Focus Ch. 6: Science

Focus Ch. 6: Science

It is interesting to me that this chapter from Schmoker goes against many things I was taught in a college Science pedagogy class but actually makes me feel better.  I took a class where we learned all about doing science experiments with kids and coming up with labs.  The emphasis was that Science is best learned by doing.  The professor was energetic and had us doing all sorts of fun things and when we developed our own experiments we had a whole lab of equipment to use to design anything.  Then when I began teaching in my own classroom, reality changed.  I found that the Science kits were normally pretty picked over, missing, not restocked, and coordinating a science experiment was a lot of work on my shoulders preparing, buying or borrowing things, and setting it all up since there wasn’t much of a Science curriculum to follow.  I tried many times to send out a list of what types of things we would need for a Science unit but very rarely got parents to donate anything.  I always felt guilty for not doing enough Science inquiry. Planning for Science was always something that stressed me out and made me feel inadequate as a teacher teaching multiple subjects it took more plan time to coordinate than I had available.  So when I read Schmoker’s chapter on Science I realized that I didn’t need to feel guilty for using the textbook, picture books, writing and research and putting more of an emphasis on literacy with Science.  Students have to have a firm foundation in the material before they can do an experiment and “get it” and be able to use higher level thinking about the concept.  Now I still think you can do demonstrations or other things to pique student interest and inquiry is important to include but it doesn't need to be every day for every concept.  After reading Schmoker, I know that teaching Science from reading is what students need also and is what high Science performing countries do also. 

Another thing that frustrated me about Science, in particular, is it seemed like the content area where teachers just teach units on whatever they enjoyed teaching or whatever they have materials to teach (since there are so few materials).  My first few years of teaching I felt like my students had a mishmash of units on penguins, the rainforest, whales, hurricanes, etc.  It felt like, as Schmoker discusses on page 168, that students knew “a lot of disconnected facts”.  I think that with our move towards common standards that this will make it easier for teachers to teach what they need to for their grade level---things are seeming to get better in regards to alignment which I think will help students not have a hodgepodge of Science units that are different from another student in another class in the same grade.