Section I: Inquiry-Learning and Learning from One's Own Experience
| The Keys to Inquiry Section I: Inquiry-Learning and Learning from One's Own Experience | | ||
| Everyday Classroom Tools | ||||
Inquiry-Learning
"Inquiry learning" and "learning from one's experience" are at the core of the Everyday Classroom
Tools Project. What does this mean, in theory and in practice? While these are terms that are used
often in the current science literature, its important to unpack what they mean to consider how they
are intended in the Everyday Classroom Tools Project and how this relates to the array of meanings
people in the field of science education attach to them.
If on the other hand, you envisioned a chaotic classroom where children were doing things, but weren't clear about what they were doing, or what could be understood from it, or what could really be known from what they found out, you've shared a glimpse of what gives some educators pause about taking the plunge into inquiry-based learning. At its worst, inquiry-based learning can result in miseducation. Either vision is possible. So what can you, as teachers, do to enable the first vision?
Throughout these essays, the issues that teachers need to keep in mind to help children learn well through inquiry and to develop deep understanding are presented. The "Points for Practice" are intended to help you create the first vision and avoid the second.
Learning from one's experience and through one's questions is based on a philosophy called "constructivism," put forth by Piaget and others. According to constructivism, we don't just absorb understanding, instead we build it. Learners need opportunities to figure out for themselves how new learning fits with old so that they can attach it to what they already know, making it part of their existing knowledge structures or "assimilating it." When they figure out that new learning doesn't with old learning, they need to restructure their current understandings to fit with the new knowledge or to "accommodate it." These processes, assimilating and accommodating, are part of learners' theory building as they make sense of the world.
What does this mean for the classroom? In part, it means that children cannot just sit like sponges and absorb information. They must do something with it. They need to be engaged in activities that help them build understanding. Beyond this, it means that often the child is the best judge of what questions he or she needs to explore to make sense of the information before him or her. For instance, if a class is engaged in an activity on weights and measurement and a child is trying to figure out if you could use pebbles as weights to measure with, introducing a particular standard for measuring weight eclipses that child's opportunity to construct an understanding of whether we need standards of measure and what purpose they serve.
Research shows that unless children actively seek connections in their learning, they are not likely to remember what they've supposedly learned. Not only this, they often cannot apply concepts. The learning is inert or has a ritualized nature. It is also unlikely that children will discover areas of misunderstanding if they don't actively grapple with the ideas. Educational Researcher, David Perkins writes about the problems of each of these types of "fragile knowledge." Fragile knowledge hurts learners and does not empower them to understand or deal with their world.
While most teachers find the central concepts of constructivism appealing, the concepts also tend to raise a lot of questions. The translation from theory to practice contains many possible stumbling blocks. The largest stumbling block has to do with helping students to build understandings that will serve them well in today's world. Constructivism and inquiry-based learning can lead to many dead-ends in that children find out what doesn't work instead of what does; or they find out that they asked the wrong question; or that what they did won't help them to answer the question that they want to answer. These are valuable understandings. They help students learn a lot about the process of science and what one must think about when trying to answer certain kinds of questions. However, they don't necessarily help children construct present-day understandings of how the world works.
After all, while individual scientists might spend an entire life time developing an understanding of an isolated phenomenon, we have an accumulated wealth of scientific information that no learner could entirely reconstruct in the course of one lifetime. It has been argued that this is children's rightful inheritance.
These issues are similar to questions raised in response to the Discovery-Learning movement of the 1960's. Students were encouraged to engage in hands-on tasks to discover science principles. Too often, students didn't have a clue as to what they were doing and why. Activities were hands-on but they weren't necessarily minds-on. Too often, the questions weren't posed by students and they may not have understood why the questions being asked were relevant. Students were learning important messages about discovery and the process of science, but without adequate scaffolding of student understandings, it was difficult to know exactly what science principles students were discovering.
How to strike a balance between children's constructing of understanding and their "rightful inheritance" to an accumulated wealth of scientific understanding presented a puzzle that can be addressed through the work of Russian philosopher and psychologist, Lev Vygotsky. According to Vygotsky, children learned within a "zone of proximal development" which is defined by the difference between the level of understanding that children can achieve on their own and that which they can achieve with adult guidance. The role of the adult is to scaffold children's building of understanding by asking guiding questions and providing opportunities for certain experiences.
From the joint work of Vygotsky and Piaget, arises a concept that can be called mediated constructivism. Children construct understanding by learning through their experiences and their own questions but the process is mediated by adults who hold scientific understandings of how the world works. It allows for building understanding as part of a society or community of learners. Children engage in Socratic discussion of ideas, guided by the teacher, to help them build new understandings.
Mediated constructivism involves a thoughtful choreography between student and teacher. The teacher must constantly study the student's evolving understanding, assess what path it is on, and help the child to have and to take advantage of opportunities that enable the child to construct new and more sophisticated understandings. The teacher must guide while taking care not to be directive such that it undermines the child's incentive to explore the question. It doesn't mean that teacher can't arrange certain experiences for children. It does mean that the teacher needs to pay attention to how students are making sense of the experiences and whether the experience helps them to answer a question that they care about.
Classroom Example
What might mediated constructivism look like in practice? Here are some snippets from a second
grade classroom discussion around a question that arose about where the stars go during the day.
The teacher sends home a memo to parents suggesting that next time they with their children near a big city at night or in a football stadium with lights on, or simply in their backyard with a spotbeam on, they see how many stars are visible and then do it again when they are away from bright lights. She also brings in a string of Christmas lights along with a spot light and some black paper so that the class can contrast the visibility of the Christmas lights against the two backgrounds.
Okay, let's revisit pieces of the conversation to look closely at how the teacher is mediating children's construction of understanding :
[Here the teacher starts with a child's question. She may have chosen this question to focus on because she saw it as having the potential to help them understand more about what they experience in terms of day and night. It is always difficult to choose which questions to spend limited classroom time on. This question may have been one that a number of children raised or expressed an interest in.]
[Notice that the teacher asked the child to connect the question back to his experience, to what it was that he observed that made him ask the question in the first place. She then asked him to tell about his own theory of what is happening. Children's implicit theories impact how they construct new theories. She knows that there will need to be new and convincing evidence to help Michael adopt a new stance.]
[Here the teacher asks for lots of different ideas about what might be happening to open up a realm
of possible explanations. She doesn't stop with just a few ideas but continues to encourage children
to consider what alternative explanations could be. If a child offered an idea that seemed unlikely or
others thought was in some way "silly," she would have reminded them that scientists need to think
openly about what they experience.]
[Here the teacher asks Ashley to tell more about her idea. Often the children are just figuring out what they think and may not have clear access to their thoughts. The teacher provides an opportunity for this, but doesn't push Ashley for an answer at this point. The teacher leaves Ashley with a follow-up, guiding question to help her in thinking about it further.]
[Some of the students are starting to support one idea that they think has potential. The teacher invites discussion of that idea]
[Here the teacher direct students to a puzzle that Annie found. She also asks them to think about what experiences or evidence could help them answer the big question. This directs students back to experience, collecting data, and looking for patterns in the real world that address their questions.]
[The teacher encourages the students to look at what they can see, at what their own experience tells them. This validates the importance of their own observations and experiences in finding out the answers to scientific questions.]
The teacher sends home a memo to parents suggesting that next time they with their children near a big city at night or in a football stadium with lights on, or simply in their backyard with a spotbeam on, they see how many stars are visible and then do it again when they are away from bright lights. She also brings in a string of Christmas lights along with a spot light and some black paper so that the class can contrast the visibility of the Christmas lights against the two backgrounds.
[The teacher also recognizes that certain kinds of experiments may be beyond the children's ability to generate given their own limited science knowledge and understandings of scientific process. So she creates opportunities for them to gain new experiences relevant to the big question that they are grappling with.]
Here are some of the kinds of questions that teachers tend to ask about mediated constructivism.
€Help children to discover what they already know and believe as a starting place to work from in constructing new understanding.
€Help children to see how they can collect evidence from their own experience that helps to inform their questions.
€Use guiding questions to help children develop more sophisticated understandings.
€Use sharing and discussion to help children consider their individual ideas in relation to the ideas of others.
€Create opportunities for children to gain experiences that will help them think more deeply about their ideas.
€Help children identify puzzles that will enable them to push beyond ideas that aren't workable.
The Epistemology of Science
Inquiry-based learning aims to teach much more that science content or science process as we
typically think of them. It provides the opportunity for learners to learn how knowledge is created in
science, what scientists do to find out and what it means "to know" something in science. This is often
referred to as the epistemology of science.
What does it mean to learn the epistemology of science? Instead of learning "facts," students are learning such things as how information is generated, what tools and techniques scientists have at their disposal to help them generate the information, what beliefs scientists share about what constitutes knowledge, and what attitudes and habits of mind scientists bring to their work. This is a much more expansive view of what is involved in science learning. The Everyday Classroom Tools Project is about helping children learn how scientists think about and frame investigations into problems by helping the children to rediscover their own curiosity and to cultivate the budding scientists within each of them.
Why is it so important to help children learn the epistemology of science? Research shows that students are sometimes baffled by what have been referred to as the "games of science." Scientists engage in certain ways of thinking and generating knowledge, for instance, isolating and controlling variables, that can be puzzling to students who have not had the opportunity to learn how these "games" work and how they are important in the larger context of knowledge generation. Not understanding these "games" often divides those who feel comfortable pursuing math and science and those who don't. Often those who don't feel comfortable with the games are women and minorities. This may contribute to lesser numbers of men and women in math and science.
Beyond this, most students carry around certain misconceptions about the nature of disciplinary knowledge. For instance, they often view science as a collection of dusty, old facts--rather than a dynamic, evolving state of how we best understand the world. School practices that don't provide opportunities to learn how scientists come to know and find out can contribute to these misconceptions.
In talking with children about epistemologies, it is often helpful to talk about it in three different ways: as roles; as tools and techniques; and as ways of knowing. The emphasis that the teacher places on each of these ways teachers depends in part upon how young the learners are and how much "science talk" they have been engaged in. In the early elementary years, one might talk about it primarily as a role, what is it that scientists do and why do they do it? One can also introduce talk about the tools of the discipline. What kinds of tools and techniques do scientists use to help them find out? For instance, scientists try to create "fair tests" by attempting to control for extraneous variables. Eventually, teachers will want to talk with students about the "rules" (and the rationale for them) that scientists employ for knowing and finding out. For instance, science involves the purposeful discarding of theory as discrepant evidence arises and theories with greater explanatory value evolve.
Classroom Example
Kindergarten:
Second Grade:
Fifth Grade:
Each discipline can be viewed as a lens on the world. Certain kinds of questions, tools, and ways of
thinking about knowledge are common to each lens.
What are some of the kinds of questions that scientists might explore?
€Talk with children about ways of finding out answers to the questions that they are interested
in.Points for Practice
€Help children to see that knowledge changes. As we learn more, we change our ideas about
how the world works. Try to share examples of "we used to believe..., but then we learned...,
so now we think...."
€Talk explicitly with children about the process of science, about the assumptions that are made and why they are important.
€Many teaching materialS implicitly include process experiences and information but never outwardly discuss the processes and the reasons for them with children. Modify existing materials so that there is explicit reflection on the processes for knowing and finding out.
€Seek out materials that help children think about the "whys" behind scientific epistemology, such as books like, How to Think Like a Scientist: Answering Questions by the Scientific Method, by Stephen Kramer.
€Help children realize that science is a way of knowing and understanding the world that is
learnable. They can all learn to think like scientists. Some of the tools and techniques they'll
be able to understand now, others will make greater sense to them as they continue to study
and explore science.
The New Frameworks and Content Standards
Increasingly, the new standards and frameworks set forth by educators, scientists, and policy-makers
reflect the need for a greater constructivist approach to teaching science. They recognize the need to
emphasize process, and to understand the nature of scientific inquiry.
Read over these standards and consider how each encourages a constructivist view of knowledge and an understanding of the epistemology of science.
The new standards call for deep understanding of the ways of scientists--how they come to know and find out, how they think about problems, what they consider to be valid information, and so on. These are the kinds of skills that the Everyday Classroom Tools Project aims to cultivate. The standards also call for helping students learn the habits of mind, the attitudes and dispositions of scientists. By working with scientists in the Everyday Classroom Tools Project, students have an opportunity to come to understand the kinds of attitudes and habits of mind that characterize their work.
What is known about teaching modes of thinking such as these? Researchers David Perkins, Shari Tishman and colleagues stress that helping students develop effective habits of mind entails helping them develop: 1) sensitivity to occasions for certain types of thinking; 2) skills that will enable them to think well; 3) and the inclination to sense opportunities and apply those skills.
How does all this translate into what students need in the science classroom? It suggests that:
1. Students need opportunities to engage in scientific thinking.
| Some Habits of Mind Called for by the American Association for the Advancement of Science | |
|---|---|
| Integrity | Openness to New Ideas |
| Diligence | Skepticism |
| Fairness | Imagination |
| Curiosity | |
| (Rutherford, F. J. & Ahlgren, A. (1990). Science for All Americans. New York: Oxford University Press.) | |
Classroom Example
What does it look like to teach the kinds of concepts in the standards in the classroom? It is like
how a teacher talks about epistemology--the way a scientist thinks and finds out. Here are some
snippets of conversations you might hear:
€Build upon opportunities that students notice for using scientific thinking. Use these as
opportunities to teach the skills of good scientific thinking while teaching content. For
instance, when students notice that where they place the seesaw along the supporting beam
(fulcrum) matters, use it as an opportunity to get them to make predictions, consider what
good evidence for their predictions would look like, design a test of their predictions and so
forth, while they are learning about levers. Points for Practice
€Introduce language to talk about scientific thinking. If a good word to explain what you are trying to explain doesn't exist, make one up with your students.
€Explain to students why you reason about certain problems in certain ways. Share contrasting examples to demonstrate what less careful thinking in the particular situation looks like. Be explicit with kids about why certain types of reasoning are better than others.
€Talk your thinking out loud to help students "see" it.
€Be alert to instances of poor thinking or misconceptions about thinking and help students learn how to avoid them.
€Create opportunities for students to work with scientists so that they can learn firsthand how
scientists think about particular problems.
Development Interacts with Children's Sense-Making
One of the challenges to inquiry-based learning is knowing how to handle issues of development.
Teachers are faced with a number of them. For instance, "We started off on a question that the
students were interested in. It sounded simple enough and then all of a sudden, we were into territory
that was way over their heads..." Or "The children start coming up with ideas that seem to make a lot
of sense, I'm just not sure how to get them to see that scientists think about these things differently."
And "I could use a model and a formula to help show the idea, but they don't yet understand the
relationship of the model or formula to the real phenomenon or of the formula to the model." These
certainly are important concerns and signal areas that need special thought and attention. Let's
consider each area in turn.
1. Children's questions sometimes lead to complexity that they're not yet equipped to handle.
"We started off on a question that the students were interested in. It sounded simple enough and then all of a sudden, we were into territory that was way over their heads..."
This is a common concern of teachers who use inquiry-based learning in their classrooms. The students' curiosity about a question leads to complexity that the teacher doesn't quite know how to communicate to young children. Questions that are bound to interest young children, such as "What makes the colors?" "Why do sounds seem louder at night?" "What does it mean to reflect?" can quickly lead to physics concepts that are over their heads. The problem isn't about getting students to understand some things about the phenomenon that they are studying--it's about getting them to understand it deeply enough such that they can explain it and can understand the "whys" behind it.
What kinds of solutions have teachers come up with? Here's how some teachers handle the issue:
€"I communicate to kids that there are lots of connections in the world and whenever we study a topic, sooner or later we'll come to a connection that we may not be able to understand yet, but that's okay, we know more than we did before"
€"There are different levels of understanding. Some topics can't be understood at the deepest levels at certain ages. I try to let my students know that they need to come back to topics, you don't just learn them once. You can always come back and explore the topic deeper."
€"I try to scope out the questions that we are going to spend a lot of time with in advance. I look for concepts that will serve as obstacles to understanding at this age. If there are a lot of them, it's not a question that we spend a lot of time on."
2. Children have great ideas, but they're not always very scientific.
"The children start coming up with ideas that seem to make a lot of sense, I'm just not sure how to get
them to see that scientists think about these things differently."
Research shows that at a very young age, children theorize about their world and why it is the way it
is. They come up with intuitive theories to explain many things. These theories tend to be fairly
resistant to change because they make sense to the child, they represent the understandings that
children have figured out. Researchers have identified a number of characteristics of these theories.
1) Because they represent the individual child's experience, they can be personal and idiosyncratic. 2)
Children don't necessarily hold coherence as a criterion for their theories so the theories may be
customized for each event explained. 3) The theories tend to be stable and resistant to change.
Children are often quite comfortable with the sense that they have made and have no reason to
change a serviceable theory.
This has both a positive and a negative side for inquiry-based learning. It says that children actively
seek to make sense of their worlds and that their curiosities help to motivate learning. It also suggests
that they have many "figuring out" tools to help them learn. On the other hand, understandings that
children evolve do not always represent current day scientific understandings. This presents a
challenge for teachers.
Research shows that kids bring a "sense-making mission" to their worlds and that they have many "figuring out" kinds of tools to help them build their theories. Infants as young as six weeks of age demonstrate some understanding of causal contingencies and in the first six months babies show surprise at events where their causal expectations are violated. Children seek out patterns in the world and attempt to explain those patterns. Children also hold certain perceptual tendencies. These are largely helpful, though they can support or limit understanding depending upon how they are applied and the phenomenon in question.
| 1. From an early age, children develop ideas related to how the world works and what different science words mean. |
| 2. These ideas are usually strongly held. |
| 3. These ideas may be significantly different from how scientists view the world. |
| 4. These ideas are sensible and coherent from a child's point of view. |
| 5. Traditional teaching often does little to influence or change these ideas. |
| Table reprinted with permission from Math/Science Matters: Resource Booklets on Research in Math and Science Learning ©1996, Tina A. Grotzer, All Rights Reserved. |
At least three broad perceptual tendencies have been discussed in the science learning literature. 1)
Children's thinking tends to be based upon what they can observe. They learn most readily from
what they can gather through their senses. In many instances, this is a useful tendency. In cases
where appearance and reality diverge, it can trip them up. 2) Children consider absolute properties
or qualities before those that involve interactions. This often leads straightforwardly to accurate
conclusions. However, it can also lead to misunderstandings of complexity. 3) Children tend assume
a linear, unidirectional relationship between events and effects that they observe. Again, this often
leads to straightforward, accurate answers but in some instances it leads to a misunderstanding of
extended and complex effects.
| How Can Children be Taught Scientific Views of the World? |
|---|
| 1. Lessons need to start with the ideas that children hold. The current understandings must be revealed. |
| 2. These ideas need to be explored as possible solutions. |
| 3. Children need to be confronted with ideas that are discrepant with their ideas. It is important to provide evidence that is contrary to their expectations on something that they care about. |
| 4. Children need opportunities to compare the differences between the ideas. |
| 5. Children need opportunities to connect the new idea broadly to the world. Otherwise they may see it as an isolated case. |
|
Table reprinted with permission from Math/Science Matters: Resource Booklets on Research in Math and Science Learning ©1996, Tina A. Grotzer, All Rights Reserved. |
We need to help students see when their intuitive theories do not account for scientific
phenomenon. They need to see when outcomes are discrepant with what their theories would
predict. This creates dissonance which invites them to evolve new and more scientifically-accepted theories.
They need opportunities to compare the differences between the ideas--to see how one has greater
explanatory value than the other. Finally, children need to seek connections to connect the new
theory broadly to world so they don't view it as an isolated case.
What methods can teachers use to encourage students to reveal and revise current understandings in an inquiry-based approach?
3. The means to an understanding represents developmental hurdles.
"I could use a model and a formula to help show the idea, but they don't yet understand the
relationship of the model or formula to the real phenomenon or of the formula to the model."
Sometimes it's not the understanding itself that poses the first developmental challenge. There are
some instances where the tools that teachers would use to help students achieve understanding contain
developmental hurdles that make them more or less useful at particular ages.
Children's understanding of models represents one such challenge. Around three years of age, children begin to show early understandings that a model is a representation of something else. For instance, research by Judy DeLoache shows that they could use a model room to guide their actions in finding the location of an object in a real room. These early understandings suggest promise that fairly young children can unerstand some things about models, yet understanding a model as a representation requires an extra leap in that the model is a thing unto itself. Even if the child perceives it as similar to the original room, the child must also reflect upon and realize that it is being used as a representation of the room. According to researcher Usha Goswami, understandings such as this are a form of analogical reasoning in that children need to recognize the relational similarity and reflect upon the similarity in structure. Using a model to show something about a scientific phenomenon involves 1) understanding the model to be a representational object, not the object itself; 2) understanding the process as it applies to the model; 3) considering how relationship between the model and the process is analogous to the phenomenon in question; 4) holding both in one's head at once; 5) mapping the analogous relationships to enable understanding of the phenomenon in question. That's a lot to think about!
Research shows that into middle school and high school, students still tend to view models as physical copies of reality rather than conceptual representations. Students benefit from scaffolding to help them understand models as metaphors and to map the deep structure of the models not to get caught up in superficial features of the model.
Despite the developmental challenges of helping students grasp and use models well, research shows that conceptual models are very important to helping students develop math and science concepts. This is in particular contrast to the focus in many schools on teaching students quantitative explanations or formal laws for understanding science phenomenon.
It is important for teachers to seek a balance between determining that a certain avenue to understanding is over children's heads with offering them early experiences that will lead to understanding of the concept. Teachers can bolster early understandings by coming at them in a number of different ways so that the children are not dependent upon models as a sole means towards understanding.
Classroom Example
Rethinking Why We Wear Coats: How Insulation Works
A Third Grade Science Lesson
The following picture of practice describes a lesson in which students are exploring the purpose of insulation and concepts of heat and temperature. It deals with a common misconception that young students tend to hold that their coats are a source of heat energy.
Here's the question: If you wanted an ice cube to last for a long time in our classroom, would you make a thick or a thin coat for it? Just think about it, don't say any ideas out loud. We're each going to design a coat for an ice cube. You can make it thick or thin, and everyone is going to have a coat for their ice cube. First, we'll draw a diagram of what we think the coat should look like, what we need, and why we think it will work. Then we'll make the coats. And in our next class, we'll test them out. Are there questions?
The students set off to design their coats. Some of them decide that a thick coat will "warm up the ice cube and make it melt faster." Others decide that a thin coat will result in the ice cube melting faster because it is a warm day in June and there will be less around the ice cube.
(At the end of the session, the students come back together to discuss what will happen in the next class. How will they do the test? What will make it fair? It is decided that everyone's ice cube should have the same amount of water and be the same shape.)
In the next session, the class discusses their ideas. Each student shows their container and explains why it will work. There are clear differences of opinion. The teacher stresses that no matter what happens with the ice cube, everyone is helping the class to gather important information they are thinking like scientists.
The teacher gives everyone their ice cube as quickly as possible, removing it from the cooler with tongs and putting it directly into the children's containers. She explains how she carefully measured the water in each cube. In addition, to putting cubes into the two containers that are identical except for thickness, she puts one cube out on a plate without a coat. Some kids think it is the "luckiest" ice cube and will last the longest, others feel "sorry" for it! The class discusses why it is important to check their ice cubes only at certain intervals, realizing that it would throw off their results to check it every few minutes. While waiting, they brainstorm as many different things that they can think of that would be considered coats.
[Notice that the teacher does not correct their use of the terms "cold" and "hot" as entities yet. In some instances, the teacher even uses the exact same words back when quoting a child ( i.e. Can you tell me how "it keeps the cold away"?) Their language reflects their mental models and ultimately when they shift to a thermal equilibrium model, she assumes that their language will shift as well or that the shift can be facilitated at that time.]
Eventually, the whole board is filled with things that are coat-like. The children begin to see that these things keep what's out, out and what's in, in leading to new ideas about what constitutes a coat.
They stop to check their ice cubes. Low and behold, those in thin coats are melting faster! Some of the students are very surprised. And that poor ice cube without a coat, it's melting very fast. The class closes up the coats with the ice cubes inside and continues their discussion.
[Notice that the students do not yet have a notion of heat as thermal energy and that they speak of hot and cold as entities. This suggests the importance of helping students see where the concept of a coat as "keeping what's in in and what's out out" breaks down. See more on this below.]
Then they go on to consider other cases. What about the student who put his ice cube in a coat with water around it?
The discussion continues as they consider the different examples of coats that they have tested. "What about the students who used balloons for coats?" and so on...
Later the class checks their ice cubes again. By now, those wearing thin coats made of balloons are merely balloons filled with water. Those in the thickest coats have barely melted. Many students are still surprised at the differences between the thick and thin coats. Again the teacher stresses how important all of the different information is and that it helps us to find out the way that scientists do. She tells the class that getting the "right" answer is not as important here as thinking like a scientist.
Then the teacher engages them in some connection-making:
The discussion goes on to consider body heat and energy.
Realizing that the students need to see that ultimately thermal equilibrium is reached and that insulation cannot permanently keep "what's in in and what's out out" the teacher has the students check their ice cubes throughout the day. Eventually the ones in the thickest coats also melt and the class reconsiders their theory about how coats work.
[Notice that some of the students think of hot and cold as entities and other students are beginning to speak in terms of reaching thermal equilibrium. The class will revisit concepts of thermal energy throughout the year and it won't be until the students have learned about the nature of energy and the particulate nature of matter that they will come to a yet deeper understanding of what insulation does. With older students, a natural extension would be to talk about heat transfer processes: convection, conduction, and radiation, and how the ice cube is impacted by each in each case, no coat, thin coat, and thick coat.]
In the next few days, the teacher gives the students as individuals another opportunity to think about the question. She has them design a better ice cream cone, one that will insulate well between the temperature differential between the hand and the ice cream. The reason for doing so is that she knows that some children may have changed their ideas based upon the ice cube experience and some children may see it as one isolated instance.
Note: This example borrows from concepts in a curriculum unit developed by
ESS on heat and temperature. The particular modifications and examples
draw from the work of Tina Grotzer and students in the public schools in
Burlington and Arlington, Massachusetts.
©1997, Tina A. Grotzer, Reprinted here with permission.
€Questions that interest young children will sometimes lead them into phenomenon they can't
understand deeply. Encourage them to see that they will continue to revisit questions
throughout their lives.Points for Practice
€Try to focus the most time and attention on questions that students can grasp with a fair amount of depth.
€Communicate to children that there are connections between questions.
€Create opportunities for students to explore the efficacy of their theories in different instances.
€Attend to group and individual understandings.
€Provide multiple opportunities to rework and rethink concepts.
€Watch out for sophisticated language that can conceal children's real understandings.
€Seek a balance between determining that a certain avenue to understanding is over children's heads with offering them early experiences that will lead to understanding of the concept.
€Bolster early understandings by coming at them in a number of different ways so that the children are not dependent upon means that are developmentally challenging as their sole avenue towards understanding.
€Be alert to instances when potential misunderstandings may be generated due to children's perceptual tendencies.
Engendering Lifelong Learners
Taken together, constructivism, inquiry-based learning, and learning the epistemologies of the
sciences can lead to an entirely different attitude towards learning. No longer is science a subject that
is tucked away between 1:00 and 2:00 from Monday through Friday. Instead, science is a way of
living your life, a way of seeking understanding, a lens that we use to know and find out.
When learning is connected to children's questions, as in the Everyday Classroom Tools Project, it sends a clear message about who the learning is for. Children come to expect that the result of their inquiry should be increased understanding of the thing they were puzzling over and at least as often as not, a new set of questions to try to answer.
By building upon children's tendency to wonder, we help them to develop a tendency to seek out puzzles and to investigate. According to teacher and writer, Hilary Hopkins, who interviewed many different scientists, what stood out for as distinctive about their childhoods was a burning desire to know "Why?" Nourishing this desire in all children will help to encourage lifelong learners who approach their lives with the eye and heart of a scientist even if they spend their days in some other profession!
Classroom Example
What does it sound like to communicate messages about lifelong learning to students? Here are
some examples:
Teacher: I've always wondered about what it would be like to visit Antarctica. Last night, I watched a program on it and now I have some new questions. I'd like to learn how penguins are able to stay under the water for as long as they do.
Student: But we already learned about volcanoes in second grade!
Teacher: One of the wonderful things about learning is that the more you know, the more there is
to know. Last year, you learned some things about what a volcano is and how it erupts. This year,
we'll learn some things about where there tend to be active volcanoes and how this connects to the
rocky plates on the earth. You'll have fun discovering the relationships.
Student: What are you going to do for the vacation, Mr. Thompson?
Teacher: Well, I've always wanted to learn about the patterns on those old cemetery stones in
Concord. I'm thinking that I'll go and read them and see what different kinds I can find and if
there are any books to help me understand them.
€Encourage students to investigate their personal "why" questions.Points for Practice
€Help your students to see that they will revisit similar questions again and again in their lives, evolving increasingly sophisticated explanations.
€Encourage students to see that you as an adult continue to ask questions and to learn new things.
€Encourage students to see that their parents/caregivers continue to ask questions and to learn new things. Encourage them to dialogue with their parents about what their parents wonder about.
Author: Tina Grotzer
Project Zero
Harvard Graduate School of Education
