Practicing Science TOGETHER. That’s right, I said “together.”

When learners struggle to engage/experience science using the modalities presented, the presentation should not get MORE 2-dimensional and boring.

Background

I walked in the door at a Title I public high school in 2010 with mostly science research experience. I knew that I would need guidance. Luckily for me, some of the best educators in the business greeted and invited me to walk alongside them. I learned that relationship was more important than content or “behavior management,” that it was okay to take it easy and just enjoy the students, and that the kids weren’t “struggling” with the content of the class, per se.

I was teaching IB Biology 1 and 2 at the same time that I taught “on-level” Environmental Science. It was a class that was largely a science credit for those who seemed unlikely to engage, enjoy, or participate in science and likely wouldn’t graduate because of it. Class size ranged from 28-35. This is where the struggling learners were placed. Also, I often co-taught Environmental Science with a Special Education teacher who was concurrently coaching football early in the morning and late into the night. Sometimes they had been History teachers at their previous schools.

I remember a key moment and a specific student (who turned out to be struggling primarily with morning sickness and other stresses of an unplanned pregnancy) that I could not imagine passing my class. As I talked to my colleague about how to make the content “easier” I finally said, “I don’t think it’s a matter of making it easier. I feel like if I stuck a post-it to her desk, told her to write her name on it, and put it on the whiteboard for a grade, she wouldn’t do it.” The problems in that classroom were many and the solutions were few. I was not the one who knew what to do, that’s for sure. My point is that we seem to assume that struggling learners aren’t grasping the content and that if we make the content more simplistic that will help. In my experience, it’s rarely the case that the learner is authentically experiencing the content and needs more time or steps that are more broken down or smaller words or bigger boxes or different fonts. The thing is that they aren’t experiencing science at all for one reason or another.

I have since spent a lot of time figuring out how to get kids to pass my class. I have taught Science in institutions of learning at many different levels. I’ve also experienced science with all kinds of terrific learners including 5th graders who could do all the science practice I’ve ever hoped to do. Because science isn’t actually an advanced skillset. Making observations, asking questions, and manipulating systems to try to answer those questions is something toddlers do. So why are we setting teachers and students up to fail by pushing this super verbal, super calculations-based content to roomfuls of human beings whose lives are complicated and who truly don’t need to know the phases of mitosis? Anyway, I’m off-track.

So, what do we try next?

Here, I have laid out some of my favorite activities on a coordinate plane wherein the Y-axis is verbal to multisensory and the X-axis is analytical to creative. Note arrows indicate a change that pushes the activity along the axis:

Learners also fall along a spectrum from verbal to multisensory in terms of their preferred/strong ways of learning, responding, thinking, processing. The same spectrum exists between analytical and creative. Age is correlated, but not determinate. It doesn’t have all that much to do with the topic we’re trying to learn, and we can change from day to day. I plan to make lessons that fall on these two spectra at different places and to provide response opportunities that can be adjusted along the axes to accommodate different learners.

Example

In the weather unit I designed for my angel baby cousins (three little people with pretty widely varied learning/response modalities): Each activity can go creative/multisensory or verbal/analytical. An evaporation activity that involves describing a shrinking puddle on a sunny day can be described with a meter stick, a chalk outline, a series of handprints, or by time-lapse photography. It can get more verbal/analytical with more measurements of more variables and/or a lab write-up that involves drawing/describing the system, listing variables, choosing variables to control/change, comparing to existing science, researching the people who study evaporation, etc. (Stay tuned for how my angel baby cousins enjoyed their unit.)

Broader implications

This is the idea of the “one room schoolhouse” model: In a classroom with learners of different strengths (which is actually every classroom with more than one learner), we don’t pass out vocabulary worksheets to students whose heads are on their desks. (Because, why? What’s the point? That’s not the same as the experience they’re missing.) We don’t dismiss learners who don’t pick up a pipette to dribble water on the lab bench. (This isn’t their problem to solve. It’s the educator’s, arguably.) We provide actual authentic experiences that include everyone and then we look for ways to recognize diverse responses. (Disclaimer: I get that all of this rhymes with the idea of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). I would argue that the differences in nuance are important and, also, that the ideas are compatible. Hopefully time and the various platforms on which I present will clarify what I’m bringing to the table.)