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A Meeting of Minds

With a focus on inquiry-based methods, an ambitious partnership sets out to transform science education in northwest Washington.

By Rhonda Barton

Bellingham, Washington—It looks more like a preschool setting than a university classroom: Little plastic tubs of thick yellow dishwashing detergent are lined up at each seat, with red- and white-striped plastic straws just waiting to dip into the sticky liquid. At the signal, everyone leans in and begins to blow. Bubbles—large, small, pink, clear, and iridescent—start gurgling up, filling the containers, and escaping into the air.

Dorothy "Dottie" Simpson, a small woman with a large presence, paces in front of the blackboard and asks, "What questions do you have?" The "students"—actually elementary through high school teachers—excitedly shout out: Where does the color come from? Why are some bubbles small and some large? Why do some pop and others don't? Why are they hexagonal? What makes bubbles last?

Welcome to introductory physics.

The bubble lesson is one exercise in a two-week academy held this summer on the campus of Western Washington University. It's the opening volley in a five-year, $12 million effort—funded by the National Science Foundation—that seeks to improve science teaching and learning in both the K-12 school system and higher education. Called the North Cascades and Olympic Science Partnership—or NCOSP for short—the unique project unites 28 predominantly rural school districts, two educational service districts, three community colleges, Washington State LASER (Leadership and Assistance for Science Education Reform), Northwest Indian College, and Western Washington University.

According to NCOSP leader George "Pinky" Nelson, the partners are set to attack a systemic problem. Few elementary teachers graduate from university ready to teach science effectively while secondary teachers have substantial content knowledge but little experience with research-based curricula. Nelson—who heads Western Washington's SMATE (Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education) program—believes, "You can't separate the content and the pedagogy. You have to focus on learning science, but in a context of teaching it better."

The launch of NCOSP comes at a time when pressure is mounting to improve student science achievement in Washington. Starting in 2010, students must pass the 10th-grade science WASL (Washington Assessment of Student Learning) to earn a diploma. This year, a science assessment will be required, for the first time, for students in fifth grade; last year, tests were mandated at the eighth- and 10th-grade levels.

Through its efforts during the next five years, the partnership expects 90 percent of students in participating school districts to meet or exceed the state science standards. And, they're forecasting other ambitious outcomes as well: 147 teacher-leaders will complete 360 hours of professional development, another 1,000 teachers will receive 86 hours of training, and 90 percent of teachers will use research-based curriculum as intended. In addition, new science content and methods courses will be in place at the university and community college levels and the number of preservice teachers from underrepresented groups will double.

Behind all those numbers is a mission to fundamentally change teachers' ideas about science. "At the extreme, it's a movement away from thinking about science as a collection of facts, vocabulary, and formulas into a deeper understanding of the whole nature of science: the use of evidence to support ideas, a questioning of observations to make meaning of the natural world," says Project Director Carolyn Landel. "It's a real paradigm shift in terms of [moving from] teaching science's terms and words and descriptors to teaching a way of thinking and knowing and exploring the world."

In Dottie Simpson's classroom, the exploration of bubbles has segued into an animated discussion of inquiry learning. "Give a situation that gets [students'] curiosity going," Simpson exhorts the class. "Ultimately, you want them to ask the questions. If you're in the habit of telling them stuff, instead of directing the questioning, then get over it!"

Simpson, a retired physics and math instructor who's part of the NCOSP faculty, gives the teachers plenty more advice: Work on your "wait time" and don't rush in to fill the gaps; discourage questions that elicit one-word answers; emphasize the evidence for ideas and thoughtfulness about observations; ask "checking questions" to determine the class's thinking at the moment; and respect all students' ideas. She concedes that "you can't use inquiry all the time—you have to pick and choose." But, by engaging the class in asking questions, you can turn them into "active listeners" when the lesson calls for a lecture.

Sue Claypoole-Brooks, a Lynden middle school teacher who's been in the trenches for 18 years, comes away from the session with renewed empathy for her seventh- and eighth-graders. "It's so valuable for a teacher to become a student—to reflect and grow from that," she remarks. "I can start thinking about what my kids are going through."

That role reversal surfaces again and again as clusters of teachers work their way through experiments with magnets, electricity, and motion. For many, physics is a foreign language—which is precisely why it was chosen as the focus of the first academy.

"The most important thing we wanted our participants to have was the opportunity to truly experience learning and more deeply understand the process they've gone through to help them develop new ideas and establish a deeper conceptual understanding of some fundamental ideas," says Landel, a former cancer researcher. "The more they understand about their own learning, the more it helps us make that next step to how their students learn."

Landel strolls through a lab where teachers puzzle over the effect of force on two different masses. Intense concentration mixed with just a hint of frustration emanates from the room. Michael Shapiro and John Lahey, two elementary school teachers from Mt. Vernon, wonder if the way they've distributed weight has something to do with how two small containers move along a track. More tinkering and knitting of brows follows this theory. Maybe, Shapiro speculates, the position of a nearby fan is affecting their results.

Like their colleagues, Lahey and Shapiro are encouraged to make predictions, figure out how to test them, observe the results, come to conclusions, try new experiments, make more observations, and modify their conclusions in a continuous cycle. It's a constructivist approach where learners are asked to examine their preconceptions and then construct new, more accurate knowledge.

The plan is that Lahey, Shapiro, and other "teacher-leaders" at the academy will return to their own schools and share such constructivist, inquiry-based models with their peers. The teacher-leaders will continue to receive training in summer academies and during the academic year. They'll also be able to tap into Western Washington's resources and get support from higher education scientists and six full-time Teachers on Special Assignment (or TOSAs) who serve as liaisons between the university and school districts.

Bainbridge Island was one school district that wasted no time in sharing the lessons of the summer academy. The 4,000-student district sent nine teachers to the NCOSP training. Joining them for a special one-day session were three high-level district administrators and 10 principals and assistant principals. It was the largest contingent of any district.

Associate Superintendent Faith Chapel says the experience was especially timely as Bainbridge Island prepares to introduce an all new K-12 science curriculum this year. "It was valuable for all our administrators, as they oversee implementation, to be on the same page as the teacher-leaders. As a group, we had a chance to hear some of the critical messages about eliciting students' thinking and activating prior knowledge. Also, it meant a lot to our teachers that (administrators) felt it was important enough to attend."

Just two weeks after the NCOSP gathering, Bainbridge Island held its own professional development training with materials from Western Washington. According to Chapel, 100 percent of the district's high school science teachers and 90 percent of the middle school teachers were there. "It's changed the level of our conversation," says Bainbridge Island High School Principal Brent Peterson. "In a general way, (NCOSP's) brought more focus to the discussion."

Throughout classrooms in the Olympic Peninsula and Whatcom and Skagit counties, the seeds planted by NCOSP are beginning to take root and grow. At Mt. Vernon High School, biology teacher and science department chair Craig Harpel reports that he's been working on his questioning skills. He's changing his instruction so there's more time to challenge individual students to think about "what they know, what they think they know, and why they think they know it."

"This hasn't been easy," Harpel admits, especially in a school where 44 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. "This approach with large class sizes and very heterogeneous populations sometimes makes a teacher feel like a Superball in a box being shaken by a very unhappy gorilla. But under all the pressure there are those frozen moments when a truly surprised student says, 'Oh! I get it!' That makes me stop and think, 'Oh! I get it, too!'"

As for reaching low-achieving students and making those "aha" moments bubble to the surface, "NCOSP doesn't have any illusions that this is going to be an easy process," Harpel believes. "But (it's) convinced that with the application of education research, engagement, and collaboration at all levels, as well as sufficient resources, this can and will happen. I think they are right... If we don't use the knowledge that is out there to teach more effectively, we are going to fail our students. It's as simple as that."