Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities

Welcome ... Name: Paul Grobstein Date: 2006-05-17 13:58:36 Link to this Comment: 19398

This forum is intended to provide a place for discussion of matters arising from a collaboration on elementary science education between Lansdowne Friends School and the Center for Science and Society at Bryn Mawr College (see Thinking About an Elementary Science Education Curriculum. Like all Serendip forums, it is a place for thoughts in progress, a place to leave thoughts of your own that might be useful to others and to find thoughts of others that might be useful to you. While we expect the forum to be most useful to collaboration participants, others are more than welcome to join in.

Greetings and thoughts Name: Alice Lesnick Date: 2006-05-31 12:14:07 Link to this Comment: 19444

Dear Lansdowne and Bryn Mawr Colleagues,

I am happy to be part of this evolving conversation.

I write today to say that I greatly appreciate having met with the Lansdowne faculty. I found the discussion of what you are doing and planning with regard to science education very rich -- I could have happily sat with you for several more hours that Wednesday afternoon.

While many ideas emerged that interest and excite me, I'll use this message to comment on one. I am intrigued by the complexity of children's virtual experience and how we as adults conceive of it. On one hand, educators often say that young learners ground learning in concrete experience and, following Piaget, narrate child development in terms of the development of a capacity for abstraction. On the other hand, adults often marvel at the imaginative play of children and, in the spirit of Winnicott, affirm its value to development. While much of this play is based in social or mediated experience (literature, film, television, and so on), it is often not clearly "concrete;" children blend invention with representation in their scenes and worlds of play.

My own sense is that we as adults still do not know very much about children's experiences. Our science and social science in this area is young and so bound to the dynamic uncertainties of culture and memory. In Geographies of Childhood, Stuart Aitken writes about how odd it is that children and adults live in close physical proximity to and intimacy with one another but in important ways remain strangers inhabiting different as well as shared mental and experiential spaces.

So I wonder about a different story for development, one that would make the concrete/embodied an ongoing strand across the lifespan, one that is braided with the virtual/abstract and braided again with language, history, and specific context (and more). Could this be helpful to our thinking about scope and sequence in the science curriculum at Lansdowne?

Best regards,
Alice

from Susan Stone Name: Paul Grobstein Date: 2006-06-04 18:37:20 Link to this Comment: 19462

An email from Susan, Wednesday 31 May, pm ...

Paul,

It was great to see you again and to meet Kim. This just gets better and better! Three bullet points that I came away with from our last discussion about science as storytelling (and creating a curriculum that maps out a sequence of skills of inquiry and a sequence of content) are:

• Our inquiry into inquiry can serve as a model for an inquiry based curriculum. Because this is such new territory it is a genuine inquiry not a simulation and a unique and exciting opportunity.
• If being conscious of what it is that humans do when they inquire is part of increasing the sophistication of skills of inquiry then we need to be made aware of the skills we are employing as we employ them.
• As we create our "story" it might be helpful and a little less confusing to have something to react to rather than try to make up this story entirely out of our own heads.

See you on the 8th of June from 10:00 -> 3:00!

Cheers,
Susan

bullet points Name: Paul Grobstein Date: 2006-06-04 21:16:20 Link to this Comment: 19466

I like very much Susan's bullet points. Yes, indeed, I think the "inquiry into inquiry" is new, exciting, and has implications well beyond "science". And I think it has to do in part with making things conscious (both in ourselves and in our students). But let's bear in mind as well the important role that the unconscious also plays in learning.

Susan's third point is particularly interesting to me, from at least two different perspectives. I absolutely agree with her that it would be nice for things to be "a little less confusing" than they got in the middle of our last session together, that it would help "to have something to react to rather than try to make up this story entirely out of our heads", and that I was a mite deficient in that regard. How and why are worth thinking a bit more about.

One important part of the answer is that the notion WE have developed, of an "inquiry into inquiry" IS new (so far as I know). And that means that I too can find myself a little confused as we work through it. In this particular case, I had been thinking during the week about a developmental sequence of cognitive skills, was impressed during the intial parts of the conversation that in fact we probably wanted to think more in terms of a progression of inquiry sophistication, and wasn't quite able to quickly enough come up with something along those lines to react to. Conversations I had with several of you at the end about the observation/interpretaton distinction I think put us back on track and I'll try and flesh that out a bit more before our next meeting. The important point is that we were are involved in is both new and "transactional", so I trust I may indeed sag occasionally without its being a collective problem.

Stepping back a bit, it seems to me the session also helps us to think a bit about the pedagogical style we're interested in more fully evolving and the role of "teachers" and "students" in that. In a transactional environment (be it a classroom or our discussions), ups and downs are a collective product for which everybody shares responsibility/credit. At the same time, the "teacher" needs to be responsible for assuring as much as possible that whatever happens is "meaningful" for everybody participating, ie that things don't become confusing or unproductive. The point here is not that the teacher should attempt to know in advance exactly what will happen, or try to be prepared for whatever might happen, but rather that the teacher needs ideally to have and as necessary make use of A way to nudge things back in a productive direction if (as we talked about before) the unpredictable dynamics of the group don't seem to be moving in such a direction. Which sometimes (as in this case?) means the teacher/facilitator not only shouldn't take it for granted that something meaningful will always emerge but also shouldn't get TOO caught up in thinking through a new perspective in their OWN mind WHILE a class/discussion is going on and so get distracted from attention to the trajectory of the discussion.

There is, of course, an individual and group self-reflective character to all this that I trust can be for everyone (as it is for me) part of "this just gets better and better". As we go on, I hope we can repeatedly and comfortably take our experiences with our own educational process as part of the observations from which our new interpretations/stories in part arise.

The Crayola Factory Name: Deb Hazen Date: 2006-06-05 06:14:23 Link to this Comment: 19467

Greetings!

Yesterday I had an opportunity to spend the entire day with a six year old--not my typical age these days--I teach 10-12s and my daughter is 16. It was a fascinating day.

Part One:

We (my husband and I) took our six year old friend to Easton to visit the Crayola Factory and Canal Museum. She spent over an hour in one room of the Canal Museum dedicated to teaching folks how locks work. It is a grand, full-room model of a canal complete with barges, cargo and little people that you can use to negotiate your way through the locks. You get to pull up on wickets to equalize water level before opening the lock to move your barge, then you close the lock and turn your attention to the next step in your journey. The model includes inclined planes and coal shoots--really a cool set up.

Our six year old friend got to put her hands in the water and negotiate this system. If she didn't open wickets and locks in the right order she got to have water slosh all over her feet or see her barge capsize. When she got it right, her barge and its occupants safely negotiated the canal. She was really engrossed and would have stayed longer. As we watched her, Bob and I started wondering how the experience might be different for her if she was experiencing the canal system through a computer simulation. We were thinking that it might be okay, if she had already experienced the hands-on model--but that without this concrete experience a computer simulation would not use enough of her senses (or get into muscle memory) and so would not be as valuable as a teaching tool.

As luck would have it a few minutes after leaving the canal room, we came across a computer simulation and our friend set about making sense of it. To operate the canal on the computer, she had four choices, nothing happened on the screen unless she chose the correct button and the experience was repetitive and entirely visual. It did not hold her interest. One thing that I noticed was lacking was an ability to manipulate the system in novel ways. Back in the model room, our friend tested what happened if she went through the system backwards, with the barge upside down, with cargo and without cargo, using the barge as a submersible, opening all of the locks at the same time (creating a wild flume experience!)...

Part Two:

Okay, so I was thinking about inquiry skills as we enjoyed the day and kept note of the types of questions, observations, and conclusions that our kindergarten guest formed. Most of her chatter took place in the car---at the museum she buzzed between activities and watching other kids.

Here is some of what we heard:
Do you like broccoli? Peppers?
Do you like to take baths or showers?
Do you like me or love me?
Do you think he is handsome?
Do you think she is pretty?
How old is your daughter?
When is her birthday?
How old are you?
Do you sleep in the same room?
How big is your dog?
What's wrong with his ear? (He was wearing a hearing aid.)
What's wrong with his arm? (He had a bandage on his arm.)
Did you hear me? (We were listening to a recording of her class singing.)
What is your favorite color?
What is your favorite food?

Her observations:

You are bigger than him.
He has a mole.
The melted wax is hot.

Conclusion made by our friend:

Husbands can't be smaller than wives.


Believe it or not, the whole husband/wife size difference was the topic of the day for our friend---she was really trying to get a handle on this. It came up over and over and she insisted that husbands must be bigger than wives. When I asked her why, her response was "because," quickly followed by a variation of---"my mommy is smaller than my daddy," "that's the way it is," and "husbands have to grow up bigger." She kept asking if I thought he was handsome and if he thought I was pretty...maybe an inquiry attempt to make sense of a story that was not logical to her?

So, one child and one day....not to be used to make generalizations...interesting nonetheless. It got me thinking about the value of having someone just sit in my classroom and record all of the questions, observations and conclusions that my students make in a given time period.

Cheers,

Deb

life is black & white Name: Lisa Daint Date: 2006-06-07 21:40:01 Link to this Comment: 19468

Hello! I just wanted to point out that Deb's day with her Kindergarten friend is an excellent example of how this age is so concrete in their thinking. A wife being bigger than a husband is just too grey an area in this little one's black and white perspective on life.

-Lisa (Dainton...LFS Kindergarten teacher)

Reading List? Name: Deb Hazen Date: 2006-06-08 18:16:51 Link to this Comment: 19474

Here is the link that was mentioned today. This is a collection of resources about inquiry based learning and teacher education ...

http://www.exploratorium.edu/IFI/library/index.html

Computers, yes or no? Name: Annabella Date: 2006-06-21 16:10:00 Link to this Comment: 19546

Hi All,

I am new on the scene, and am very interested in helping develop and implement this new approach to math/science elementary education. I am a McBride student at Bryn Mawr College, and am working with Paul Grobstein in exploring the possibilities of using the techinques of inquiry based education to cultivate the natural mathmetician/scientist's curiosity that I believe is within our students-as well as the rest of us-from birth. I am very excited to be joining all of you on this most important and grand adventure.

I have spent most of this week immersed in reading about your meetings, your thoughts and comments. Though there are a myriad of subjects upon which I could comment, I will pick out the one about computers in education, as I find it one of the most difficult for me personally to answser.

Are computers helpful or detrimental in education? Are they good or bad in developing a well rounded individual? i.e. Do we write the use of computers into the curriculum or not?

This form of the question is posed in black and white. Therefore, its answer would have to be "yes" because to not teach the kids how to use computers in any of their endeavors would leave them ill-equipped in today's world and would be negligent from an educational standpoint. But just as certainly, not all math/science can be learned from a computer. Experiential learning is essencial in both of these disciplines.

Perhaps a more helpful form of the question would be how much computer work do we write into the program, and what activities would it include? Then the answers would be somewhere in the spectrum between the black and the white. My personal preference would be to write in as little computer work as possible, but I realize that I am prejudiced in this regard because I learned science in a heavily experiencial environment, and I loved it.

But it is the second part of that question that really grabs my attention. If we want to use inquiry as the basis for our curriculum, could we find or build computer programs that would never answer the kids questions, but rather would lead the kid to their own answer through asking more questions? In other words, could we make the computer inquiry based? If so, would this be too manipulative, too restrictive in regard to not honoring the freedom of the student's individuality? Would we be, in a way, putting a nanny on the computer? Or would it, on the other hand, maximize the power of the computer as a teaching aid to help us create a seamless curriculum that will get our young scientists thinking in questioning and creative ways?

I tend to lean in the direction of "yes". We can use the computer in this way and expect good results as judged by helping the student activate their own ability to think things through only to ask another question. I don't believe the student would feel devalued at all working with such a program. It would be interesting to notice whether the kids seem eager to get to work with a program that doesn't give them answers, only questions, or whether it will be a turn-off to them.

Nontheless, I think computers must be included as an integral part of the curriculum, and it is up to us to maximize their contribution toward our goal of inquiry based education.

from Alice ... Name: Paul Grobstein Date: 2006-06-23 08:43:55 Link to this Comment: 19564

Email dated 15 June, posted with her permission

I enjoyed the last meeting and appreciate being part of this project. In reflecting on the conversation, several ideas stand out as important to frame and pursue. I'll comment on two here.

One implication of the session is that in using Paul's framework of inquiry as a recursive process of observation and interpretation, it is important to recognize that both are acts of imagination. That is, both are constructed and creative. Observation as well as intepretation entails choice, perspective, and purpose; it is not only or simply a matter of faithful mirroring or recording.

For me, this connects with the idea, articulated at the last meeting, that science education ought not to be in the business of telling children that their ideas -- fictions, fantasies, stories -- are wrong and need to be replaced by adult reality narratives (which are also fantasies, though of a more public, shared, and constrained kind). As Paul pointed out, it is an important part of the work of scientists to make things up. As a learner and teacher, I find this perspective of science liberating and I look forward to exploring and clarifying ways to share it with students.

Interesting Website Name: Deb Hazen Date: 2006-06-27 07:07:17 Link to this Comment: 19603

Hope everyone is enjoying the humidity...
You may already be aware of this site, if not I think it is worth looking at as an example of kids actively using technology to tell their stories!
http://www.galileo.org/index.html

broadening the conversation ... Name: Paul Grobstein Date: 2006-11-15 12:49:09 Link to this Comment: 20992

Welcome to participants in the Center for Science in Society working group on Elementary Science Education. The origins of this forum were in a project with Lansdowne Friends School that is continuing, and you can read earlier comments by clicking here. As it says at the beginning This forum ... is a place for thoughts in progress, a place to leave thoughts of your own that might be useful to others and to find thoughts of others that might be useful to you. By broadening the conversation, we hope to bring to bear the many different perspectives that are relevant for doing some serious rethinking of how science should be approached as it is first introduced in school curricula, including its implications for science pedagogy at all levels of the educational enterprise. Join in, and let's see what new ways of thinking and approaches we can generate together.

another voice Name: Paul Grobstein Date: 2006-11-15 12:58:22 Link to this Comment: 20993

From Susan Dorfman, Head of the Science Department, The Baldwin School, and a participant in the 2006 Brain and Behavior Insitute:

Just a quick update to let you know how well my students have accepted the "new" scientific method. In a recent lab report, one of my Grade VII science students wrote in the errors section how we adjusted our procedure to "get it less wrong." It made me smile. Pre-teens love the idea of getting it less wrong.

The curriculum project I wrote worked wonders for the usual boring and rote characteristics of living things. The Grade VII students loved the videos I chose for them online. The project was well suited for the interactive whiteboard. Without any assigned reading, I had the students come up with a list of the characteristics of living things that I typed while they watched on the board. The next day after completing the first assignment, the students revised their list. I wrote the revisions in a color over the typed list on the interactive whiteboard. The third day after completing the second assignment, we repeated the process of revision but in a different color. Each day, I was able to save the additions for each section of the course. The students were the captains of their own progress. I just coached. It was fun. Last week, I shared the project with other faculty in all three divisions to demonstrate my incorporation of technology into a more interactive learning.

Also, Tiffany Hays and I used our grant money to take our seniors to Hawk Mountain. The students loved the combination of hiking and then observing the birds of prey. There was not a single grumble about the journaling and questions we assigned. They had so much to write. It was a blast. Story telling rules!!

first meeting comment Name: Paul Grobstein Date: 2006-11-22 10:40:48 Link to this Comment: 21163

Excerpted from an email from Sarah Freilich, a Haverford student who participated in the first meeting of the Working Group on Elementary Science Education, to Alice Lesnick. Made available with permission of both.

I wanted to thank you so much for inviting me to the meeting tonight. I really enjoyed it and was inspired by the passion within the room and the different people who were gathered to work on a "problem" yet also providing an opportunity to meet people who may inspire us or teach us informally.

To be honest, lately I have been having trouble engaging and finding some of the fun that I used to feel for the edu classes. Going to the meeting tonight reminded me why I decided to minor and also why science education has been an ongoing interest in my life. As I said in the group discussion, I have a fear of becoming an upper level science teacher because of the roteness I see in the education system....pedagogically and the need for correct answers by students, and therefore have been shying away from this interest.

I think this idea of correct answers is one of my fears in our 310 class. As we have moved towards thinking about next semester and even some of the fieldwork concerns I feel that there is a need for learning to teach. As if there is one way to be a good teacher. Some of my fear of this may be due to my fear of "acting" the teacher role. Also though, I think that every classroom is unique and therefore "correct teaching practices" in the everyday must be flexible and work for the individuals teaching the class and acting as learners. I guess I see it though as an extension of this idea that there are right and wrong sides to education and this may cramp our learning and learning HOW to learn.

Also in terms of my journey towards the empowerment found within mentoring/tutoring I saw this meeting as an extension of that. It was great to meet Jill and (I forgot the other lady's name) who have both graduated from here and to be able to see how they have used their ed minors to do something they enjoy and yet struggle with and are alwaysquestioning. Meeting Jill was also exciting in the sense that I feel we both liked science-biology for a specific reason (community reasons and people interaction) which may not be what the bio department wants to hear. It was just really nice to hear another person say that because for a while I was worried and thought maybe I was missing the point or something because community is definently what drove me into biology.

Lastly, last semester I took Community Math Teaching Project with Josh Sabloff. One of the things I really enjoyed about this class as an edu class was that it worked toward a certain goal in the fieldwork. Anyways though, the point is that he may be interested in this group. ALthough he is a math prof I feel as though his teaching and what he was trying to teach us in our ways of teaching was this idea of learning through questions or teaching concepts through examples that applied to students.

continuing .... Name: Paul Grobstein Date: 2006-12-01 15:21:32 Link to this Comment: 21244

It seems to me there are some important things in Sarah's comments that faculty (here and elsewhere) ought to be paying attention to, whether they want to hear them or not. One is the "fear of becoming an upper level science teacher because of the roteness I see in the educational system". Clearly, if we want good teachers entering the K-12 system (Peter B's "solution" to the problem) we need to be encouraging (and ourselves modelling) something other than "roteness" (ie we don't want to be following pedagogical styles that bore EITHER our students OR ourselves). So "everyday must be flexible and work for the individuals teaching the class and acting as learners".

The other thought of Sarah's that caught my eye was "liked science-biology for a specific reason (community reasons and people interaction) which may not be what the bio department wants to hear". We all, I think, have some tendency to presume that we KNOW why students are interested in (or should be interested in) what we're teaching, and its useful for biologists to hear that those may not in fact be the reasons one expects. I'll certainly convey this particular message to my colleagues in biology here. More generally, it's a good reminder that classroom activities really ought to start with a sense of the particular interests of the particular students with whom one is working.

There are a few more sets of thoughts off our first meeting available on the web page for that meeting. Additional thoughts, or reactions to thoughts, can be posted directly here in the forum. Longer sets of thoughts can be emailed to me for inclusion on the meeting web page. Also available from our resources page are some additional student thoughts on "The Learner's Responsibility in Progressive Education". See also another student's "Traditional Approach Vs. Story Telling Approach to Science".

Looking forward to continuing conversation here, and at our next meeting.

on not assuming we know why students want to study Name: Date: 2006-12-12 15:09:14 Link to this Comment: 21316

The curriculum theorist Madeline Grumet wrote something about this in her book, Bitter Milk (Amherst, MA: UMass Press, 1988) that I find helpful:

To teach as an art would require us to study the transferences we bring to the world we know. . . Then, perhaps, teaching the text may lead us to devise new forms for knowing that will not compel our students to recite the history and future of our desire."

Seeing something in two ways Name: Jill Bean Date: 2006-12-28 11:43:03 Link to this Comment: 21355

Hi Paul, etc.,

I wanted to share this story with you. In comes in response to Paul's presentation to the students at Lansdowne Friends School. You can see some of the presentation here:
http://serendipstudio.org/local/scisoc/lansdownefriends/IntroSci/

I was over a second grade student's house for a Christmas party. She showed me some of the sculptures she had made in ceramics class. She got to one and said, "You remember that guy who came and talked to us about how you can see things in two ways? Well look." She had created a piece that looked like a duck from one direction, and then when you turned it, it looked like a cow (I think). The duck was very recognizable and the cow was hard to see. She even said, "It was hard. It really turned out to be a duck more."

Jill

Is yeast alive? Name: Deb Hazen Date: 2007-01-30 07:05:03 Link to this Comment: 21420

Reflections from a class of 5/6 grade scientists.

We began the lesson with white boards, dry erase markers, sock erasers (so much easier to change our ideas as we go)and a question. What is life? The reactions of the students ranged from cries of "this is hard" to quiet concentration. After a few minutes they shared.

Life is being able to move, eat, and breathe. Life is the opposite of death. Life is how we live. Life is the cycle in which things live.

Next step...please list evidence that something is alive. We transfered their ideas to the big white board.

Movement, has feelings, growth, breathing, eating, aging, reproducing, change...

And then the fun really started as the kids began arguing with one another. In the midst of the healthy debate, I brought some things out---a tangerine (Is it alive?), red wheat berries (Are they alive?), wheat grass that we are growing (Is is alive?), one of those compressed people figures that moves and grows when placed in water (Popped that one right in a bottle of water and asked--- Is it alive?). The kids really got into it...debating whether or not each of these things was alive given their list of evidence.

Soon the question was did all of the evidence have to be present or could only one thing be present to prove life? One of my sixth graders argued that if we took the list of evidence we could say that fire was alive (it needs oxygen, eats fuel, changes, and yes she made a case that fire reproduces itself by spreading). Then someone brought up a person in a coma---does the person move---and joy the kids tripped off on a discussion of moving blood cells versus moving muscles! As a group, we got a little stuck with the tangerine when one student likened the seeds in the tangerine to the seeds inside herself--which could one day become babies. After a while, I picked up the tangerine and a cup and squeezed the fruit juice into the cup asking "Is this murder?" and then "Why or why not?" A bit bizarre I'll grant you...but I'm finding it necessary to go bizarre sometimes...like when one student is absolutely certain that you must have feelings (happy, sad, angry...) in order to be alive and I stand there and pluck leaves off the wheat plant looking for some evidence of emotion from the plant. I am finding that if it students perceive that an argument in science class comes from a personal/religious belief (the student who mentioned the babies/seeds is known by her classmates to hold very strong/rigid religious beliefs), classmates are less likely to debate the issue--wanting to "respect" a person's beliefs. And then there is my sense that at least 15% of science education in the elementary classroom is getting some of the students to let go of their Disney depictions of the world.

The students, through their debate and story-telling got to a short list of evidence that something is alive---there is some sort of metabolism (they had the concept, I gave them the science vocabulary), it reproduces, there is growth, and some sort of response to stimulus. So this is our working definition---with everyone in the class willing to accept that this is a white board definition (we could change it the minute someone tells a new story).

Final part of the exercise (this is a two hour science block--what joy). New question---Is yeast alive? Design some kind of experiment that would help us to answer the question.

The kids were great...they combined that day's discussion with prior experience. Here are six of the twelve ideas:

1. Test for stimulus response---Put a bunch of yeast on my desk and stab it with a pencil to see if it does anything. I know that if I poke a friend with my pencil he'll react.

2. Test for metabolism---Make bread--cause I know that yeast breads rise and I've seen yeast bubble up when I add it to a recipe and one time we didn't put enough yeast in the recipe and nothing happened.

3. Test for growth---Research to see if yeast has a life cycle--because sometimes scientists read about what other people have done.

4. Test for growth--Put it near water and sunlight and see if it grows toward either. It looks like a seed so I think it might act the way plants act.)

5. Test for reproduction--Bury it in a sunny spot and water it to see if it grows. It looks like a seed and seeds need these conditions.

6. Test for reproduction--Set it out on the table and see if it makes more of itself. People make more of themselves and people are alive.

Today we experiment to answer the question---Is yeast alive?

Pluto's standing Name: Cam Date: 2007-02-22 13:51:03 Link to this Comment: 21487

I am teaching 2nd grade science for the first time, and have just started the solar system. How are others handling Pluto's downgrade to a dwarf planet?

Pluto and .... Name: Paul Grobstein Date: 2007-02-25 14:34:12 Link to this Comment: 21494

Thanks, Cam. Your question helps to highlight a point in a conversation we were having in our working group on K-6 science education. The premise of that group is that science is too frequently taught as "Truth" or a body of "facts" and would be better and more appropriately taught (at all levels) as observations and interpretations of observations, stories that are always subject to revision. From this perspective, the Pluto's "downgrade to a dwarf planet" is .... an ideal teaching moment, an opportunity to help students learn that scientific stories are changeable, and to explore more about how and why that is so.

The Importance of Questions Name: Jill Garla Date: 2007-03-23 09:19:02 Link to this Comment: 21571

This brief excerpt from “Doing History: Investigating with Children in Elementary and Middle Schools” talks about question-making in another discipline but it seems applicable to our upcoming discussion of the role of questions in inquiry-based education.

THE IMPORTANCE OF QUESTIONS
‘Anything that may be called knowledge, or a known object, marks a question answered, a difficulty disposed of, a conclusion cleared up, an inconsistency reduced to coherence, a perplexity mastered. –John Dewey’

If children are to enthusiastically engage in sustained conversation about history, four things are required:
• Questions that are worth discussing
• Questions that do not have simple of single answers
• Sufficient and appropriate data sources so that students can attempt to answer the questions.
• Imaginative entry into the past.

Exploring eggs Name: Paul Grobstein Date: 2007-03-31 08:35:25 Link to this Comment: 21616

Welcome to everyone who attended today's inquiry/science day at Lansdowne Friends School. This is a place to leave any reactions/thoughts/stories/questions that you have, and to revisit to see what others thought and respond to that. Join in, and let's see what develops from thinking about eggs.

What role do students play in helping teachers to Name: Darla Atta Date: 2007-06-14 21:39:35 Link to this Comment: 21763

Hi Everyone,

This morning I stumbled upon this article from a Kentucky newspaper that I thought might be of interest to this group. It discusses a summer program in which middle school students are recruited to help middle school science teachers learn how to use more student-centered and inquiry-based teaching methods. I wish the article fleshed out the program more, but I still think it's interesting enough to pass on:

http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070611/N EWS0105/706110425/1060


Looking forward to our next science working group meeting!

Darla

Forum Archived Name: Webmaster Date: 2007-10-18 12:48:42 Link to this Comment: 22063

This forum has now been archived and is closed to new postings. Please come join us in continuing conversation on elementary science education in Serendip's Exchange.