High Quality Instruction In Science

High Quality Instruction In Science High Quality Instruction In Science Michael Horton

Science CoordinatorRCOE

“Teachers and students together will be members of a community focused on learning science while being nurtured by a supportive education system.”

-National Science Education Standards

The following characteristics of high quality instruction in science are drawn from:

• The National Science Education Standards

• The Science Framework for California Public Schools

• Carol Ann Tomlinson’s research on Standards-Based Teaching

• Horizon Research, Incorporated’s research into effective lessons

• AAAS’s Benchmarks for Science Literacy

• Hammerman’s “Becoming a Better Science Teacher”

Symbols Symbols

Classroom-level strategy or indicator.

School or district-level strategy or indicator.

Partners: Space shuttle, microscope, magnet, gyroscope, eye contact, and elbow.

Collaboration Collaboration

“Isolation: The Enemy of Improvement” -Mike Schmoker

“The traditional school often functions as a collection of independent contractors united by a common parking lot.” -Robert Eaker

“Collegial interchange, not isolation, must become the norm for teachers. Communities of learning can no longer be considered utopian; they must become the building blocks that establish a new foundation for America’s schools.”

-National Commission on Teaching

“Teachers should be organized into structures that allow them to engage in meaningful collaboration that is beneficial to them and their students.”

-Richard DuFour

What to collaborate on? What to collaborate on?

• Best practices

• Essential Standards

• Common assessments

• Pacing guides

• Activities and projects

• Interventions

• Teaching strategies

• Assessment of student work

• Common rubrics

• Instructional materials

The question confronting most schools and districts is not, “What do we need to know in order to improve?” but rather, “Will we turn what we already know into action?”

-Richard DuFour

Implications and Solutions Implications and Solutions

Discuss with an elbow partner the challenges and benefits of collaboration in your district.

Please write the highlights of the conversation on the chart provided to be compiled and emailed to participants. Include your email addresses if you would like to receive the compilation.

Collaboration in Science

Benefits Challenges

Benefits Challenges

Identify Learning GoalsIdentify Learning Goals

“Identifying ‘power standards’ and ‘unpacking’ those standards to identify important big ideas are two popular approaches to selecting and managing content for instructional units.” -Elizabeth Hammerman

“Power Standards are ‘those standards that, once mastered, give a student the ability to use reasoning and thinking skills to learn and understand other curriculum objectives’.” -Doug Reeves

“Know and use clearly articulated learning targets – ones that are robust concepts, generalizations, or procedures rather than only statements of daily classroom objectives.” -Jane Pollock, Improving Student Learning One Teacher at a Time

“While academic standards vary widely in their specificity and clarity, they almost all have one thing in common: there are far too many of them.”

-Doug Reeves

Implications and Solutions Implications and Solutions Discuss with an eye-contact partner the progress in your district in the following areas:

• Pacing guides• Identification of “Power Standards”• Benchmark tests

Based on the following quote, answer the question, “Is identifying learning goals enough to make a difference?”

“Marzano did a meta-analysis of in-school factors that affect student achievement. Coming in at the top – first place – is what gets taught. That is, if teachers can lay out a sound, viable set of standards and can then guarantee that these standards actually get taught, we can raise levels of achievement immensely” (Schmoker, 2006).

Essential Standards

AKA

“Essential Learnings”

“Power Standards”

“Focus Standards”

Essential Standards

• Marzano calculated that it would take 22 years to teach all of the K-12 standards.

• In California, there are 226 core standards in 7th grade. There are 339 if you count PE and VAPA!

• It is impossible to teach that many standards well.

• Essential standards or “Power Standards” must be identified in order to spend extra time on what is most important and de-emphasize others.

Essential Standards

1) An Essential Standard must be such that it will be important to students for years to come in life and in academics.

Endurance

Essential Standards

2) An Essential Standard must be such that it will help students in other classes.

Leverage

Essential Standards

3) An Essential Standard must be such that it prepares students for the next level of study in this class or in future classes.

Readiness

Essential Standards

With another eye contact partner, use the document entitled “Essential or Not?” to answer the following questions about the sample standards:

1) Are both standards important?

2) Do both standards have “Endurance”?

3) Do both standards have “Leverage”?

4) Do both standards have “Readiness”?

5) Which standard is an Essential Standard?

“Teacher quality and classroom practice can have an effect on student achievement equal to or exceeding that of students' socioeconomic status and other background characteristics. Among the top factors affecting student performance are a teacher's major course of study in college, diversity training, and the use of hands-on learning in the classroom.” (Wenglinsky, 2002)

“Research shows that high student achievement correlates with teacher experience and expertise in subject matter and having experienced, well qualified teachers is especially important for students living in poverty.”

“The study found that the more college-level science courses teachers had taken, the better their students did on the science assessments.”

-Monk, 1994

Teacher QualityTeacher Quality

“Mortimore and Sammons (1987) found that teaching had 6 to 10 times as much impact on achievement as all other factors combined.”

“Eric Hanushek has found that five years of instruction from an above-average teacher could eliminate the achievement gap on some state assessments.”

Teacher Quality (cont.)Teacher Quality (cont.)


Discuss with your “microscope partner” which of the following attributes is most important in a high-quality science teacher. You and your partner must come to consensus on your decision and report your choice to the rest of the group.

• Content knowledge• Strong pedagogy• Classroom management• Engaging teaching style• Consistent discipline• Technology skills• Other?

Address Student MisconceptionsAddress Student Misconceptions

“When the instructor asked the students if they knew what comes out of volcanoes, the young student proudly answered, ‘Baking soda and vinegar.’”

-Sharon Janulaw

“[Misconceptions] that students have constructed have been developed over an extended period of time; one or two classroom activities are not going to change those ideas.” -Driver, 1983

“Traditional instruction (rote learning) will not lead to substantial conceptual change.” -William Kyle

“Good teaching requires that students have the opportunity to select and assimilate enough data to force them to challenge misconceptions and to create strong, accurate conceptions.” -Thomas Cardellichio

Address Student MisconceptionsAddress Student Misconceptions

Misconceptions Video

With your “space shuttle partner,” look at the list of statements on the page entitled “Misconceptions Everywhere.” Find the ONE statement that is true.

Watch A Private Universe DVD.

Brainstorm with your partner a list of ways to battle student misconceptions and share the highlights with the group.

Misconception podcast: Mars is Red

Hands-On ScienceHands-On Science“The California Science Standards can be comprehensively taught from the submitted materials with hands-on activities composing at least 20 to 25 percent of the science instructional programs.”

-California Dept. of Education

“If students are not doing hands-on science, they are not doing science. Most science classes teach the vocabulary of science and nothing else. Study after study has shown the value of hands-on learning. Students are motivated, they learn more, even their reading skills improve. How can you justify not doing hands-on science?

-Edwin, Sobey, National Invention Center

“Hands-on learning has been shown to increase learning and achievement in science content” (Brooks, 1988).

With your “magnet partner”, look at the document entitled “Math and Science CSTs ’02-’06” and discuss the items below “Things to notice.” Report out some of the most important points.


Important PointsImportant Points

Universal AccessUniversal Access“Academic instruction must be designed so that each student has the opportunity to master the science standards that provide systematic and coherent access to this challenging subject.” -CA Science Framework

“A multicultural curriculum results in respect for diversity flowing from knowledge. With that respect will come the ability of people to live and work together in a diverse society.” - Gerry Madrazo

“Science teachers need to be aware that much of the language used in interpersonal communication differs from the language used in education and that children may be more proficient in one than the other.”

-Cathleen McCargo

Watch the video about universal access in science. With your gyroscope partner, discuss whether the following statement is true:

“Most of the accommodations requested by the children in the video are simply good teaching strategies for anyone.”


Curriculum Alignment

• Intended curriculum, taught curriculum, and tested curriculum should match. (Reeves)

• Use a “Keep, Drop, Create” process to ensure alignment. (Many)

• Content, rigor, and academic language need to align as well.

Curriculum Alignment

Discuss with your elbow partner what documents you would need to collect before facilitating a “Curriculum Alignment Meeting.” Where would you find these documents?

Curriculum AlignmentDocuments

A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron. -Horace Mann

Student Engagement

Richard Hake’s Engagement Study

"Interactive Engagement" (IE) methods are those designed to promote conceptual understanding through interactivity and engagement of students in heads-on (always) and hands-on (usually) activities which yield immediate feedback through discussion with peers and/or instructors.”

"Traditional" courses as those reported by instructors to make little or no use of IE methods, relying primarily on passive-student lectures, recipe labs, and algorithmic-problem exams.”

Student Engagement

Student Engagement

Interactive engagement versus performance, Hake 2002

Student EngagementTwo lab sections in an introductory physics course participated in different lab exercises for nine weeks. One completed nine chapters of the interactive-engagement lab curriculum, RealTime Physics. The other participated in cookbook labs that were written for this study to cover the same material. Both groups completed the conceptual homework included in the RealTime Physics exercises. This procedure was repeated in a second nine-week phase, in which neither group was assigned the homework.

Average gains for the interactive-engagement and cookbook groups were h = 0.471 and h = 0.392, respectively. In the second phase (without the homework), they were h = 0.480 and h = 0.334. In the second phase, the normalized gain for the interactive-engagement group was 0.568 s.d. higher than the cookbook group.

For the interactive-engagement groups in the two phases, the homework did not make a difference in FCI gains.

Small differences in satisfaction and perceived effectiveness were measured between the interactive-engagement and cookbook groups. These differences generally favored the cookbook labs.

Student EngagementConsider the results of more than 1,500 classroom observations in 2005 and 10,000 in 2006:

o Fewer than one-half of students engaged: 82% o Clear learning objective: 4%o Worksheets: 52%o Lecture: 31%o Monitoring with immediate feedback: 22%o Students required to speak in complete sentences: 0%o Evidence of assessment for learning: 0%o Evidence of bell-to-bell instruction: 0%

Cited in Reeves, D. B., (2006), The Learning Leader, ASCD

Examples of Engaging Strategies

Effective Homework- A typical homework-completing high school student will outperform students who do not do homework by 69% on standardized tests (Harris-Cooper, 2000).

- Homework-completing junior high students outperform homework non-completers by 35%. There seems to be no difference in scores in the elementary grades (Reese, 1997).

- Kohn concluded that research fails to demonstrate homework's effectiveness as an instructional tool and recommended changing the “default state” from an expectation that homework will be assigned to an expectation that homework will not be assigned (Kohn, 2006).

Effective Homework

With your microscope partner, discuss the questions:

1) So is homework effective or not?

2) What are a couple of points you think that all of the homework researchers would agree upon?

Effective Homework

“According to Kohn, teachers should only assign homework when they can justify that the assignments are “beneficial” ideally involving students in activities appropriate for the home, such as performing an experiment in the kitchen, cooking, doing crossword puzzles with the family, watching educational TV shows, or reading.”

Resources:

Student misconceptions:1) www.learner.org, video series “A Private Universe” and “Minds of Our

Own”2) http://scienceinquirer.wikispaces.com, audiocasts addressing 37+ of

the most prevalent science misconceptions by Michael Horton

Collaboration:1) Richard DuFour’s “Whatever it Takes” and “Learning by Doing”

books.2) Patrick Lencioni’s “5 Dysfunctions of a Team”

Universal Access:1) Marzano’s “Building Background Knowledge”2) CSTA’s “English Language Learners: Informing Our Practice”3) Special Education in the Science Classroom,

http://www.glencoe.com/sec/teachingtoday/subject/special_ed.phtml

http://www.learner.org/

Resources (cont.):

Hands-on Science:1) California Science Teachers Association, www.cascience.org2) National Science Teachers Association, www.nsta.org

Standards and Learning Goals:1) CDE California Science Framework,

http://www.cde.ca.gov/re/pn/fd/sci-frame-dwnld.asp2) National Science Education Standards,

http://www.nap.edu/books/0309053269/html/index.html 3) Results Now: How we can Achieve Unprecedented Improvements in

Teaching and Learning, Mike Schmoker, ASCD Publishing, 2006.

Contact Information

Michael HortonRiverside County Office of Education

3939 13th Street

Riverside, CA 92501

951-826-6789

[email protected]

http://acsaacademy.notlong.com