April 1998 Videos Focus Lens on New Math, Science Strategies
Two new videos from NWREL give viewers a first-hand glimpse of innovative approaches to teaching math and science. Stressing the importance of hands-on projects for developing problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, the videos offer an intimate look insfide Northwest classrooms that emphasize active, discovery-based learning. Teachers and students featured in the videos talk about the challenges of moving away from textbook-driven instruction toward more open-ended strategies that put students in charge of their own learning.
The videos-one on middle school math and the other on high school science-can be used to familiarize teachers, parents, and students with instructional styles that are less structured than traditional approaches. In an active-learning classroom, students typically work in groups, collaborating on problem solving and experimentation. Teachers serve as guides, not lecturers. These classrooms tend to be characterized by conversation and animation. The change in teachers' roles and classroom climate can be disturbing to adults whose own schooling experiences were much different.
"Teaching is no longer focused only on rote learning of basic facts and procedures," says the introductory booklet accompanying the math video. "These skills are often taught in the context of complex problems rather than worksheets and computation drills alone. Parents may conclude that students are not spending enough time on 'the basics.'"
High School Science. Doing science means working with test tubes, beakers, Bunsen burners-the concrete tools of the laboratory. It means posing questions, testing hypotheses, and actively seeking understanding. Doing science-not just learning about science-is what students in inquiry-based classrooms are engaged in.
The video Why Won't You Tell Me the Answer? Inquiry in the High School Classroom, produced by NWREL's Mathematics and Science Education Center, gives viewers the opportunity to watch and listen as students conduct investigations and search for answers to scientific questions under the guidance of their teachers. The video, which comes with a companion publication, Inquiry Strategies for Science and Mathematics Learning, identifies several levels or degrees of inquiry:
- Structured inquiry, in which students follow precise instructions from the teacher to conduct an investigation or engage in a hands-on activity
- Guided inquiry, in which the teacher chooses the question to be investigated, but students devise a procedure for the investigation
- Student-directed inquiry, in which students generate their own questions concerning a topic selected by the teacher, and design their own investigation
"The best of all worlds," says teacher Dave Hamilton of Portland's Franklin High School, "would be if the students come up with their own questions and do their inquiry based on their own interests." In this type of classroom, teachers and textbooks become resources upon which students draw, rather than being the primary sources of information, Hamilton notes.
The video emphasizes the importance of classroom discourse for genuine understanding. Real learning happens, the video stresses, through a process of "questioning, probing, prompting, redirecting, and waiting." In inquiry-based classrooms, teachers let the students make their own discoveries.
"I love being encouragingly silent," remarks teacher Dottie Simpson of Mercer Island High School in Washington. After posing a question to students during an investigation on frequency and wave lengths, Simpson waits quietly, giving students time to process information and ponder solutions.
"I mediate the discussions," Simpson says. "I mediate the labs. But I try not to be the authority."
Says teacher Richard Peterson of Oregon's Beaverton High School: "We want students to be scientists, in a sense-to be able to probe questions, to be able to design experiments, to be able to critique evidence that's presented to them in newspapers and other media."
"TEACHING IS NO LONGER FOCUSED ONLY ON ROTE LEARNING OF BASIC FACTS AND PROCEDURES. THESE SKILLS ARE OFTEN TAUGHT IN THE CONTEXT OF COMPLEX PROBLEMS RATHER THAN WORKSHEETS AND COMPUTATION DRILLS ALONE" Middle school math. Giving students the tools to evaluate data and information presented in the media is one long-term goal of a Portland math program featured in the video How Do You Spell Parallel? Visiting Middle School Mathematics Classrooms.
"Kids today are absolutely bombarded with data all the time," observes sixth-grade teacher Richard Brannan of West Sylvan Middle School. "They have to be able to look at that data, organize that data, analyze that data, and come to some kind of decision about that data. Those decisions they are going to be making are going to involve a lot more than just subtract, multiply, divide."
Anne McEnerny-Ogle, too, wants her Waluga Junior High School students to learn to manipulate numbers within a real-world context. She teaches them to apply mathematical principles to the kinds of problems they're likely to encounter beyond the covers of a textbook.
"We tend not to get the question, 'How am I ever going to use this in my life?' because they're using it right now," McEnerny-Ogle says.
Besides the growing emphasis on complex problem solving, one of the most striking changes emerging in math classes for the middle grades is the increasing reliance on student communication and interaction, the video notes. When students communicate orally with their classmates, McEnerny-Ogle says, "it reinforces their own thinking."
Another effective strategy featured in the video is using physical activity for hands-on projects. Seventh-graders in Jean Howard's classroom in Helena, Montana, collaborate on a project that involves using rulers and ropes to measure how far they can jump. "With this physical activity," Howard says, "they will probably be more engaged because any time they're more active, they're more willing to open their mind and allow the information to come in. If you're touching something and using the tactile (sense), your brain is more involved (because) you're using more of your senses."
Brannan strives for "richness" and open-endedness in his classes.
"I want to provide them with a rich variety of problems that might possibly have more than one answer and a variety of ways to get to that answer, rather than just a single path that leads to that answer," he says.
To order the videos, Why Won't You Tell Me the Answer? Inquiry in the High School Classroom, and How Do You Spell Parallel? Visiting Middle School Mathematics Classrooms, send $165 per video to: IOX Educational Research and Development, 28170 SW Boberg Rd, Suite 1, Wilsonville, OR 97070. For more ordering information, call (503) 582-8958.
Within the Northwest region of Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington, the videos may be borrowed for a three-week period from NWREL's math and science resource collection.
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