Education Week - February 8, 2017 - 6

Scientists Playing New
Roles in K-12 Learning
By Sarah D. Sparks
As schools work to implement the
Next Generation Science Standards,
practicing scientists are also rethinking how they work with schools to
advance understanding of their field.
The National Board on Science
Education, part of the National
Academies of Science, brought together science educators and members of professional science groups
like the American Chemical Society
last month to discuss guidance for
developing partnerships between scientists and teachers.
"Almost all practicing scientists
were trained in a system designed to
keep people out," said David Evans,
the executive director of the National
Science Teachers Association, noting
that during the first week of class,
college science lectures often include
grim predictions of how many students will drop out. "Now we know
[science education] is much more
important than just who will get a
job in a STEM field. Everyone needs
to know how to look at evidence and
engage in the practices of science," he
said. "The encouraging thing is there
has been a real movement in recent

years among young scientists to really participate more and give back
to the community in K-12."
The discussion comes as several
winners of this year's Presidential
Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers plan projects to
draft curriculum and materials for
the science standards, which were
developed by 26 states based on a
framework by the National Research
Council. The awards are the highest
federal honor for scientists at the
start of their careers, and they have
recently given particular weight to
researchers who partner with educators to improve STEM education.

Physical-Science Progression
The next-generation standards
widen opportunities for science-educator partnerships because they represent new approaches to scientists
working with schools.
They call, for instance, for better
integration of teaching scientific concepts with the daily procedures and
practices of science.
Alicia Alonzo, an associate professor of physics education at Michigan
State University and a 2017 early-

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Standards help spur collaborations

career-award winner, has been working with teachers to reimagine learning progressions for a traditional 9th
grade physical-science course.
"In general, the teachers [I work
with] are wrestling with how to incorporate practices into what they
are teaching," she said. "They are
used to teaching content, with labs
happening on a separate day to demonstrate content that has already
been taught."
Instead, Alonzo and a group of
seven teachers are reshuffling the
progression for learning about force
and motion, so that students will explore the concepts on their own and
then build on their findings. As the

teachers work through their lessons,
Alonzo interviews their students
and assesses them every other week,
passing feedback to the teachers on
how students are thinking about the
concepts and what they do in class.
In the process, Alonzo said she has
also moved from prescribing how
teachers use learning progressions
in class to helping teachers use them
explore student learning.

Cultural Connection
Shawn Jordan, an engineering researcher at Arizona State University
and a director of the STEAM Labs
Center for K-12 Research and Engagement, is working with teachers
in a local Navajo community to develop a curriculum for tribal middle
schools that ties science and engineering to students' cultural history
and community problem-solving.
(STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, arts, and math.)
The curriculum has evolved out of
summer camps in which students
wrote epic stories about simple
tasks and then worked as a class
to create Rube Goldberg-style machines to act them out. "It's trying to
flip and put culture on the front end
and make that the design constraint
for the product, rather than having
the technical side drive the lesson,"
Jordan said.
One unit to be piloted in schools
this spring, for example, teaches size
and scale by exploring four sacred
mountains and finding ways to measure and model them. From there,
students design and test scale models
to solve community problems, such as
creating portable corrals for managing livestock.
"It lets students learn content related spiritually to their culture and
use engineering to improve their
quality of life at home," Jordan said.
The first units of the middle school
curriculum will be tested in three
schools next month, then evaluated
and eventually built out into a full
physical science and engineering
course.
Working with Navajo educators
and students has made Jordan "reflect deeply on what my role should
be ethically and morally as a researcher," he said. "Often, researchers
and engineers will approach working
with communities as a helicopterdrop model. We will come in and
think we can make a huge difference

Shawn Jordan, right, an
engineering researcher at
Arizona State University, takes
part in a teacher-training event
in Flagstaff.

by bringing in our knowledge and
giving them all the answers. But that
is a cultural disrespect. At the end of
the day, this is a partnership, exploring the intersection of Navajo culture
and engineering design."
Though there's a long tradition
of scientists reaching out to schools
before these newer pushes, "it's not
always been a happy history," the
NSTA's Evans said. Scientists are
often enthusiastic about their fields,
but many are not skilled at communicating to a nonscientific audience, particularly young students, he said. And
scientists working with schools can
go astray if they try to make the new
standards fit the areas they want to
teach, rather than working with teachers to craft lessons systematically.

Growing a Partnership
Inviting a teacher to be part of her
lab has helped Andrea Sweigart, an
assistant professor of genetics at the
University of Georgia in Athens, become a better teacher herself, she said.
Mary Bradley-Bailey, a veteran
biology and physical-science teacher
at the nearby Cedar Shoals High
School, has worked for the past two
summers at Sweigart's genetics lab
as part of Georgia's science internship program for teachers. The lab
lesson was designed to study a genus
of wildflower capable of growing in
harsh environments, including salty
beach sand and soil contaminated by
heavy metals.
Sweigart and Bradley-Bailey are
writing a curriculum to use hybrid
lines of the flowers to teach high
school students about both botany
and plants' adaptation to environmental pressures.
Teachers and scientists need to
lay out clear expectations for what
each wants students to learn, and
how those relate to the larger science
framework, Sweigart said. "The reality is a lot of students have never
really looked at a plant before, don't
know what a control group is," she
recalled. "My original plan for activities was more like something for an
advanced-biology class. I've learned a
lot more about what students need to
learn basic scientific design."

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Education Week - February 8, 2017

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