EDUC 6470 Final Project

For EDUC 6470, a project to examine innovative teaching, to search the literature, and to develop ideas. See EDUC 6470 Final Project-Discarded Topics for two topics I considered before settling on this one. I chose this project because I can apply the pedagogical innovations discussed in class with the curriculum innovations that interest me, thus cementing the content of this course to my existing frameworks. If constructivism is all it's cracked up to be, then I should learn deeply from this exercise.

Relationships between innovative teaching and innovative curriculum

Abstract

In a course at Cornell University, Innovative Teaching in the Sciences, we have studied several pedagogical innovations. The author finds and draws links between those innovations and interesting reforms in curriculum. Some new pedagogies are well-suited to new curriculum, while some tend to support traditional curriculum. The author concludes that inquiry, perhaps the most important focus of reform, can be seen as both a pedagogy and a curriculum, and perhaps it can be best taught explicitly as the focal content.

About the author

Shawn Reeves is a high school physics teacher, also president of EnergyTeachers.org, a network for educators interested in energy production and use. He studied the physics and its history for his B.A.; the applicability of the then-new Math, Science, and Technology Standards for New York State for his M.A.T., and most recently is studying the slow change in the canon as presented in introductory physics textbooks.

Introduction

In Cornell's Education course, Innovative Teaching in the Sciences, taught by Dr. Barbara Crawford, we have studied several pedagogical innovations. I have sought to link those innovations to my research focus on curriculum change. One difficulty in making connections is that there is very little literature on curriculum change, so this work is a survey of what might be done to make connections and examine curriculum with the best pedagogical innovations in mind.

Curriculum change, specifically examining and questioning the choice of content in early physics courses, is a rare topic in physics education research. In discussing curriculum change, or specifically curriculum diversification with teachers and researchers, I see connections between the resistance to curriculum change and the belief that physics is separate from humanity more than most any other subject, something to be discovered then sanctified. Some resistance may also be attributed to the unmoving standard subjects in mandated and national tests for high schools, a sense of back-to-basics among conservatives in education, a nationalization of curriculum (more notable in other english-speaking countries), and an unwillingness on the part of textbook publishers to remove any concepts from textbooks.

Since the late 1980s, documents have appeared that ask curriculum leaders and teachers to begin to teach more about the nature of science, and to use "inquiry-based" methods to teach science, at the expense of rote content. That movement has been very slow most likely because inquiry has mostly been accepted by practitioners only as a way to better teach that same rote content. Many instruments used to measure progress, which has been slow by any measure, only measure improvement in understanding the same content that existed on those instruments before states added sections on inquiry and the nature of science to their guiding documents.

There are different measures of progress which interest different parties. Since H.A. Rowland's "Plea for Pure Science" in 1883, leaders in physics have been questioning whether, in America, we should offer physics to a broad base of students or focus on lifting the highest achievers even higher.<bibref>Rowland:1883</bibref> This tension between equity and excellence may be treated as a zero-sum game erroneously, as we might have both if we can teach excellence for all, most notably planned by Project 2061 in "Science for All Americans."<bibref>Rutherford:1990Science-for-allAA</bibref>

Another measure of progress, also related to equity, might be a measure of how females fare in early parts of the pipeline to a career in physics. It is important to question whether the content of the curriculum should have anything to do with this question. Two different feminist views might have differing answers, one acknowledging a feminine culture, the other seeking parity in an existing world as paramount.

There is a tension between getting more people to follow the traditional science curriculum, often touted as a path to equity and to prosperity, and changing the curriculum to address the needs of more modern people. This tension is made manifest in the efforts to open the most traditional curricula of physics and engineering to more females.

Common measures of progress are international test scores, other more traditional instruments, participation rates in courses or majors, and success rates within those courses or majors. As we will see, teachers when making decisions about curriculum may base them on predicted success on state-mandated tests rather than the standards documents on which those tests are only loosely based. No Child Left Behind, in asking states to implement with a standard measure of performance, without funding new testing methods, has served to lessen the possibility that states will have time and resources to develop better measures of more realistic skills and understandings.

Amidst all this, science education researchers have developed new pedagogies and curricula that incrementally push towards inquiry and new understandings, and for more than a century there have been movements to diversify, intensify, and update teaching and learning, so change is happening despite resistance. For example, England is pushing back against its own nationalization of curriculum towards multiple pathways after age 14.(Pring, 2009, p. 98)<bibref>Pring:Education-for-aAA</bibref>

This all leads to my driving question:

Driving question

How can the powerful movement in innovative teaching be brought to help the movement in innovative curriculum?

Questions

To examine the driving question, I seek information on separate fronts, then see where connections might be drawn. I seek to enumerate innovations in curriculum and pedagogy, make connections between the two, then seek specific ideas useful to physics, and to science.

1. What innovations in curriculum are documented?
2. What innovations in teaching are documented?
3. What innovations in teaching are closely linked to considerations of content?
4. What innovations in teaching are specific to physics?
5. What innovations in teaching are specific to science?

In subsequent work, I hope to seek ideas useful to the educators with whom I work, and to ask what innovations in teaching are specific to my audiences.

Definitions

For the sake of clarity, I take a bit of space to state what I mean when I use certain broadly-used terms in this paper.

Curriculum

Curriculum is the set of ideas, skills, and tools students are expected to learn. There can be differences between the curriculum advanced by standards, by states, by administrators, by teachers, and the curriculum actually learned by students.

Pedagogy

Pedagogy is the methods, tools, and styles teachers use to serve students. In some ways, it is inextricably linked to the curriculum, as certain methods, tools, and styles are appropriate or important to certain subjects or topics, as we will examine later.

Inquiry

As we will explore in this paper, inquiry can be an approach to teaching, learning, and research in science, based on the nature of science, which allows for multiple methods, requires intellectual rigor, sees the building of understanding as a goal instead of the sanctity of a bit of knowledge, and requires practitioners to construct and test explanations while interacting with information about their world. Different disciplines in science have different, appropriate standards for what inquiry-learning looks like. When learning through inquiry, students will be limited by instrumentation, theory, and their own conceptual frameworks. But we will also look at students learning *about* inquiry.

Standards

Standards are documents and ideas that organizations and governments publish as guides or mandates for practitioners.

Curriculum Reforms

1. We should have students study less topics, more deeply. Michigan State in 2003 offered an introductory course in physics where students study only two topics, all in the lab, vacuum physics and optics, but deeply explore the instruments and methods. (Bauer, 2009)<bibref>Bauer:2010Physics-Major-GAA</bibref>
2. We should offer studies in new topics. The idea that the canon needs revision is introduced in "The Saber-Tooth Curriculum" by Harold Benjamin (1939). <bibref>Benjamin:1939Saber-tooth-curAA</bibref> Catherine Middlecamp (2006) discusses her long-term exploration of the relationship between specific scientific topics and their worth in the socially-situated classroom.<bibref>Middlecamp:2006Diversity-in-thAA</bibref> (pp. 279-288) There are multiple paths to new topics:
   1. Many schools offer a course about science and society. This path does not threaten the canon, especially as it is usually offered to non-majors with the intention of helping the laity understand socially important messages from the professionals. Informally interviewing teachers of such courses, I've found that they never consider such courses for students majoring in physics.
   2. Maybe more impacting, we might update schedules to offer courses around the scientific topics of interest to current society. In a way, this happens as students and educators vote with their feet, moving towards relatively new fields like environmental science. But could it happen within physics, a move from a traditional topic to a new one, such as from mechanics to solid state physics.
3. We should require only essential topics, and present new topics on a need-to-know basis. Cultural leaders or leaders in each discipline would define what is essential. This does not appeal to most reformers, but might be considered as a reform, if in the narrowing direction. It would be interesting to explore the difference between this and the discarding of some traditional topics that might be considered, by some, essential, since both reforms would remove something from the curriculum.
4. Stick to a nationalized or statewide "Core Curriculum." This reform is enforced by governmental grants that require professional developers, curriculum writers, and other grantees to show how their programs support the core curriculum.
5. Remove old subject-divisions. James Beane (1995) suggests that school-based subjects are not as fluid as scientific disciplines. <bibref>Beane:1995Curriculum-inteAA</bibref> Whereas disciplines offer a lens on the world, subjects are limited parts of disciplines maintained and presented either by specialists who don't use the generalities of the subject or generalists out of touch with the movements of the discipline. A project where Cornell University graduate students in biomedical engineering help secondary school teachers develop new lessons "will also help teachers focus on interdisciplinary ways of teaching science, moving away from the traditional hard lines drawn between such fields as chemistry, physics, and biology." (Ju, 2009)<bibref>Ju:2009BME-Grad-StudenAA</bibref>
6. Study the nature of science, including theory-dependence of observation, tentativeness, social relevance, empiricism, etc. (See NSES.) For an example of research on the teaching of the nature of science, see Carol Smith and Laura Wenk (2006).<bibref>Smith:2006Relations-amongAA</bibref> Hodson (1986) calls for teachers to examine the curriculum to check for content incompatible with modern philosophies of science. (p. 222)<bibref>Hodson:2004</bibref> Defining the nature of science, Lederman (1998) is helpful.<bibref>Lederman:1998The-State-of-ScAA</bibref> The American Association for the Advancement of Science tries to make clear that science concepts should not be taught without accompanying "habits of mind." (AAAS, 1990, pp. 201-203)<bibref>Rutherford:1990Science-for-allAA</bibref>
7. Teach a "socially responsive" science curriculum. See an example from the Alaska Science Consortium, where the science is important to the local society and its important functions: http://ankn.uaf.edu/publications/handbook/index.html

Discussion

George DeBoer questions whether we can separate the impact of specifying content standards from the impact of accompanying standardized tests. (in Sunal, 2006, pp. 30-31)<bibref>Sunal:2006The-impact-of-sAA</bibref> Research to answer that question might look at whether any impact can be measured between the time standards are specified and tests are required. Here in New York State, there was an eight year delay between the publishing of new standards and a graduation requirement for science tests.

Dennis Sunal and Emmett Wright undertook a fascinating survey in 2004 of Alabama teachers, finding that some teachers considered the state tests (18%) and textbooks (8%) to set the content-standards for their classrooms.(Sunal 2006, p. 132)<bibref>Sunal:2006The-impact-of-sAA</bibref> They also found that most teachers see the state science standards as content-only standards, not pedagogical or implementation guides. (p. 147) But those teachers who were trained to use the state science standards were more adept at describing classroom activities that would be considered "inquiry learning" as opposed to "transmission learning." (p. 148) In conclusion, they find that a quest for excellence as required by the 2002 No Child Left Behind legislation, in focusing on accountability standards over learning standards, acts against the the national standards focus on science for all, on equity. (p. 149)

Pedagogical Reforms

Here are some of the many reforms in teaching and innovative approaches to the classroom, most which we studied in Innovative Teaching in the Sciences. For each reform, I examine whether there are any special compatibilities or possibilities for each of the curriculum reforms mentioned.

1. Inquiry or guided inquiry. Erin Marie Furtak (2006) shows how different teachers wrestle with allowing students to ask their own questions and to seek their own answers. If students are not choosing their own variables, not deciding what to control, not bringing their own theory to the table, and not linking claims and counter-claims to data, then they are not using inquiry.<bibref>Furtak:2006The-Problem-witAA</bibref>
   1. Inquiry should be very compatible with the goal of studying less topics more deeply, for two reasons. First, students will need time to practice inquiry to approach any topic; second, inquiry itself is an important topic, rarely taught. Consider this from Norman Lederman:

      Inquiry...can be viewed as a set of skills to be learned by students and combined in the performance of a scientific investigation. It can also be viewed as a cognitive outcome that students are to achieve...Current wisdom advocates that students best learn science through an inquiry-oriented teaching approach. It is believed that students will best learn scientific concepts by doing science. Int his sense, 'scientific inquiry' is viewed as a teaching approach used to communicate scientific knowledge to students (or allow students to construct their own knowledge) as opposed to an educational outcome that students are expected to learn about and learn how to do. Indeed, it is the pedagogical sense of inquiry that is unwittingly communicated to most teachers by science education reform documents, with the two former senses lost in the shuffle.<bibref>Lederman:1998The-State-of-ScAA</bibref>

   2. For students to invest in an inquiry, it may be argued that social connections between the expected learning and the students must be made clearer. Thus, the introduction of more relevant topics may go hand in hand with learning about inquiry and through inquiry.
   3. Some hope that inquiry-styled activities will provide better ways to focus on essential topics in the curriculum, while some (certainly some of my students) see "affective" work in inquiry as a distraction from the essential concepts. More promisingly, inquiry itself is proposed by some as one of the essential topics we should cover.
   4. Inasmuch as a mandated "Core Curriculum" includes concepts and methods of inquiry, they are compatible. The trick is to get teachers to see this part of the standard curriculum as important as their subject knowledge, which they may see as independent of inquiry.
   5. Teaching students that their inquiry is dependent on their theories and social issues should be a great way to teach better the nature of science. This would require teachers to treat the students as practitioners of science, otherwise the teachers will show that they think knowledge separate from students, anathema to the social nature of science.
2. We should offer more computer aided simulations and microcomputer-based laboratories. For example, Redish, Saul, and Steinberg (1996) find that microcomputer-based-labs help with the standard content of introductory physics.<bibref>Redish:1997On-the-effectivAA</bibref> But I haven't seen how such a reform would help curriculum reform, perhaps because all the instruments used to study effects only measure canonical concepts. Still there is promise in researching how well this pedagogical reform might aid curricular reform:
   1. Since it is easy to analyze results and activities on the computer, instructors can use computer-based classwork to more quickly get to the deep parts of topics.
   2. Computer simulations and labs, since much of the activities is managed by software, which is easily transferred between schools, allow the rapid spread of an instructional unit. The dilemma is that this can serve both to allow the rapid dissemination of new curricula and to allow the rapid homogenization of some curricula. Miri Barak (2006) shows how using 3D models in chemistry courses and computer-aided information-accession allows students to be trained in modern research processes. (In Mintzes et al, 2006)<bibref>Mintzes.etal:2006</bibref>
   3. Computer-aided classwork might be made and distributed to help focus courses on essential topics, while providing the instructor with performance data to quickly address need-to-know concepts.
3. We can start teaching what we don't yet know. Discussed in a book "Teaching what you don't know" by Therese Huston (2009), this is the situation where experts in their subject are teaching something new to themselves. <bibref>Huston:2009Teaching-what-yAA</bibref> Although this situation may merely be an expedient for schools that can't find a teacher for a new subject, I will consider it here as a reform, since it will be required when we want to teach new curricula.
   1. Teaching new-to-everyone topics seems quite compatible with the depth-before-breadth reform in curriculum. If a class is expected to explore a topic for longer than in a traditional survey course, everyone, including the teacher, is given the opportunity to explore how best to learn the topic.
   2. One benefit of teaching new topics is described by John Bean, professor of English at Seattle University, quoted by Huston: "Each time I've taught a literature course I've wanted to have different readings. The teaching that I try to do is not simply the expert giving information to the novice; I'm teaching them how to make knowledge out of stuff that's confusing." (p. 12) Can we apply this idea to science education? It might be argued that the sequence of topics in physics is too strict to allow much change in topics, but I would like to explore the argument against such a restriction.
   3. Teaching new topics would be part of physics, chemistry, earth science, biology, and technology teachers in high schools breaking down subject-divisions. When high school classes learn about modern disciplines from visiting scientists, field trips, web pages, etc., they glimpse life outside the traditional bounds.
   4. The nature of science is itself a topic new to most teachers; although they've seen it in standards-documents and readings for their masters degrees, they haven't taught it explicitly.
   5. Teachers may be more willing to explore new topics when they are demonstrably more socially relevant.
4. We should use student-generated questions. If we allowed students to pose questions in the field of the course, they might generate novel areas of research or approaches to a question. Huston (2009) suggests that leading students in a course "that involves reading primary sources, evaluating their claims, and constructing new interpretations" would be a better springboard for a professor's research. (p. 34)
   1. If we made explicit to our students our reasons for this effort to more open inquiry, they might learn more of the nature of inquiry and understand a new set of expectations of themselves as scientists.
   2. Student-generated questions may force us to cross borders around traditional subjects, and they may lead to new topics, depending on boundaries we set in the classroom. Think of how proud of students we are when they say, albeit rarely, that they appreciate what they learned in a previous class because it is applicable in ours. Doesn't that mean that we should prepare students to make connections between our subject and their future subjects? Instead, we arrogantly think of the centricity of our subjects as implicit and unquestionable. I have repeatedly heard physics teachers declare that Newton's Laws are behind everything in the world, and that physics allows a small collection of laws to explain everything. Hubris indeed.
5. We should measure more often with standardized tests, using careful inter-rater reliability.
   1. Standardized tests might help with getting courses to cover less content better, if the standards distill their conceptual array.
   2. But, they will have negative effects on the study of new topics, since they will lag the cutting edge of curriculum. They will re-establish a canon at the expense of the diversity of learning any nation needs for its citizenry, its workforce.
   3. Standardization, if declaring the cultural importance of specific concepts, values the universal over the diverse, and thus lacks social responsiveness. A more careful standardization might identify a plethora of achievements that would meet the same standard level. It is difficult, however to be specific enough about science and still allow this plethora. But a look at the diversity of successful PhD dissertations shows that a single level, Doctorate, can be applied to a universe of skills, knowledge, and accomplishments.
6. We measure students with concept inventories before and after instruction. Also see Heady (2001) on learner gains instruments.<bibref>Heady:2002Gauging-StudentAA</bibref>
   1. Such inventories may be part of an unintentional delay tactic to put off curriculum reform by doing better with the traditional curriculum. The most common such instrument in physics education research (PER) is the Force Concept Inventory. (Hestenes, 1992)<bibref>Hestenes:1992Force-Concept-IAA</bibref> An instrument that was specific to a local curriculum wouldn't be of much use to the PER community, just as a locally-knowledgeable textbook wouldn't be a universal best-seller. This is a tragedy, but mentioning it to researchers or textbook writers only puts them on the defensive.
   2. We could imagine a universal system that helped to generate locally-specific concept-inventories, which would allow researchers in diverse places to compare testing methods, if not results.
   3. Concept inventory pre-tests and post-tests allow educators to measure gains in conceptual understanding, but may only help with the learning of concepts for which inventories are published. This may serve to measure how to learn some concepts more deeply, but will, like standardized tests, impede the movement towards new topics or student-chosen curriculum.
7. Students and teachers should generate mind maps and concept maps.
   1. Such views of the constructed frameworks of knowledge and understanding among students may help us more quickly address the essential content, or reach the depth required in a depth-over-breadth curriculum.
   2. Concept-mapping might help us draw connections across borders between the traditional subjects.
   3. Concept maps may be compared to maps of standardized curriculum, making possible a new measure of progress towards learning standards.
8. We should teach the nature of science.
   1. Is the point of a high school physics course to help students be able to predict when a ball will clear the back fence, or to help students be more intelligent about how physical science is developed? A statewide test appears to give a different answer than a statewide standards document. If we need to reduce the amount of required concepts in standards documents, in favor of allowing students to work on essential concepts so well that they learn them well, it will be difficult to defend teaching the nature of science against sacred cows of rote knowledge.
   2. If science is itself, by nature, socially responsive, then we might spend more time with students exploring, not just telling them, this aspect. We might even ask the students to find more of their own links to the scientific endeavor.
9. We should create learning communities. Learning communities are described in Crawford, Krajcik, and Marx (1999) as learners who collaborated and used a process of inquiry to "find solutions to authentic problems or questions." (abstract) <bibref>Crawford:1999Elements-of-a-CAA</bibref>
   1. Teaching inquiry goes part and parcel with learning communities. Sharing ideas and information is central to the work of practicing scientists. We might go so far as to make explicit such action, telling our students that when they share ideas and information, they are more like scientists.
   2. If teachers from multiple subjects begin their own research communities at their schools, they may act as models for students to break the barriers of subject-divisions.
10. Offering science for all instead of weed-out courses. Sheila Tobias (1990) examined students who were excellent but removed themselves from scientific paths because of unfriendly introductory courses.<bibref>Tobias:1990Theyre-not-dumbAA</bibref>
    1. Currently at larger colleges we commonly have three tracks of physics classes: One for majors, where students are pushed hard but also cared for, one for other sciences and engineering, where students are pushed harder and cared for less, and one for non-scientists, where students are guided towards the more interesting and timely subjects in a less threatening way. In the class for other scientists and engineers, we find the most topics crowded together. Majors can put off some topics for later courses, and non-scientists supposedly have no need for a complete survey of topics, so courses for them are more amenable to a depth-not-breadth curriculum. Could a course for engineers and other scientists be deeper and less broad? I don't know, this is so far from the norm, and nobody to my knowledge is considering it, despite groans at how big the textbooks are getting.
11. We should use open inquiry labs.
    1. Donald French and Connie Russell (in Mintzes et al. 2006, pp. 203-211) developed open inquiry labs partly to help teach the nature of science and the process of inquiry.<bibref>Mintzes.etal:2006</bibref> Typical concerns about losing guaranteed exposure to specific concepts weighs against exposure to concepts about the nature of science and lab-work. If teaching more about the nature of science is seen as one of our curricular goals, rather than just a pedagogical goal, then those concerns lose weight.
    2. To better teach the nature of science, we might show how our theories and instruments affect each other. For example, to read about how clock-related instrumentation is closely related to the theory of relativity, see Peter Galison's Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's maps (2003).<bibref>Galison:2003Einsteins-clockAA</bibref>
    3. French and Russell also report that their open inquiry labs removed a gender difference of participation that existed in traditional verification labs.

Some pedagogical reforms with no clear links to curriculum reforms, yet

1. Hire Lecture Facilitators. See French and Russel (2001).<bibref>NSTA:2002Innovative-techAA</bibref>
2. Have students publish or create something.
3. Use peer instruction exercises (see chapter 5 of Huston, 2009).
4. We should try sometimes teaching in teams.
   1. My own experience in team-teaching has helped me learn to teach new subjects, and helped my colleagues in other subjects see how physicists approach problems.

General conclusions

1. Just as scientific theories are inseparably mixed from instrumentation and procedures, pedagogy that utilizes new equipment and new procedures will emphasize certain content beyond the traditional curriculum that depended on traditional equipment and procedures.
2. Inquiry is limited when teachers approach it as merely a pedagogical tool to help transmit a required set of content. Inquiry is a curriculum and a pedagogy, it is both the way students may learn and something for them to learn. Presently, inquiry is often used as a pedagogical method to teach known content that will certainly appear on a mandated test. Perhaps such tests will need to measure the inquiry-related skills and understanding of students more directly before inquiry itself will be seen as something that needs to be taught.
3. Most pedagogical reforms, carefully applied, can help curriculum reform. However, we have a history of trying to apply most pedagogical reforms to the same old content.
4. Some pedagogical reforms are tied to the canon through their instruments. Those instruments should be examined, and the topical choices questioned.
5. We might follow Sheila Tobias' lead and begin to question students attitudes towards the curriculum, at first leaning away from questions about the pedagogy.
6. Pedagogical and curriculum reforms are ready for many venues, from large college courses to intimate school-rooms, from labs to computers.
7. Our openness to better ways of teaching might lead to an openness to better things to teach.

References

See Week 10 notes on Donald French's 2006 paper. <bibreferences />