JONESBORO, Ga. — For years Lorrie McNeill loved teaching chemistry. She taught her students the periodic table of elements, the ubiquitous classroom staple that many Americans regard as a scientific rite of passage.

But last fall, for the first time in 15 years, Ms. McNeill, 42, removed the periodic table from her classroom. Gone, too, were assigned lab partners–and even the laboratory tables themselves, bunsen burners and all. Instead she turned over all the decisions about what science to learn to the students in her seventh- and eighth-grade science classes at Jonesboro Middle School in this south Atlanta suburb.

Among their choices: building model volcanoes, setting off smoke bombs, making sundials from modeling clay and popsicle sticks, and creating “geysers” by dropping Mentos candies into 2-liter bottles of Diet Coke.

The approach Ms. McNeill uses, in which students choose their own science projects, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their observations, is part of a movement to revolutionize the way science is taught in America’s schools. While there is no clear consensus among science teachers, variations on the approach, known as science workshop, are catching on.

In the method familiar to generations of students, an entire class conducts a scientific experiment together to learn about matter and energy and the interactions between them. That tradition, proponents say, gives students experience with disciplined scientific inquiry by posing questions and testing hypotheses. Defenders of the practice believe it also prepares students for more advanced study of science in college.

But fans of the science workshop say that assigning experiments and reading from textbooks–and learning the chemical symbols for elements on the periodic table–leaves many children bored or uninterested in science. Leaving students free to experiment, play, break things and get their hands dirty, they say, can help to build a lifelong love of science.

“I feel like almost every kid in my classroom is engaged and actually interacting with science,” said Ms. McNeill after conferencing on the classroom rug with a student and wondering in a technique called a “think aloud” if Diet Coke dripping from her classroom ceiling might form a stalactite. “Whereas when I do chemical compounds or the parts of the atom, I know that I have some kids that just don’t get into it.”

10 Comments »

Sounds a bit like Science Fair to me…

Comment by Rachel — August 30, 2009 @ 2:38 pm
I know you mean this as parody, but it’s way too close to the way science is taught in many K-8 classrooms. Before high school, science instruction often is hit and miss. As long as kids are doing “hands on” projects, who cares what content they learn or don’t learn? My daughter, attending well-regarded Palo Alto schools, had no serious science instruction till eighth grade.

Comment by Joanne Jacobs — August 30, 2009 @ 5:25 pm
Pondiscio’s First Law says “There’s no good idea in education that doesn’t become a bad idea once it hardens into orthodoxy. So, Joanne, thank you for the Second Law: The closer pedagogy comes to parody, the deeper the trouble.

Comment by Robert Pondiscio — August 30, 2009 @ 5:44 pm
My child’s academic magnet middle school tried this but it was in 6th grade. There was no value add to the science scores that year. The fact that the TVASS score was a D was a wake up call to that school and those teachers. Yes, science should be fun but there are some basics that need to be learned for students to excel in science in 8th grade (physical science) and beyond.

Thanks!

Comment by tim-10-ber — August 30, 2009 @ 9:02 pm
But isn’t what Ms. McNeill actually doing more akin to letting each student choose for himself/herself which experiments to do out of a kit she provides? The way I understand the NYT article is that she’s got a classroom library and her students select books from it to read. Assuming that the books in the classroom library are of high quality, what’s so bad about that approach?

Stanford University’s Education Program for Gifted Youth does it in their “Reading and Writing About Literature” online course. They’ve got a list of about 100 well-written books, and the student selects which ones he/she wants to read and then discuss in his/her writing.

Why does every student have to read the exact same book? I’m all for cultural literacy and students being able to take part in what Mortimer Adler calls “The Great Conversation”. But does it really matter that I’ve read The Odyssey and MacBeth while my DH has read The Iliad and Othello (which actually happens to be the case)?

Comment by Crimson Wife — August 31, 2009 @ 11:36 am
@Crimson Wife–

Yes, when it comes to science, it matters quite a bit. In science, basic content knowledge is the equivalent to being able to produce a well-formed paragraph in literature. Performing these experiments are not the equivalent of reading different works, it’s the equivalent of not learning how to communicate effectively about those works.

Science knowledge is organized in a different fashion than other disciplines– it’s rigid in structure and hierarchical. Taught appropriately, it is nearly impossible to separate out disciplinary knowledge these days at even a high school level. Physics, chemistry, biology, and earth science (the standard four in NYS high schools) all directly inform one another, and not having the basics of one can greatly hurt your performance on others.

Students need to be able to understand electricity and magnetism to understand chemical bonding which they need to be able to understand to comprehend biochemistry.

In the article above, some students learned about how state changes and surface areas affect reactions, while others learned acid-base chemistry. Whereas your DH can discuss Shakespeare and Homer with you, despite having read different works, those two sets of students will not have the same kind of transferable insight.

Comment by Jason Becker — August 31, 2009 @ 11:57 am
Jason — the post about science was a parody of the NY Times article about Reading Workshops… It does sound an awful lot like some elementary science, but not like any high school science I’ve seen.

Now, back to literature… The basic challenge to the “everyone reads the same classic work” approach is making it work for most of the kids in the class. Done well, its wonderful. Done not so well, a lot of kids end up feeling that “literature” is tedious. One of the local schools does To Kill a Mockingbird in 7th grade, but so far mostly I’ve heard how much kids hate it, which is sad.

But the worst is what many schools seem to be doing, which is re-defining literature, and having all students read the same banal “young adult” book.

My 8th grade daughter’s big complaint about the whole class books (a complaint shared by many parents) is that they are chosen to be accessible to the below grade level readers, so that in 7th grade they are reading books in class that the more advanced readers were reading by themselves in 5th (e.g. Stargirl).

Comment by Rachel — August 31, 2009 @ 1:42 pm
What’s wrong with having to learn chemistry the old-fashioned way? But following up a lesson with one of the whiz-bang experiments to reinforce what’s been taught?

The way the article describes it, the class sounds more like entertainment than education to me.

Comment by Laura — August 31, 2009 @ 4:30 pm
Rachel– while I did read the NYTimes article, somehow, I read this and thought it was just a parallel coincidentally being reported at the same time rather than parody.

I agree that the re-defining of literature is a major issue and that choosing whole class books for the lowest reading level would cause quite a stir as well. I am of the impression that in most schools, there are set reading lists teachers are able to choose from for grade levels that do not deviate significantly from the reading level expected from those in their classroom.

That being said, when I was in elementary school I did receive differentiated instruction– we had reading groups of no more than 5 students that were created based upon skill set and based on these groups we’d be assigned reading. The groups were fluid, it was not made clear to us at the time that these groups were differentiated on skill, and we still occasionally read books as a class simultaneously. This seemed to work well.

Of course, there are many who are against differentiated instruction and I understand those arguments well. I wonder how the “no-excuses” charters fair when they push elementary school students, where reading gaps seem to have the most potential to be reinforced rather than closed, manage the varying skills in their own classroom.

In the end, I guess I should say that I’m an avid reader, always have been, and I always hated the books assigned to me in school. In the end, however, I find that it’s these books that have helped me learn and grow, something I only appreciate reflectively.

Perhaps my comment here (http://www.quickanded.com/2009/08/read-what-you-love.html) will better explain my thoughts.

Comment by Jason Becker — August 31, 2009 @ 4:33 pm
You are an idiot with too much time on your hands. Surely your science background has taught you the difference between apples and oranges. Furthermore, if you READ the article you’d note that Ms. McNeill begins each class by reading a poem (as a class) and then discussing and applying traditional and universal literary techniques.

Comment by Jet — September 2, 2009 @ 9:30 pm