EDUC 6470 Final Statement of Philosophy

Written for EDUC 6470. See the [Feb 10 2010 version] for what I first submitted to Professor Crawford.

My philosophy about teaching grew first in comparing my teachers in the fifth and sixth grades, their approach to individuals, to homework, and to reading. In high school, I recall several experimental methods my science teachers used, such as unguided student research and concept maps, along with recognized curriculum that was considered excellent, such as PSSC physics. I distinctly recall the self-separation of students into those that could handle and enjoy physics and those that could or would not. In college I recall the difference between physics courses for majors and those for others, such as class size and expectations. All this history I use as a base to think about my own philosophy of teaching, and teaching science.

Statement of Philosophy

Look to other subjects

I think science educators, including me, have a lot of reforms to consider seriously. First, something a bit more unique to my own philosophy, is to look for excellence in other subjects. As a member of a hiring committee for my latest school, I noticed that we had one to two applicants for each science position, but about ten for each english position. It stands to reason that our selective process allowed us to choose excellent english teachers, but we were forced to hire whomever we could for science teachers. I hope, having been hired by such a school, that that process doesn't reflect too closely on myself! But, looking through books at educational bookstores, reading journals, reading through the LB section at Mann Library, anyone can see that as a society we have really thought long and hard about teaching english and mathematics.

More specifically, having collaborated with humanities teachers, their penchant for allowing the student to seek their own answers and to express themselves uniquely has rubbed off onto my philosophy. That brings me to student choice.

Student choice

The curriculum in physics is very narrow. It is considered a difficult and frustrating subject, often even disdainfully. Physics teachers often discuss how they need to sugar-coat the content to reach more students. (see #Relevance)

I have experimented with allowing each student in a class to study their own circuits or their own 2-D motion, and will never go back to whole-class labs for those subjects. It is conventionally recognized that students who feel they own their curriculum are more attached to that curriculum, more motivated, and perhaps retain ideas about it better. The first step in constructivist pedagogy is to allow students to build their own knowledge. The next step, obvious to me but not to all, is to allow students to choose, somewhat, their path, their curriculum. I posit that students will truly, if only partly, own their curriculum when they choose their subjects. I am aware that this goes against standardization of curriculum, but I argue that it serves standardization of achievement very well, that it helps students reach higher achievements than if they all have to be in lock-step.

Secondly, it is a way to achieve a more diverse curriculum, allowing students, courses, and schools across the world to learn more and become a more diverse workforce. But, workforce development isn't the highest goal of education, see #Education is part of life.

Diversity and standards

Diversity is always discussed in terms of making all different types of students learn the same thing. In this way, attention to diversity is intended to address achievement gaps and open pathways traditionally closed to diverse parties. While such is an important reform, I propose separately considering allowing all different types of students to study all different types of subjects, and different flavors of those subjects. This reform away from traditional, unidirectional paths would open new opportunities for all students. This may be called "lots of science for all" instead of "same old science for all."

Standardization, as it is applied to curriculum and especially to testing, discourages such diversity. Standardization has the noble goal of removing "lower tracks." Unfortunately, it has the outcome of proscribing tracks to many interesting and useful destinations.

All the different tracks should lead to high places, but not the same place. There are many high places, too many to offer a single curriculum to all of the 60 million students in America.

At the high school level, the written standards are beginning to diversify, as begun in the Benchmarks for Science Literacy and the National Science Education Standards. The de-facto standards, however, are the SAT-II, the AP tests, and the statewide tests, driven by an un-diverse, older crowd of leading educators who act defensively to preserve their fields in a zero-sum game.

Education is part of life

Education is part of life, rather than just preparation for life. I simply can't stand the idea that schools are factories to create "better citizens." It sounds so good to adults, but the students can sense that their in some kind of abattoir, and all caring teachers are doing is sanitizing the knives and the grates and making the slaughtering as painless as possible. Students should not be told that if they don't get an education, they'll be punished by being hired only at fast food joints. Instead, education is a privilege, and also an enjoyment. Lifers in prison seek education. Working adults in great occupations seek education. Retirees seek education; if so, then education is not just about preparing for something, but a basic part of the human endeavor.

Science is part of life

Science is part of the human endeavor, not something external to us that we must learn to apply to our lives. A scientist could be a research professor, an inventor, a patent officer, a miner, or even an elementary school student. Not understanding this, we bite our nails as a nation, worrying whether we are preparing enough scientists to compete with some other nation. By focusing too much on the goal, we miss the rough road between us and there. We take a path that some followed before, measure its effectiveness by its past performance, then force students down that same path, expecting the same outcome despite changes in the world and in the student bodies. Science is relevant and important not because of some intrinsic quality of what we study in science, for example the reasonable motion of a bicycle, but because we have studied what is relevant and important to us in history. Navigators studied the stars, warriors cannons, those with fancy new telescopes whatever those fancy new telescopes could discern.

It's telling that a preponderance of female engineering undergrads have an engineer for at least one parent. (see "All in the (engineering) Family? - the Family Occupational Background of Men and Women Engineering Students" Schreuders, Paul D., Mannon, Susan E. Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, vol. 13, Issue 4, p.20 http://www.begellhouse.com/journals/00551c876cc2f027,756e148b0eb48c4b,72d41fb4529b058f.html ). That supports that we study things for complex, social reasons, not simply because there's something interesting out there in the world and we're the first to notice it.

Science is part of the military-industrial complex, it is part of the patent process, it is part of dilettantish life, it is part of the boy scouts, it is part of dairy farming. It is not something completely separate from those things that is applied to those things. Not even string theory. String theory did not spring from nature into researchers' laps, it came from the post-WWII high energy research program, a system of multiplying and hiring nuclear physicists to stay on top of nuclear science in case it might reveal even worse weapons than the A-bomb and the H-bomb.

In Horace's Compromise, Ted Sizer calls science and math at the "beginner's level" all certainty. But if we separate the tentativeness of science out of lessons for youth, we subject those youth to the hubris of absolutes, and I wonder whether that makes it harder for those youth to accept that tentativeness when they encounter it. How often have we heard "2+2=4" as an example of the certainty of math. My answer is that 2+2=4 is not definitively math, it is a mere application of mathematical concepts, a slice of what one can do with math. Anthropologists study cultures without negative numbers or a word for zero; this shows that even math is a social construct, made to serve a purpose. Our purposes are tentative, thus the tools to serve those purposes are.

Physics provides excellent examples of the problem of the hubris of absolutes. For example, the most atomistic particles are discovered to be understood better as collections of even smaller particles. A photon is taught to be a particle or packet that travels from here to there, as a person might travel from Tarrytown to Poughkeepsie, stopping at a gas station in Peekskill. But a photon cannot be measured mid-flight, otherwise it is not the same photon at both ends. If we cannot measure the photon mid-flight, then how can it be said that there is a photon mid-flight? It doesn't empirically exist there. Students shouldn't have to wait to learn of these differences between truths and conventions until third semester in college.

So, science is largely a search for more useful and trustworthy conventions. Science education is an introduction to those conventions, and a training in the relevant methods. Science educators should be honest with their students what the purpose of science education is. I think we usually are, but we might sometimes put science on an altar, pretending it's rather separate from us.

Relevance

Physics teachers often state that they are making physics relevant by talking about skateboards and cars. There are several problems with the assumption that that is proper and that it works.

• Newton didn't care about skateboards or even ox-carts when he came up with Newton's Laws. He was thinking about Kepler's Laws, gravity, action at a distance, and the continuity of nature, time, and space. To discuss Newton's Laws and skateboards is not "making them relevant." It is applying them, and perhaps making the application more relevant.
• Most kids don't know how to ride a skateboard, have never ridden one. If our subject were more socially relevant, then we would be more socially in touch with our students lives and we might learn that very few of them know how to ride one.
• Making a rap song about physics can be fun and/or embarrassing, but it isn't necessarily making it relevant.

So, how do we make physics and students relate? Either bring the students to physics, or bring physics to the students. The first can be achieved by leading students down the same historical paths that made Newton interested in motion:Have students study planetary motion, and get to the point of appreciating how well Newton's laws help understand it. The opposite of this is done in classes: Students are forced to learn Newton's laws, almost kicking and screaming, and then told to apply them. Or, physics can be brought to students:Ask the students to choose inquiries that you know will lead to learning about the physical world. A physics classroom today uses many of the same inquiries Galileo used in the 16th and 17th centuries, but only because we are not allowing ourselves to be as inquisitive as Galileo about our own 21st century world. Galileo's tools led to Galileo's physics. The tools of our time should lead to the physics of our time.

A third option to make physics and students relate better is to demonstrate integration with other subjects. Historians study physics when they study physicists. Students shouldn't have to wait until college to learn some of the subtler lessons historians are learning about physics.

Constructivism

I don't see how anyone could argue against constructivism. Students learning is affected by prior learning and prior experience, period. Teachers make mistakes when they are unaware of students' backgrounds and existing scaffolds. I've personally experienced this frequently in my classroom. Constructivist inquiry takes more work in the classroom. It requires revisions to a syllabus during a semester. It requires the students and the teachers to come to new agreements during a course.

Constructivist inquiry can be very difficult because students accustomed to other methods will at first be uncomfortable with the teacher, especially if the teacher is modeling learning something for the first time, which is an excellent way to introduce constructivism to the classroom. I feel tense, but when it works, I rather enjoy learning something alongside the students. If I'm an expert in a subject, I need to step aside, often more than I ever do, to let the student find a working path to understanding. Physics teachers are known for hand-waving, a method of teaching that is the opposite of successful, where they say "thus and thus must be so" because "thus and thus." You've heard it enough to know what I'm describing.

Constructivist inquiry is well taught along with the oft-touted but rarely taught feature of scientific work, that observations are dependent on theory. Our theories are caught up in our technologies as well as in our previous frameworks. Revolutions often come from within, so dissatisfaction is fodder for good scientific work. Sometimes a teacher's job might be to breed dissatisfaction.

Reassess often

The students' thinking in science is never concrete. After a battle with a misconception we cannot post a "Mission Accomplished" banner, in part because our misconceptions are part of a complex framework of concepts, just as proper conceptions are, in part because our measurements are limited to modes defined by our pedagogy. We should seek different approaches to measurement, just as I think we should seek different approaches to teaching the same subject.

One interesting thing about authentic assessment is that it can be open to multiple paths. Since scientific concepts are caught up in complex frameworks, assessments can follow multiple paths, ranging from testing mathematical abilities to testing the making of analogies.

Achievement

What can be the meaningful measures of achievement in science education?

1. Students produce science.
2. Students alter the path of science. When students master science, they become leaders of it rather than slaves to it.
3. Students integrate science into their full lives. Science takes its proper part of society and the lives of those who practice it, used to serve the good goals of those people and that society.

Most so-called achievement tests are tests of technical skill, and serve to measure none of these. In a tautological way they merely predict how a student will be ushered into achievement in the future.

What is explicitly rejected from my philosophy

Recapitulation of historical science in science curriculum Basics must come before the ideas built on those basics. This was not the case during the reductionism of the 19th century, arguably the gestation period of modern physics, so why should we reduce reductionism to basics-first? Basics-first is not the mode in first-language education, and it robs the student of a meaningful and motivating structure of socially important knowledge to which they can attach the basic ideas. Furthermore, back-to-basics is a knee-jerk reaction against multi-culturalism, an ineluctable part of the information society.

What I tell my students about learning

"You don't have to do the homework/test/lab, you *get* to do the homework/test/lab." "You have to tell me what you're thinking more." "What questions do you have about this topic?" "You will see something in the future and think about this."

Some successes attributable my philosophy

A student who took my class as a high school junior mentioned in her exit interview at the end of her senior year that she distinctly recalled the value of a unit in electronics, where she freely chose and built a circuit, seeing it as part of science and science as a part of what she could do, even though she was going on to be an english major in college. Focusing on how particular students are thinking about a novel subject, I am able to create new activities that address niches in their understanding. Recently I added a lesson to a unit on stereoscopic photography where students generated their own rules for a proper stereograph, and the students built these rules into their own understanding before we even were able to express them in words. I will assess them authentically not by having them write or say the rules, but use them to consistently create proper stereographs.

References

National Research Council, National Science Education Standards. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1996.

Sizer, Theodore, Horace's Compromise. Boston:Houghton Mifflin, 1985.

Project 2061, Benchmarks for Science Literacy. Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993.