Masters program redirects teachers' thinking about science with stress on inquiry
January 3, 2002
by Dina Gerdeman
Reprinted with permission from The Patriot Ledger
Several elementary and middle school teachers are taking classes in a new online graduate degree program at Lesley University that gets them to explore science concepts through inquiry and experiments, rather than by memorizing textbook definitions.
The Science Education program for practicing kindergarten through eighth-grade teachers was developed by Lesley and TERC.
The program, now in its second year, prepares educators to learn by inquiry as preparation for teaching inquiry-based science.
Each unit in the two-year, 33-credit, Internet-based sequence is taught by both a scientist and a science educator, who use investigative tools commonly available in elementary and middle school classrooms.
"We've designed the program so that teachers engage in science," said Lesley instructor Linda Grisham, co-director of the program.
"They test their own ideas, make predictions, gather evidence from a variety of sources to test these predictions, analyze and interpret data."
For example, one of the courses asks students in the program to study a glass of ice water and make predictions about its density, energy transfer and composition. The students are asked what the coldest spot in the glass is, and they must use digital thermometers to measure the temperature at various depths.
"Their preconceived ideas might not be correct," Grisham said. "The goal is to find a solution based on the evidence. They begin to see that nature is not static."
The program is a change from the traditional cookbook-type labs where students are asked to produce the right answer. Instead, using their own data, students generate and communicate their findings in a way they will expect their own students to do.
"We have developed activities where teachers investigate phenomena, gather qualitative and quantitative data and make conclusions based on evidence," Grisham said.
"Teachers engage in the same learning paradigm of inquiry-based science that they will bring to their classrooms."
Grisham said the program prepares teachers well for today's elementary school classroom, especially with the changes that have occurred in the state's public school curriculum as a result of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test.
"Today, elementary teachers need to have a sophisticated understanding of scientific concepts," she said. "Unlike high school science teachers, who focus on a specific topic, like physics or biology, the elementary teacher is a science generalist. They are challenged to find teachable moments in which scientific principles are connected to children's life experiences and other subject material in social studies, geography, literature and math."
The online courses work well for time-pressed teachers, said program co-director Sue Doubler, who serves on the Lesley faculty and is a senior staff member at TERC.
"A big difference we see in the online environment is the availability of time," Doubler said. "Program participants report that they have time to think seriously about the science and about their teaching."
And the students are learning from one another, Grisham said.
"The real work is going on peer to peer," she said. "We have incredibly rich conversations going on between teachers as they work through these ideas, which is what scientists do all the time."
Lesley and TERC are creating the curriculum for the program with money from the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Instruction and from the National Science Foundation's Teacher Enhancement Program. Recently the program started accepting students for on-campus enrollment.
For more information about TERC and Lesley's Science in Education masters degree program, visit: scienceonline.terc.edu.