I’ve been racking my brain of recent trying to work out how to break through the Teacher-Led paradigm of teaching that I find myself in. Don’t get me wrong there is a time and a place for it and some students do learn better through this method, but I am aware becoming more student centered is where I’d like to go.
One day I’d like to be able to have each class turn up and hand them a hard bound A4 note book and say,
“This is your journal. Its not a exercise book, its a journal. A place to record your thoughts, your experiment ideas, investigations, research notes and experimental results. Its a place to do your drawings and your reflections on what you’re experiencing. You should be able to add to it every lesson. You should also be able to add to it between lessons, when you’re studying, researching or investigating outside the class”.
Then I’d like to be able to say, this is the “topic” we are focusing on, What are some big questions that we need to ask about the topic. Some examples might be “Why is the sky blue?” or “What happens if you do X?”. As a class we would then work out what do we need to know to find the answer. What do we need to figure out to enable us to conduct an experiment or investigation. We engage then in thought games and postulate ideas and suggestions start coming up with things to test.
Let take the questions “Why is the sky Blue?”. What do we need to know? Perhaps we could begin by asking “What is blue?”, “What is colour?”, “Where does light come from?”, “How does the sun generate energy?”, “How do we get different colours from the sun?”, “How do we see it?”. From that one preliminary question we can then do theory and practical work looking into the physics of light rays, the chemistry of colour, the biology of our eyes etc to come up with our final investigation/experiment that shows us why they sky is blue.
I admit it does make for a chaotic approach to learning. No two groups will be the same and you could wind up with a dozen different experiments going on at once all unrelated to each other, but what fun it would be. Each group focused on topics they want to investigate. It is inherently student driven. Assessment tasks can be individualised OR we look at common themes running through the individual classes and groups and come up with a comparable marking scheme that covers the wide range of topics being investigated.
As we progress through the open ended investigations we see how we can incorporate the syllabus points and tick them off as we discover them. As teachers we can guide the students into asking the right questions to allow us to help them uncover the required information.
Testing would then become more of an application of what they know rather than a recall.
In addition, through programs like CSIRO’s Scientists-In-Schools program and our personal connections I’d like to link the students to real world/industry science. Here they can access real world problems to be investigated and solved. Ones where they need to research and contribute “citizen science” style to a much larger project. One where they will have an impact on the world.
Finally, I’d like to utilise our connections with other schools and students around the world to create cross learning opportunities through the net, SKYPE, or email correspondence to replicate what global collaborative science is really like.
This is the science classroom I’d like to teach, a place where I am less of a “teacher” and more of a facilitator, guide, mentor and coach. A place where I can foster a true interest in science and learning that will equip my students with real world skills in problem solving, research and collaboration.