through interviews done by an ethnographic researcher and by paper and
pencil response, provided some additional insights into the nature of the problem that allowed us to
redesign both our methods classes and our required science courses. None of the students had
experienced hands-on inquiry science on a regular basis at any level of schooling. A vast majority saw
science teaching as the distribution of factual information. Scientists were seen as an elite core of mostly
older cantankerous men by more than 90% of the preservice students. Less than 2% said they had ever
met a scientist and none of them had any idea of precisely what a scientist would do during a normal
work-day, including the handful who personally knew scientists. Likewise, people who taught science
were a “strange breed,” with a few exceptions, and the students in the methods classes could not picture
themselves “doing to their students what was done to them in science class.”
A grant from the National Science Foundation supported the creation and implementation of this
program focused on a collaboration with the scientists at the university who were teaching these
students’ science classes. The science courses that eventually created were taught in a laboratory setting
using constructivist, hands-on inquiry techniques that allow prospective teachers to learn science by
really doing science.
If students were to instruct elementary school students with an inquiry-based, activity-oriented,
constructivist methodology then they would need to experience this type of learning themselves. It
became clear that the students needed to do science. Up until this point science was something that was
owned by science faculty and distributed to those in their classes through lectures and laboratory
exercises with predetermined designs and results. If students were to experience science, then the liberal
arts faculty members needed to become involved in redesigning their courses. However, these faculty
members had never experienced this type of learning environment in a classroom, even though it existed
in their own research laboratories. Just as we were asking the preservice teachers to reconsider their
understanding of how science is taught, simultaneously science faculty were beginning the same journey.
Science courses had preservice teachers engaged in designing investigations of natural phenomena that
had no preordained answers. Dual objectives of having these students learn the processes of science as
well as the conceptual understandings were agreed to by all faculty. The science courses were
completely lab-based, with little or no lecture. The interplay between professor and student was similar
to that of an artisan and apprentice, where as students designed and implemented their investigations,
professors facilitated the students’ understanding of the limitations of their current designs.
Paul C. Jablon, Ph.D.
Lesley University
pjablon@lesley.edu
Collaborative lab teams would then redesign their procedures in order to more accurately uncover an
understanding of how a particular phenomenon of nature works.
Since students are active constructors of knowledge and knowledge which is constructed in social
situations is more permanent and viewed as more valuable by the learner, cooperative learning strategies
and group problem solving were important elements of the learning environment. Opportunity for
extensive, hands-on, minds-on experience was provided, and sufficient time was allowed for students to
construct knowledge for themselves rather than having facts and expert opinions foisted upon them. This
means that breadth of coverage was carefully balanced with depth of coverage, and that the latter is
preferable to the former.
The series of three science content courses in the program emphasized scientific investigation, where
what was previously lecture and a rather cookbook style lab in traditional science classes at colleges
became a seamless activity that all occurs within the laboratory classroom. The level of conceptual
understanding of scientific ideas would not be altered, but the material would be taught from the
experimentalist point of view, integrating lab and problem solving discussion into one seamless activity.
The class utilized actual work in problem solving, not in the doing of laboratory exercises whose
solution is preordained. The structure of the class encouraged peer study groups (vital for minority
success in science) by using collaborative methodology throughout. Science activities would be
structured in a manner so that in order to answer a posed problem students would need to design and
carry out a series of experiments that would include the selection of procedure and appropriate
equipment.
These courses had a profound effect upon the elementary preservice teachers enrolled in these courses.
Combined with some science teaching methodology courses and urban field experiences over 80% of
graduates no longer felt a fear of science, and felt ready to effectively teach science “the way it had been
taught to them”. Many of them spoke about once again “owning” the curiosity and the messing around
of science that they had previously lost in their previous school experiences.
In addition, since most of these classes were taught by senior faculty from various science departments
who personally experienced the effectiveness of this approach, they began to push this approach for
teaching various courses in their departments. Since I gained great insight into how to interest science
faculty and develop their expertise in this inquiry or constructivist teaching methodology as I led this
project at Brooklyn College, when I moved to my current position at Lesley University I began creating
collegial relationships with the senior scientists. Over the past two years through a series of workshops
and team planning and teaching of core science courses we have been researching the effects of this
approach upon non-science majors at the university. Some preliminary results demonstrate a better
mastery of science process skills and conceptual, but also twice as many students as with traditional
courses who are opting to take additional science courses as electives. In some cases this caused students
to switch to science as a major. Hopefully, a percentage of these will opt to become middle or high
school science teachers. If they do they will understand how to use an inquiry approach to science
teaching as this is how they themselves are learning science.
Question #2
Effective Strategies for Engaging Urban Adolescents in Science: An Insiders View
Paul C. Jablon, Ph.D.
Lesley University
pjablon@lesley.edu
As a science educator who spent a majority of his life teaching in large urban area high and middle
schools, it becomes extremely frustrating reading much of the research that is done about science
teaching in these inner city areas. Unfortunately, science education professors and their graduate students
who have not had the opportunity to experience for themselves the long-term difference between
effective and ineffective science teaching situations with urban adolescents are doing much of this
research. There are few of us with science education doctorates who have experienced in our own
teaching through years of effort, collaboration, and creativity this long, slow evolution. An evolution
from feelings of failure and frustration as teachers in science classrooms within traditional large urban
schools to situations where we happily arise each day knowing that together with our colleagues we will
successfully engage a remarkable percentage of our students in deep science understandings and positive
attitudes towards the study of science.
There are schools in these same large urban areas with the same student populations as these large
ineffective traditional high schools that have demonstrated high levels of success with their science
classes. They are unfortunately, not the norm, but small numbers of them exist Those of us whose own
evolution in our teaching have paralleled the evolution of these schools with these effective
environments can outline the matrix of structures that account for success with these urban students.
In my own case my nineteen year career began in a street academy in Spanish Harlem, moved to a large,
dysfunctional New York City public high school in Hell’s Kitchen, helped transform that high school
into the first mini-school complex in the country, and then with a set of exceptional colleagues created a
small high school nationally recognized for its success with “at-risk” urban adolescents. Only then did I
move to university teaching for the last seventeen years where I have had the incredible opportunity to
work with pre-service and in-service science teachers, joining them in constructing the understanding of
what creates effective communities of urban adolescent learners. Many of these have gone on to
restructure their own classrooms and schools demonstrating the effective application of these strategies.
Each of these effective structures that I will suggest below also inform science education research in
general, but are central to our work in urban areas. Students in urban areas have a set of characteristics
that are the extremes of all adolescents. Without addressing these with this full matrix of structures
assures that little success in urban science teaching occurs. Each one of these structures that is omitted
from the matrix lessens our success and at a certain point we become ineffective with a majority of these
students, unlike in suburban situations where home environments still allow for some success.
Some underlying postulates
However, before we look at these particular structures that need to be in place for success, let’s consider
some postulates that underlie most of these structures.


Studying science classrooms without considering the whole school context in which the
classrooms exist makes for naïve research. This is true for all science education research that
tries to control variables solely within the science classroom, but is especially important to urban
situations where external factors in the larger school have a more profound effect upon what is
possible to achieve in the science classroom.
If students do not attend school regularly, or cut science classes regularly, or drop out of school
then they cannot succeed in their science studies. In urban areas school dropout rates,
absenteeism, and cutting patterns are even higher than the devastating numbers reported by these
urban districts.
Paul C. Jablon, Ph.D.
Lesley University
pjablon@lesley.edu


The genetically and environmentally determined emotional needs of students, if not met while
they are studying science, will not allow them to engage in focused thinking and effort. This is
exacerbated in urban classrooms, as the problems of low economic urban students are more
complex and deeper than their suburban counterparts. Many have been let down and wounded by
dramatic losses and repeated instabilities in the most essential relationships in their lives.
If there is not an alternative positive peer group that meets these emotional needs that is part of
their science studies, then they will continue in the negative interactions brought from their
“street culture” peer groups as they sit in their science classrooms. If this negative culture persists
in their science classes, then success is not viable.
Common structures in effective urban schools
There are structures that are common to successful urban schools for adolescents. It is not surprising that
the most successful science classrooms exist in these same schools. Classrooms that are successfully
engaging urban adolescents in higher order thinking in science and creating positive attitudes towards
science have the following characteristics:
1. These classrooms exist in small schools where faculty members not only have a good deal of
control over many aspects of their curriculum, but over organizational structures in the school.
Within these small schools teachers have designed the structures so that they are able to create
long-term relationships with their students. They usually have them for longer periods of time
during the day, have them for more than one science class over a number of years, and connect
with many of their students in some advisory capacity as well. There are a growing number of
these schools that coexist within the large old traditional school buildings.
2. The science in these classrooms is not taught separate from the other subjects in their school. In
addition to STS contextualization within the science classroom, science teachers work
collaboratively with teachers of social studies, English, physical education, art, music and
mathematics on interdisciplinary projects that have students including a great amount of the
social and personal context of science and mathematics impossible to include in solely subjectspecific classrooms.
3. The schools, including their science teachers, have students involved in real world community
activities. These usually exist within two contexts.
a. Part or full-time carefully supervised internships that connect the students to high-end
work environments that they have not been exposed to within the economic structure of
their neighborhoods.
b. Community-based projects that actively engage the students in assisting to alleviate some
community need or that allow them to use the knowledge gained in their science and
other subject area classes to express their ethical points of view in the public arena.
4. The whole school environment has been designed to empower students. Students have been
taught peer mediation and conflict resolution skills and the faculty are committed to allowing
them to use them and to create democratic situations where students are integrally involved in the
organizational process of the school. Thus the school becomes a “safe” zone within the inner city
“hostile” environment. This is not just about physical safety, but also allows the students to feel
safe to express their ideas when negotiating ideas in their science classroom. This means even
more than just the freedom from being put down for trying as hard as they are able, freedom from
name calling, and freedom to take the direction that they choose for their lives. Rather, it means
being surrounded by peers who will support them in their efforts for success. This can be
accomplished because these peers not only want to support each other, but have been given a
toolbox of interpersonal skills and understandings.
Paul C. Jablon, Ph.D.
Lesley University
pjablon@lesley.edu
5. These decision-making skills are put to use by allowing students to make decisions. Teaching
and learning are accomplished through inquiry. Almost all science instruction centers on lab
investigations that are partially or fully designed by students, and whenever possible, are
contextualized within or connected to real world applications as mentioned previously. In many
cases, the science classes required by state standards are further ensconced in formats that are of
interest to students and then students get to select the format in which they will take the
mandated courses.
What is it about the combination of these structures that makes it possible to engage students in
these classrooms in effective science learning?
The empowering of students in these schools is based upon the notion of critical constructivism. Not
only does this approach to teaching assume that knowledge is actively made, rather than passively taken
in, but also that students bring their intellectual and emotional lives, their familial and community
experiences to the classroom. Since critical theory holds that many forms of social injustice and
economic inequality plague our communities and our country, these problems are inseparable from the
concrete lived social contexts of school and community. Therefore, if schools are to be successful, they
must not accept the deficits of the students who walk into their classrooms, but engage students in a way
that both raises their cognitive and social growth, and also empowers them to become change agents
within their own communities.
Unfortunately, there are many science education researchers who speak in terms of the social capital of
students within their classrooms as mostly determined by their place in their street-situated peer society,
but rarely speak about the need for the school to offer a real-world alternative peer milieu that is
attractive to these students. It is the building of this alternative “society” that all of these structures lead
to. This society cannot be built in the science classroom alone and needs the collaboration of other
subject area teachers and administration.
This vision of middle and high schools is one in which adults are actively participating in youngsters’
lives, students are constructing their own knowledge, schools are committed to and deeply involved in
community life, and teachers are cooperatively creating the kinds of learning experiences that breed
excellence. These are high quality schools that result from the creative balance between specialization
and generalization, between curriculum and community, between equity and excellence, between
teaching the mind and touching the heart. It is a realization that this dynamic tension, in one-way or
another, has always been a part of an effective education. It is designed to provide continued work in
learning skills while bringing more depth to the curriculum. It emphasizes guidance and exploration,
independence and responsibility. It offers a transition to the real world. Independent studies are being
carried out by small self-selected groups of students who want to pursue common interests. These are
studies that exemplify variety and choice and make it more likely that students will experience and
pursue meaningful academic learning at this critical time in their intellectual development.
Adolescents are experiencing a period of dramatic physical and cognitive growth, an ability to think in
abstract and complex ways, while having boundless energy, curiosity, and interests. Simultaneously, they
hold these intense interests for very brief periods of time, and are awkwardly navigating their social
environment. The world is seen only from their personal emotional perspective, yet they want to have an
impact on society. They are most insecure, and revel in public recognition of accomplishment.
Paul C. Jablon, Ph.D.
Lesley University
pjablon@lesley.edu
When we research what works best for adolescents to learn science we can no longer be constrained
within the science classroom. Our studies must include work with other teachers, interdisciplinary team
building, advisory work with students, and the use of responsive classroom techniques and conflict
resolution training on the ability of students to negotiate ideas in inquiry classrooms. Likewise, Our
science education programs must contain many courses that help both our preservice and inservice
science teachers learn how to work on interdisciplinary teams, how to initiate and run community-based
projects, how to facilitate conflict resolution activities and democratic classrooms, and how to
participate as a team member in effective schools within schools. All of this in addition to, but
simultaneous with, facilitating well-run inquiry and STS based science classrooms. Without those
outside-the-science-classroom additions, students will not be effective inside their urban science
classrooms
Question #3
The Problem of Sustainability of Science Education Reforms in School Districts in Urban Areas
with mostly Under-represented Minorities.
Unlike many of the suburban school districts with which I collaborate the urban school districts rarely
ever have a sustained population of teachers well trained to teach science, or leadership to insure the
continuation of effective practices. Therefore, any efforts to have successful science teaching sustained
in these urban areas must have a built in framework that sustains these practices even as superintendents,
principals, teachers, and even science coordinators leave their positions in much shorter times than their
suburban counterparts. Increasing the complexity of the task is that this support matrix cannot be created
solely with in these districts. what is necessary is an interdependent support matrix among preservice
elementary education students, college science and science education faculty, public school teachers,
administrators and staff developers, and public school students. Only when this occurs is there any
chance of sustaining these effective programs in a natural, organic way despite changes in personnel.
Creating an Effective Preservice Science Preparation Program
The first part of this program is described in my response to question number one where I described the
evolution of college scientists who created inquiry science content courses for these preservice teachers.
Once college students were experiencing being taught as we expected them to teach, then it became the
job of the science methods courses to have them understand that is developmentally appropriate for
elementary students within this same framework of instruction. In addition, these students needed to
become familiar with nationally validated curricula that met the criteria set in the national standards. The
course also assisted them in metacognitively investigating their own science phobias, much of which
was connected to issues of gender and to their experiences in the urban environment. An opportunity in a
field placement in a public school where they could practice their novice inquiry science teaching skills
was also built into the design of the methods courses. All elementary and early childhood majors were
required to take eighteen credits of science and two science methods courses as part of this preparation
sequence which has become nationally known as the Brooklyn Plan.
Systemic Reform of Science in Local School Districts – a Collaboration.
Another two activities intersected at the same time. Local school districts had approached the college to
assist them in revamping their elementary science programs so that their students would be exposed to
this constructivist, activity-based curricula. At the same time, we at the college had been searching for
field placements where our preservice students could experience effective elementary science
Paul C. Jablon, Ph.D.
Lesley University
pjablon@lesley.edu
instruction. After searching through thousands of teachers, we had found almost none. Thus began a five
year systemic change project in two large school districts. The classrooms of the best of the teachers
from this project would become mentor, field placement sites for the undergraduate preservice teachers.
However, this was not a one way street where the education faculty dispensed information about how to
teach science effectively in an urban setting. Rather it became an ongoing collaboration between the
school district staff, school administrators, the teachers, and the students in the public schools with the
college science education faculty, preservice students, and college science faculty.
This project, Science in the SEAMLESS Day, as with the Brooklyn Plan, was supported by a grant from
the National Science Foundation. Using findings in the literature about what are the components of a
systemic reform effort in science, some of the understandings from the Brooklyn Plan, and the Science
Content Standards, the Science Education Program Standards, and the Science Education System
Standards, a comprehensive approach to change was created by both district and college personnel. This
included summer immersion institutes (based on the Brooklyn Plan), in-class assistance for teachers, the
purchase, by the districts, of nationally validated science kits for each classroom teacher, staff
development for principals, and district staff developers, after-school seminars, and a coordinated effort
to build a leadership team in each school.
After 4 years of this initiative there are now over 600 classroom teachers who engage elementary
children in hands-on, inquiry-based science activities on a regular basis each week, and a set of about six
school–based leaders who were developed by having them co-lead the summer institutes. There are still
another 500 teachers who have not been a part of this process. Although this is touted as one of the most
successful urban, systemic, elementary science change process in the nation, in order to create
sustainability so that the project will become institutionalized in both districts, more leadership is needed
that can be supplied through grant funds. The college also is the sole provider of science education
university leadership for an additional 8 school districts in the county with their 7000 teachers in
addition to the two who are involved in this project.
The Need for Leaders at the Elementary Level in Science – The Masters
Program
It is clear in the National Standards document, as it is in the experience from the two NSF supported
projects, that strong, dynamic, knowledgeable leadership is necessary to institute any aspect of science
education reform. In response to this demand, a unique masters program was created at the college. The
program grew out of the experiences of college and district personnel, and students. This Masters
Program in Elementary Science and Environmental Education needed to address two simultaneous
needs. The need for novice teachers to become better all-around classroom teachers, and the need for
teachers who would have not only a knowledge of what is effective practice for instructing young
children in science, but the science content knowledge and staff development skills to lead others in this
endeavor.
The program creates a professional cohort who travel through their courses together, and have eventually
continued to operate as a professional support network once the teachers have graduated from the
program. The program uses national standards not only in science, but in each of the curriculum areas,
as the starting point for students to create their integrated, SEAMLESS plans for their teaching.
Students become comfortable with all the major national validated science curricula, e.g., FOSS, ETC,
Insights, utilizing them in their own classrooms and in their college classes. Students spend weekends at
Paul C. Jablon, Ph.D.
Lesley University
pjablon@lesley.edu
various environmental centers learning to facilitate outdoor education experiences, while strengthening
their professional support network. They are provided with e-mail accounts to access the larger science
education community through list-serves, bulletin boards, and research sites. They e-mail their
professors and peers in their own cohorts and previous and future cohorts. They are taught staff
development and school change skills as part of the program.
Students enroll in 3 inquiry-based, non-lecture science courses which build on their science knowledge,
while further exposing them to doing science. The courses are in various science disciplines. As in the
Brooklyn Plan, this gives the teachers a visceral understanding of what effective constructivist science
instruction is like, while increasing their science conceptual understandings and process skills. This is
all intertwined with instruction on how to create an effective classroom social climate for learning,
effective methodology for implementing other subject areas effectively, and other skills that novice and
intermediate teachers need for their classrooms. There has been a broad spectrum of teachers who have
enrolled in the program, ranging from first year teachers to 20-year veterans who are working on their
third masters and joined for the stimulation provided by the professional network. Every teacher in the
program was instructed how to and was required to run staff development workshops in science at
regional conferences, in their school districts, or at their own schools. A number of these graduates have
been hired by their school districts as science staff developers. Some are principals – principals who
really understand how to support their staffs about inquiry science teaching – not just language arts.
Many of the graduates are still full-time classroom teachers, but are seen as the “go to” person in their
school for assistance with science teacher and revel in their roles as the spokespersons for science
instruction in their districts. This is part of the matrix as there were 18 additional teachers in the masters
program who are now part of the leadership program in the two school districts in the Science in the
SEAMLESS Day Project. The rest lead science throughout the rest of the 30 school districts in the city.
The Evolving Matrix – Windows and Mirrors
It is an evolving matrix of support. Within this network each member is constructing understanding of
what science is so that they can take ownership of science for themselves. In the case of the teachers
(both preservice and inservice), staff developers, and college faculty, they could then facilitate the
learning of science in an effective manner. The students in the public schools, being the beneficiaries of
this whole endeavor, have begun to take on science as their own with a love and fervor heretofore not
seen.
At both the college and elementary level, the courses give students the opportunity to explore science as
a way of knowing the world and as a tool for problem solving. This is in stark contrast to what they had
previously experienced. We encourage students to be scientists and design and conduct investigations
that address problems associated with how the natural world works. Science becomes a collaborative and
participatory experience. It is much more about process than it is about facts. They, the preservice,
inservice, or elementary students, need to be prepared to join in and explore.
The exploration of how to create such a learning environment was equally difficult for the college
science faculty as it was for the preservice or inservice elementary teachers. The matrix of projects
facilitated that goal by providing windows through which both the faculty, teachers and undergraduate
students could explore the most effective teaching practices in science, and mirrors which will reflect
and validate their own experiences with science. The interrelationship in this mirrors and windows
metaphor is an underlying structure for the matrix. As Emily Style has so insightfully stated, “If the
student is understood as occupying a dwelling of self, education needs to enable the student to look
through window frames in order to see the realities of others and into mirrors in order to see her/his own
Paul C. Jablon, Ph.D.
Lesley University
pjablon@lesley.edu
reality reflected”. Knowledge of both types of framing are necessary in order for all involved to
understand that their past history with science instruction is not indicative of the job they can do as a
teacher.
Interaction with district staff developers, classroom teachers, and preservice students, as well as visits to
see elementary students engaged in effective science learning environments, provided windows for the
college science faculty to see how various approaches to science instruction affected not only their
students in the elementary education program, but how it in turn would nourish or block the teaching of
science by these preservice teachers once they had their own classrooms. Although this interaction was
facilitated by the science education faculty, the education faculty grew to understand the process of
developing appropriate science teachers better through their interaction with both the science faculty, the
preservice teachers, and all the staff and students in the public schools.
Some of the district staff developers, after team teaching in summer science institutes at the college with
college faculty have become adjunct instructors for college courses during the school year. The content
of these education courses is now molded jointly through both the research perspective of the college
faculty and the practical understanding of school systems and children by the district staff adjuncts.
This process has promoted an attitude change for everyone involved in this matrix. They begin to see
themselves as having a voice in the process; in most cases having a woman’s voice in the process of
teaching science. If they have a voice in constructing their world, their profession, then they better
understand the voice in science that they should give their students.
The windows and mirrors theme provides a metaphor for one of the grounding assumptions of
constructivism: that cognitive complexity is related to the subject’s recognition of the world’s
complexity. Since the preservice students, inservice teachers, and college faculty have constructed their
own understanding of what science is and their relationship or lack of relationship to it before entering
the matrix, all must be given a chance to reconstruct this preconception if they are expected to hold a
more accurate one. Lecturing or telling, as usual, will not work. It is an interactive process by which they
simultaneously uncover what science is and how to create an appropriate learning environment for
engaging children or adults in science.
It is therapy for the preservice and inservice teachers in that these mostly female students investigate and
validate their less than desirable relationship with what they thought was science. By engaging in being a
scientist and studying how to teach it, students can come to a new relationship with science and
technology. They cannot embrace science through someone else's window of seeing, but need to create
their own place in science, real science, so that they can assist their students to do the same. Each of the
activities of the matrix has helped facilitate this process. Although at first perusal the activities seem
unrelated, they support one another and intersect to form a matrix with the mirrors and windows
becoming intertwined until they become almost indistinguishable.
Without this interactive matrix in most school districts and universities, it is unlikely that there is going
to be enough energy, money, expertise, informed understanding, and effective leadership to enact, but
more importantly, to sustain the changes suggested in the national standards document. A scientific
metaphor seems appropriate to describe this system. An organic interrelationship evolves that exists in a
state of entropy, where the most seems to get done with the least input of energy.
Paul C. Jablon, Ph.D.
Lesley University
pjablon@lesley.edu
Paul C. Jablon, Ph.D.
Lesley University
pjablon@lesley.edu