by Katie MacDiarmad

cientific inquiry” is one of those things I thought I knew how to do. I had taught middle school science and I’d worked several seasons of outdoor science school. I loved doing experiments with kids and I tried to incorporate them into my teaching as much as possible. I got into this field because of my love of doing science with kids. So I must have it down, right?

But as I researched ways to incorporate inquiry into environmental education for my “Trends in EE” class, I discovered that I still had a lot to learn. I slowly came to the realization that most of my attempts to “do science” with kids had actually been far too scripted to qualify as real science. I had followed the all-mighty “Scientific Method” because it was in all my textbooks. How could it be wrong? Besides, it was the only way I remembered learning science. As a teacher, I had tried to get kids to ask and then test their own questions (one of the key elements of “authentic” inquiry), but it had been extraordinarily difficult. The more I learned about authentic inquiry through my research, the more I realized that it didn’t have to be so hard.

Kids are naturally able to evaluate, critique, and defend their ideas based on validity and reasoning. They just need us to provide them with a meaningful context and some encouragement to begin “wondering.” When it comes to testing their own questions, the “tests” don’t always have to happen in the lab. One of the articles I read pointed out that, while “school science” nearly always includes testing one variable in the lab and controlling all others, many real scientists don’t work this way. Field biologists engage in descriptive and comparative studies. They build models and do surveys. The reason I had found it so hard for my students to investigate their own questions was that I was trying to squeeze all of their questions into a narrow mold. My research on scientific inquiry showed me a new way.

I’m not the only teacher who struggled to incorporate inquiry into the science classroom. Inquiry requires a subject interesting enough that students want to ask questions about it. It’s even more likely to be successful if students feel their investigation will make a difference in their world.  Environmental education can provide both of these things, since nature provides an endless amount of complex subject matter and plenty of unsolved environmental issues. For this reason, I believe we can increase our students’ scientific literacy by incorporating environmental education into science classes at all levels. At the same time, inquiry is a sure way to develop traits essential to environmentally literate citizens. Inquiry can nurture an interest in natural systems as well as an understanding of their complexity. At the same time, inquiry develops the agency, critical thinking, and collaboration skills that are so desperately needed to move our students from knowledge to action. Authentic inquiry and environmental action are natural partners.

All this new knowledge makes me feel pretty guilty about my scientific method past. But I pledge, from here on out, to look beyond the textbooks to where the real learning happens.  I am thrilled to be part of a team designing an inquiry framework for our Fall in the Field outdoor science program. And of course, I plan to incorporate inquiry into my student teaching lessons as well. I look forward to the next steps in my inquiry journey and I can’t wait for the discoveries to come.

Visit the SEECing Natural Discovery website at http://seecing.wordpress.com/

Share on Facebook

Part 20: Beginning at the Beginning

by Jim Martin, CLEARING guest writer

n the last blog, we looked at planning an inquiry unit from the perspective of a student display, isolating the parts of the display and tracing them backwards. Now, let’s start at the beginning, and look at the inquiry unit as a scope and sequence. Until you’re comfortable taking your students out into the real world, it’s easy to forget some of the details in this kind of work until you’re on site, or waiting by the school for a bus you haven’t ordered. It happens!

It’s difficult, in the blog’s format, to construct a scope and sequence using a long timeline, so we’ll do it as a narrative. You might practice laying the parts out on a timeline, at least mentally, as the visual feedback often suggests things to do that you won’t notice as you read a narrative.

Our reed distribution inquiry began with the Casual Observation. At least, as written. However, just getting to the site means you’ve ordered a bus and substitute, have talked with your students about safety, given specific directions about clothing and lunches, sent permission slips home for parents to sign and return, looked for equipment students might need, prepared student logs so they can record their experiences, done a preliminary site visit yourself, and prepared the substitute’s lessons.

On a time line, these would line up on the left under a heading, “Casual Observation.” They would be on the left side of this column. On the right of that column, you would list the things students will do. For instance, they will need to know something about the site they will visit, and, in general, what they will be doing there. You’ll need to organize reference materials the class will need when they return, and decide which references you will carry to the site. All before you board the bus. So your timeline would begin at least a month before you’re on that bus, headed toward your site.

The actual observation won’t take up much space on the timeline. You ought to give your students a tour of the site. Then have them follow prompts you give them, or just follow their own noses. At first, this will depend on your comfort level. Eventually, it will depend on your recognition of the potential embedded in a student’s ownership of the work and learnings.

Where we go from here depends upon your schedule. If you’re here for the day, then your students can move through all the pieces of the unit. If you are planning for two briefer field trips, then the timeline will look different, but most of the components should be the same. Because this is a linear unit, with each piece completed before moving to the next, the parts of the scope and sequence will be similar, but the days won’t.

When students have completed their casual observation, you might have them share what they noticed. As students work, some may go to the references for information, others may not have thought of this, or are waiting. As you move around the site, some may ask for advice. Be careful not to tell them what they can find out themselves. A sentence that almost always works for me is, “Good question; how can you find out?” The number and kinds of questions students raise are mostly a function of their locus of control. Okay, let’s move to the Develop an Inquiry Question phase.

Before starting this phase, you should have samples of good and not so good inquiry questions for students to critique. Do you have them do this before, or after they have written two or three tentative questions? Again, this depends on your comfort level and teaching style. Because Assimilation is one of the main conceptual structures that underlie the organization and delivery of my curriculum, I like to have students write first, so they have concrete referents to use when we discuss the characteristics of good inquiry questions.

The process is simple, but takes time. Basically, students write and critique inquiry questions using the examples you provide until they have one or two they are comfortable with. Then, they assess these questions and develop a final inquiry question. You might introduce the concept of operational definitions if appropriate, and naming protocols, which are sort of operational definitions. (Use naming protocols for plants or animals whose names they are unsure of. Mine was, “Give it a name and use it until you have good reason to change it.” This seemed to work; relieves anxiety and reduces confusion.)

If you’re doing two field trips, you’ll want to check permission slips, equipment, bus, and sub. So, under Develop an Inquiry Question, you would just have something like Develop an Inquiry Question on the right, and Prepare Sample Questions and Assessment Criteria on the left, and if you’re doing two trips, check permission slips, etc., on the left. (You might have noticed that all of the items we’ve been adding fall into two groups, logistics and pedagogy. This could be a way to further clarify your scope and sequence.)

After students have developed their inquiry question, they need to Design an Investigation. This is always pretty straightforward; their question tells them what to do to answer it. The other items in this column might be safety reminders, prep the analytical math they’ll need to process their collected data, practice using tables to organize observations, and practice on any equipment they plan to take into the field. They are important, not so much to the design of their investigation as to the next item, Collect Data. However, this is the time, before they leave the school, to do this. Of course, you can move it to Collect Data. I like the idea of prepping these things as students are designing their investigations because they have an opportunity to integrate these concepts into their planning at a time when it makes sense to them.

The Collect Data column is short, unless you include the logistical pieces in it, like take the bus, arrive at site, go to stations, collect data, pull the work together, return to bus. Students ought to iterate safety rules before you release them into the site. After that, students do the work and return to school. By this time, they ought to be the well-oiled machine.

Back at school, they Analyze and Interpret their data. Now that they have concrete referents about data, this is a good time to review what they learned about tables and analytical math. Since student groups will move through this phase at different paces, show them what you want to include (but not be limited to) in their reports and displays, if they are making them. As questions arise, this is where you do targeted mini-lectures. Most classes will welcome a demonstration of the analysis of a hypothetical set of data, both the mathematical and graphical analyses and interpretations. If you’re weak in this area, and lots of us are, this can be a good learning experience for you.

After students have analyzed and interpreted their data, they prepare to Communicate it, the last heading in the scope and sequence. They should at least make a presentation to the class, complete with a poster. You’ve already briefed them on what to include in their display, and this is a good time to reiterate it. After all reporting is done, you ought to consider having the class summarize the meaning of all of the findings. You’ll find, over the years, that you’ll learn as much about teaching as they learn about environments.

This description of attempting to use a scope and sequence has generated a great deal of detail. More detail than you’d want on a simple timeline. You can take lumps of these details, give each lump a name that makes sense to you, and just name the lump. It will help build a better scope and sequence. Somewhere below these briefer descriptors you can jot down the details. (I’ve used spreadsheets to do this, since you can go as far to the right, and down, as you want.)

It may be time, while we’re engaging underlying structures, to examine their significance. Next time, we’ll do this, and discuss some of the reasons structure is significant.

This is the twentieth installment of “Teaching in the Environment,” a new, regular feature by CLEARING “master teacher” Jim Martin that explores how environmental educators can help classroom teachers get away from the pressure to teach to the standardized tests,  and how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula. See the other installments here, or search Categories for “Jim Martin.”

Share on Facebook

“Lessons for Teaching in the Environment and Community” is a regular series that explores how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula.

Part 19: Walking Backwards May Get You There

Working backwards is a good way to nail down understandings. It’s also a good way to test your students’ understanding of science inquiry.

by Jim Martin, CLEARING guest writer

e’ve been looking at inquiries as they go from beginning to middle to end. What might they look like if we start our inspection at the end of an inquiry, and trace it to its inception? Will it sound the same? Are there some insights lurking along the backward path? Retracing a path you’ve walked or driven often contains some surprises.

Let’s start with an end product, a two-panel cardboard display board sitting on a counter in the classroom. On its surfaces, students have written and illustrated their question and how they arrived at it, the design they built to answer the question, the data they collected, their analysis and interpretation of the data, and their conclusion about whether the interpretation answers the question. (That last piece is an easy one to overlook. Studies can take on a life of their own, and students sometimes forget why they started on their journey!)

Think of that display as a benchmark; the evidence that a student has mastered the learning it, the benchmark, encompasses. If you’ve ever used benchmarks to design the scope and sequence of a unit, you’ll know they do have good, practical, pragmatic uses. They tell you what you want to accomplish, and your scope and sequence tells you how they will get there. If you keep the benchmark in mind, you’ll find it easier to keep your scope and sequence focused, targeted on the benchmark. This is different from looking up a required benchmark and seeing if your lessons have addressed it, a common, ineffective, current pedagogical practice.

So, let’s take the last activity we described, a study of temperature and dissolved oxygen in the main and lateral channels of a stream. What do the writing and illustrations on the panels of the display tell you that students have to learn? Well, an obvious one is that they have to know how to organize a complex report. So you make Report Writing one of the topics to cover. To get to the final product, they have to be able to work in Effective Work Groups. This means you need to be working on building these well-oiled machines early on.

Moving back, they have to know how to Construct and Read a Graph for the information it contains, and Explain this Clearly in Writing. They have to know how to Refer their Interpretations back to their Question. And they have to have the capacity to engage in Critical Thinking in order to do this. This is one of the weak spots in education in the US. Getting the right answer on a multiple choice question isn’t critical thinking. My own questions of students and a number of studies show quite clearly that, no matter how well critical thinking would help make the right choice, students just look for the best answer, or choose between two likely answers. They don’t think unless you ask them to write their thinking on the test itself.

During their work, they will have to know how to Analyze Data. This means you’ll have to assess their competence in the math they’ll use for the analysis, and they’ll have to practice figuring out what the results of the math mean. Often, this means that we, the teachers, need to brush up on this. Not to mention the Outliers in the Data that they’ll have to make decisions about. Students are working with two measurements, temperature and dissolved oxygen. How do they analyze them? Deal with outliers?

Collecting Data is just a term, but it’s a big part of the work. Students will have to know how to Measure Temperature and Dissolved Oxygen. This means time in the lab, and the conceptual background to Understand the Relationship of one to the other, and to the lives of juvenile salmon. (Analogy to doing my budgets to find out what I’m really doing.) As they encounter problems, they’ll need to know how to Negotiate Meaning in a group. They’ll need to know how to Organize their Sampling; do they sample at the edge of each channel? Within the channel? How many measurements at each place they sample? Actual sites are very different from the lab. In the lab, everything is organized, and sitting just where it is needed, in its proper order. The real world is messy; until you’ve sampled in it a while, it can be a very confusing, disorderly place. Safety on the site: What Safety Rules do you have to discuss with the class and write down? The work: How do they divide the jobs?

Designing the Investigation; how do students go about this? If they’ve asked a succinct inquiry question, it will tell them what to do. They just list the steps the question calls for. This is usually the easiest part of the work to do. You simply need to get them started, then walk around and review what they’re talking about and writing down. You’ll find that their locus of control has moved within them, they exhibit all the characteristics of ownership of the learning. Plan for enabling your students’ locus of control and ownership of the learning, or it won’t happen in the clutch.

Asking a good Inquiry Question is probably the most difficult part of the work. After developing a question, students assess it. There are lots of assessment rubrics around. Here’s one I use, thanks to Norie Dimeo-Ediger and Berk Moss, who passed them on to me while we were doing institutes at the Oregon Zoo. A good inquiry question is: interesting to you, simply stated, observable, and doable. And one other, thanks to Mike Weddell – Ethical. (That last may not seem applicable to you until your students are disturbing plants, animals, and soils in ecosystems.)

The questions themselves are very difficult to arrive at until we’ve asked a relatively large number of them. This is partly because we haven’t lived our learning lives out in the world we evolved in. So we are a bit overwhelmed by the complexity we observe there, and subsequently ask very large questions. These large questions often begin with “Why.” Why do birds fly south in winter; how do aquatic organisms reduce pollution; why do leaves break up and decompose on the bottom of a pond; why did these trees grow the way they did here? These are what I call ‘umbrella’ questions. They don’t lead to one succinct inquiry which will answer them. Rather, they beg several to many smaller inquiry questions.

For instance, I might ask an umbrella question like, “Why do reeds grow in narrow bands along this river’s edge?” Think of answering ‘Why’ questions in this facetious way: Do I design a questionnaire, then go out and ask the reeds its questions? That’s a very common way to get an answer to a Why question. Or, I might take a different tack and ask the Why question what smaller questions might provide an answer to it.

Why questions and How questions are almost always umbrella questions, which can only be answered by sets of succinct inquiry questions. One inquiry question that might begin to answer my Why question about reeds might be, “Where, on a line from the water’s edge to a spot 100 meters up the streambank, do reeds live?” An answer to that should tell me what particular part of the reeds’ environment to question for an answer to my umbrella question.

A follow-up question might be, “What are the properties of the soil at the streambank’s waterline, the streamside edge of the reeds’ distribution, the streambank side of the reeds’ distribution, and soils at 10-meter intervals thereafter?” Not a succinct question, though. Not simply stated. That’s my cue to think about what I’ve just said. Thinking about it, I suddenly see that it’s more like a piece of a design to answer my inquiry investigation. I could make my inquiry question more succinct by simply asking about soil properties at 10-meter intervals from the waterline, or soil properties in the band of reeds, and on either side of the band. If I suspected soil moisture might contribute to the reeds’ distribution, I might ask, “What are soil moisture properties between the band of reeds and the stream, in the band of reeds, and 10 meters up the stream bank from the reeds?” I’ll continue with this one, but am still uneasy about the long predicate.

The time it takes to do this well is worth the expense. It’s key to doing inquiry. Work out your own way to do it; just be sure to do a quality job. And don’t forget, it takes lots of practice to get to the place where you routinely see something and ask a simple inquiry question about it.

Let’s assess this last question. First, is the question interesting to me? If I’d never seen reeds, the answer might be, ‘No.’ However, I have done a casual observation, and their tight distribution along the streambank came to my immediate attention. So, I’d say the question is interesting to me. Too often, students are given their question. Not a good way to make a question interesting.

Second, is the question simply stated? I say yes and no. It’s a long sentence, and I might spend some time thinking about how to shorten the description of where the soils are that I’m interested in. Perhaps I could change my question to, “How does soil moisture compare between the band of reeds and the rest of the streambank?” That way, my investigative design can do the work of describing just which soils I’m interested in. I like that; it is what I will do.

Third, is the question’s subject observable? Oh, yes. I find the soil, I dig, I test for moisture, I write down a number. Easy. Fourth, is answering the question doable? Well, that depends on how much time I have to do the sampling and testing, if I have the equipment, and if I can get transportation to the site. If those needs are met, then it’s doable, and I can get to work. If not, I’ll have to rethink my ideas.

It looks like my question has survived, and I can get to work. Earlier, I mentioned a casual observation. Let’s look at that now. You can’t ask an inquiry question without knowing something about the subject of your inquiry. It’s the weakest part of most publishers’ lab and field exercises. Many have the student write an hypothesis in the absence of experience, something scientists don’t do until they’ve thoroughly studied a phenomenon with many individual inquiries. The casual observation gives students an opportunity to get to know the subject well enough to ask an informed question of it. We owe them that much

When you send students out for their casual observation, and it’s their first such experience, you might think of giving them brief prompts like, Look for plants, Look where the water meets the land, or Look where plants live. Another thing to consider – students will be negotiating meaning while they’re doing their casual observation, and that tends to be best when they work in dyads, pairs. A third student will probably let the others do the work. At this point, it’s very important for each student to be closely involved in the work, and to be sharing thoughts with a partner. This is where the process of assimilation for understanding begins. If you can’t arrange the casual observation without one triad, then make sure each member is a good communicator.

Don’t tell your students specifics about what they are about to do, just what the next step is. Their brain has to do the learning. This is a toughie. We always want to help them, but this is learning they have to do themselves. And can.

We’ve walked through an inquiry from very end to beginning. Next time, we’ll bring this together to scope and sequence how the unit would work. See how it looks from beginning to end. This is a skill we all need to develop and use.

This is the nineteenth installment of “Teaching in the Environment,” a new, regular feature by CLEARING “master teacher” Jim Martin that explores how environmental educators can help classroom teachers get away from the pressure to teach to the standardized tests,  and how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula. See the other installments here, or search Categories for “Jim Martin.”

Share on Facebook

Developed by a diverse and collaborative statewide group, the effort resulted in a plan with three components: a conceptual framework; a K-12 scope and sequence; and connections to service-learning projects developed by teachers.

The conceptual framework identifies important forest concepts, the scope and sequence is a blueprint for when to teach the concepts, and the service-learning projects provide an instructional strategy for how to teach the concepts. The Oregon Forest Literacy Program, in essence, provides guidance on the “what,” “when” and “how” of forestry education.

The guide was made possible in part through a “Learn and Serve for Sustainability” grant from the Oregon Department of Education, jointly awarded to the Tillamook School District and OFRI. The Oregon Forest Literacy Program is available at Oregonforests.org, along with tools that correlate the forest-literacy concepts to Oregon’s science and social science standards, as well as to OFRI’s other educational materials.

Norie Dimeo-Ediger
Director of K-12 Education Programdimeo-ediger@ofri.org

Share on Facebook

By Jana Dean

was invited to speak here because I spend a lot of time with some of the funniest, most hopeful and energetic people on the planet: thirteen and fourteen year olds. While my official charge is to teach math and science concepts, my students learn best when I engage them with the forces that shape their lives.

One of the strongest forces confronting my students is ever increasing pressure to consume manufactured goods, in spite of a global environmental crisis. The U.S. advertising industry spends 150 times more a year marketing to children than it did when I was in high school. Rich or poor, the ads tell them, they have the freedom to buy: This comes in lots of forms: ipods; skateboards; shoes; game consoles; cell phones; purses; clothing. . . . and most recently, GREEN.

As though simply purchasing the right goods will solve our environmental problems. Granted, some consumer choices are far better than others. Better to drive a Prius than a Hummer, better a paper cup than Styrofoam, better fluorescent than incandescent. But to exercise stewardship only through consumer choices is an extremely limited stewardship indeed.

Finding solutions to climate change requires cultural transformation. The freedom to buy even if it’s green won’t get us out of this mess. We need a culture focused on collective decisions that remake our infrastructures and re-form the way we live and work together.

As a teacher, I have the power to lead youth to transform culture. Both climate change and systemic change are complex and can evoke paralyzing fear, making uniting across differences difficult. And yet uniting across socioeconomic, philosophical and political differences is just what needs to happen as humanity faces the global crisis. The public school classroom, with its forced diversity, can be a place to overcome fear and learn the power of collective action. As I tell you one teacher’s story of teaching about climate change, keep in mind that my classroom is a microcosm of the larger culture.

The first time I taught about global warming, I took my cue from my student’s textbook “Weather and Climate”. It was published by Prentice Hall in 2000 and devoted one page of its 175-page middle school science book to global warming. The language was vague:
“human activities MAY be warming the earth’s atmosphere
“if carbon dioxide traps more heat, the result COULD be global warming.”

The little bit that was there however presented an opportunity to make the connections necessary to plant some seeds for change.

I teach 8th grade in the small town of Tumwater, in Washington State. While mostly white, my students are socio-economically diverse. Our community – typical of small US towns — offers few private schools, and it has only two middle schools, both of which serve a similar mix of suburban and rural areas: Education is compulsory and I teach the wealthy students along with the poor.

This community is extremely dependent on carbon-releasing fuels. Housing prices and lack of public transit are to blame. Population growth in our county has been among the fastest in the nation and affordable housing has leapfrogged into the county’s rural areas while bus service has declined. Homes in the urban core have increased tremendously in value, farm and forest land in outlying areas provide for comparatively inexpensive new housing.

My middle school students are prisoners of an infrastructure that is not their invention. My students do not walk to school. Most of them cannot walk to school, nor can they ride bikes. Distances are too great and safe passage in crossing the interstate and busy boulevards is impossible given the constraints of daylight and the lack of sidewalks. Climate change demands that we transform fossil-fuel dependent infrastructures so that the next generation of Tumwater kids can get to school without driving.

Instead of using the single page devoted to climate change provided by our textbook, I presented my students the evidence about climate change: shrinking glaciers; increased wild fires; spread of malaria; more frequent flooding of coastal cities during storm events. We studied ocean currents, atmospheric convection and the volume of water at different temperatures and in different states. Scared by such drastic changes and the implication that their way of life was the problem, my students balked. Cody said, “What are you trying to tell me Ms. Dean? I can’t drive a truck?!” Just a generation ago Tumwater depended almost entirely on the woods for its economy. In Cody’s mind work means driving a truck, and thanks to the advertising industry, it means the freedom to drive the open roads of the West. He and his classmates expect to be able to drive a truck just like their fathers and grandfathers do. In learning about climate change, they felt scared and stuck and they didn’t like it.

My official charge as a public school teacher is to teach hundreds of isolated academic objectives, to be achieved, individually, by each of my students. Such schooling isolates subjects from one another and separates learning from the forces active in students’ lives. In the thirteen years since I became a teacher, this has gotten worse, much worse. Rather than creating an engaging, integrated, and rigorous context for learning, the current school reform effort charges teachers with tracking and assessing achievement of individuals. This focuses teachers on trying to make students better, without examining the dysfunctional system in which students find themselves. It’s kind of like buying a more energy efficient car and then moving 40 miles out of town for cheaper rent in order to make the car payments. When my students resisted learning about climate change, I could have dropped the subject right then and given a test. I didn’t.

Fear short-circuits critical thinking. I knew that we’d be more likely to be able to push through to more learning if we took the time to talk about how we feel: that way emotions and thoughts wouldn’t get so muddled up in each other. But in my experience, asking eighth graders to name their feelings can be like trying to get a stone to talk.

So I asked the class, “How many of you have ever had a time when things were going wrong and you felt there was nothing you could do about it?” Nearly every hand went up. In nearly every story they told, they were in trouble alone.

My students’ greatest asset in getting past their fear of climate change was right under their noses: They had each other. When my school was built about ten years ago, the state had promised smaller class sizes. I have room for about twenty-four students in my room. I usually have over thirty. From the first day of school I ask my students, “Why would you shoe-horn so many people into such a small space and not rely on each other?” Limited space and resources can force interdependence.

After students had shared their stories I reminded them “As we continue to learn about global warming, expect to be scared sometimes. In most of your stories you were alone. In the global warming story, we’ll have each other.”

I pressed my students to think past individual contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and consider what we could do together about global warming. We examined sources of CO2 and methane and the ways that the production of almost everything we consume relies on the burning of fossil fuels.

As students examined what it took to make the goods they consume, they chose to look at everything from apples to playing cards to computer consoles. Every item traced to carbon-releasing fuels. At one point Madeleine looked up at me from her study of apples and said, “But Ms. Dean, we have to eat.” Other students vowed to change their ways. Chandra smiled at me one afternoon and said “I’m going to plant a garden.” Ryan started limiting his family’s consumption of aluminum cans. At the same time, Katrina vowed that she still planned to drive a truck, with a carburetor and Luke announced, “Well you know Ms. Dean, I still want a car!”

I kept a list of climate change solutions sorted under the headings “I can . . .” “We can . . .” and “They can . . .” I wanted students to see what was within their power and control. They decided that the place where they had some power was in their school. And at that point, our school sent all of its waste to the landfill 150 miles away. They researched CO2 emissions from transportation and methane released from landfills and discovered that shifting the waste stream of our school from the landfill to recycling would make a difference. With help from the custodian my students designed a sustainable system and taught the rest of the school about the connection between waste and greenhouse gasses. They organized their community to behave differently. In the words of Cheryl, who is now a student at Tumwater High School, “Teaching everyone in our school about global warming was fun, but what was really cool was that we made change together. Even the other classes are into it.”

By itself, their collective action is not much, yet it represents the unification across socioeconomic, philosophical and political boundaries necessary to change our culture into one that can work together to remake infrastructures. My students experienced something revolutionary in a time of relentless emphasis of individualism. They learned that working together, and in spite of their fear, they could, in fact, create systemic change that meant more than individual choices alone. Since their initial effort, the system has sustained itself in spite of twice-over turnover in students and significant changes in staff. That is cultural change.

My hope is that the my students’ success as change agents will provide them with the mindset and tools to move their culture toward collective action. My hope is that their experience will support them in transcending the barriers, that keep us focused on individual choices rather than on the systemic changes needed to mitigate global warming.

Schooling needs to stop emphasizing individual achievement of isolated academic objectives and use the opportunity provided by shared time and space to transcend boundaries and work together to understand issues that deeply impact our communities. Teachers have the skills and students have the potential to make connections between what they learn in school and the rest of the world. As long as political forces continue to fragment academic subjects from each other and make talented teachers into managers of student progress, our schools will struggle to give us what that the world needs: citizens with the capacity to understand complex systems and unite with each other as agents of cultural change. Now, more than ever, we need less emphasis on individual achievement and the individual freedom to buy. Instead we need an ever deepening understanding of our interdependence and a renewed commitment to each other.

Jana Dean is an eighth grade teacher in Tumwater, Washington. She is the author of the article “Living Planet, Living Imaginations” that appeared in Clearing way back in 1993.

Share on Facebook

1. YardMap

YardMap is a free, interactive, citizen science mapping project about habitat creation and low-impact land use from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, designed to cultivate a richer understanding of bird habitat for both professional scientists and people concerned with their local environments.  YardMap uses web technology to let users construct landscape maps using real satellite images of their own backyard.  Map your yard, track birds, and measure your impact.

http://content.yardmap.org/

2. World Environment Day Contest

Students, teachers, classes, or schools across the globe participating in an environmental activity that involves students in grades K-12 are invited to enter their project into the Project Earth 2012 World Environment Day Contest.  The deadline for entry is June 5, 2012.

http://www.projectearth.net/Competition/Details/0b755bf6-7839-488d-a414-562465c18af9

3. Endangered Species Day

National Endangered Species Day is May 18, 2012.  The Endangered Species Day website features a Teacher Resource Center with sample science and art lesson plans, and more.

http://www.stopextinction.org/esd.html

4. Greening STEM Planning Toolkits

This five-volume set of planning toolkits is being offered free to educators in honor of this year’s EE week theme, Greening STEM: The Environment as Inspiration for 21st Century Learning.  The toolkits feature STEM activities and resources for all grade levels on Gardens & Schoolyards, Energy Efficiency, Geography Connections, Water Resources, and Climate & Weather.  The kits highlight opportunities for project-based learning, service-learning, and citizen science.

http://eeweek.org/greening_stem/toolkits

5. Journey North

Journey North has launched for 2012; explore the interrelated aspects of seasonal change.  Check out the free app for mobile phones and report your own observations.

http://www.learner.org/jnorth/season/

http://www.learner.org/jnorth/mobile/index.html

Share on Facebook

By Mary Quattlebaum

“We have a garden!  With flowers and butterflies!” The third graders beam as they describe their wildlife garden during my author visit to St. John the Baptist (SJB) School in Maryland.

I thought about their enthusiasm and the dedicated teachers and parent volunteer, Mary Phillips, I met that day as I researched and wrote Jo MacDonald Had a Garden (Dawn Publications 2012 – http://www.dawnpub.com/our-books/jo-macdonald-had-a-garden/).  How best to convey a child’s joy in digging and planting while offering teachers and parents helpful information on starting and/or teaching with a school or backyard garden?

These days, schools, such as SJB, can be the venues best positioned for nurturing a child’s wonder in the natural world.  I grew up with a dad who shared his curiosity about nature with his seven kids and umpteen grandkids and showed us how to garden.  (He’s the model for Old MacDonald, Jo’s grandfather, in my book, which is an eco-friendly riff on the popular song “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”)

But in today’s fast-paced, busy world and with diminishing green spaces, these “growing experiences” and “life lessons” may be missing from childhood.

Happily, SJB seems to be part of a national trend, with an increasing number of schools adding an “outdoor classroom” to the traditional learning environment.  At the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), Senior Coordinator Nicole Rousmaniere, who manages school programs, shared recent statistics.   More than 4200 schools have started schoolyard habitats that help sustain regional wildlife, she says, with an additional 300 to 400 being added yearly.

Rousmaniere emphasizes that commitment rather than size is the key to an effective “green education” from school gardens.  Small can be powerful.   Having children plant and care for native plants in containers or in a little patch beside a school can foster lessons in biology and stewardship.  Indoor “green” activities pique youngsters’ interest in learning and doing even more.  (Dawn has such activities online and in the back of all its children’s books, including Jo MacDonald Had a Garden.)

“Kids love a garden, but you’ve got to start them young,” says William Moss, a master gardener and horticultural educator.  Advocating for school and small-space gardening, Moss writes the popular “Moss in the City” blog for the National Gardening Association, hosts HGTV’s “Dig In” and is a greening contributor to “The Early Show” on CBS.

Just about any subject can be taught through a garden, says Moss, including science, math, natural history, geography, nutrition, reading and writing.

A garden offers hands-on and experiential learning, says Phillips, the parent volunteer who helped SJB’s science teacher to create the school garden three years ago.   Phillips has seen teachers use the garden to teach units on pollination, history, the food chain and the ozone.  Her blog www.theabundantbackyard.com showcases student art inspired by the garden and by the art teacher’s lessons on Georgia O’Keefe’s flower paintings.  An added bonus, says Phillips, is that the garden, in addition to enriching academic studies and creative expression, also stimulates the brain, enhances sensory awareness and gets kids outdoors for some exercise.

I thought of all these points so beautifully articulated by Moss, Phillips and Rousmaniere as I researched and wrote Jo MacDonald Had a Garden.   My hope, along with illustrator Laura Bryant’s, was not only to playfully introduce youngsters to wiggling worms, fluttering birds and growing plants but to make it easy for teachers and parents to build on basic lessons.

School gardens can be the start of a learning experience that grows over a lifetime.  As NWF’s Rousmaniere points out, just as schools teach the 3 R’s, so, too, they might provide a setting that connects children with and increases their knowledge about the natural world.  One of the most important lessons to learn young is stewardship, says Rousmaniere, the idea that we are all caretakers of the earth and its wild inhabitants.

Resources for Starting and Learning from a School Garden

William Moss, horticultural educator  www.wemoss.org
National Gardening Association www.kidsgardening.org
National Wildlife Federation www.nwf.org
Mary Phillips, school garden advocate www.theabundantbackyard.com

Mary Quattlebaum is the author of Jo MacDonald Had a Garden and numerous other children’s books.  She and her family enjoy watching the birds, bugs and other wild creatures that visit their urban backyard habitat.  www.maryquattlebaum.com

Share on Facebook

SOURCE: Wells, N. M., & Lekies, K. S. (2006). Nature and the life course: pathways from childhood nature experiences to adult environmentalism. Children, youth and environments, 16(1), 1-24.

Share on Facebook

Check out the creative and insightful work of students in Pauline Sameshima’s T&L 390 class at Washington State University. (Click on the image to see their individual reviews of K-12 teaching resources).

Share on Facebook

Part 18: Starting at the Top

Stand the hierarchy of cognitive functions on its head

by Jim Martin, CLEARING guest writer

earning to exploit the community and environment for your curriculum can be a confusing process. It can be less confusing if you apply the Learning Curve to the structural concepts we’ve been discussing – dimensions of inquiry, student-centered inquiry, effective work groups, etc. – because learning is a process, a developmental process. For instance, when you first start to develop effective work groups, both you and your students are learning them. Once learned, you’ll find that you have to keep in mind that you’ve got it down so well that it is easy to assume a new batch of students has too. To you, because you assimilated the concept, it seems more like common sense than learned content. The word, developmental, is an important one to remember. Lots of us don’t. We teach as if they already knew.

‘Structural concepts’ is a term that is useful to keep in mind. They help you stay on track in your teaching. I’m sure that, like me, you’ve found yourself in a favorite unit, straying away from the plan because where you’re going is such fun. If we keep those structural pieces in mind, we can attach the curricula we’re delivering to them. Some sheetrock here, a window there, and the deck in just this place.

One structural concept is Bloom’s hierarchy of cognitive function, which contains several levels, named and then described: Knowledge – observation and recall of information; Comprehension – understanding information; Application – use information, use methods, concepts, theories in new situations; Analysis – seeing patterns, organization of parts, recognition of hidden meanings, identification of components; Synthesis – use old ideas to create new ones, generalize from given facts, relate knowledge from several areas, predict, draw conclusions; and Evaluation – compare and discriminate between ideas, assess value of theories, presentations, make choices based on reasoned argument, verify value of evidence, recognize subjectivity.

You might have noticed as you move through the hierarchy, there are more and more descriptors. A clear indicator that more and more of the learner’s brain is involved at each successive level. And, the learnings are more meaningful. Many published materials contain words in question stems like, ‘What,’ ‘How,’ and ‘Why,’ in an apparent attempt to stimulate thinking at the various levels in the hierarchy. In fact, I once attended a workshop where the presentor suggested starting multiple choice question stems with words like these to induce critical thinking. Words in question stems don’t do the work of thinking at the various levels; what students do, does. Starting at higher cognitive levels and inquiry dimensions is doable, and a way to stimulate involvement and investment in new learnings. It’s worth learning how to do.

Much of what education does in the US attempts to move students up the hierarchy, perhaps with the idea that when students have all the facts memorized, they’ll be able to evaluate what they’ve learned. But, most curricula ends at the Application level, or if it does reach true Analysis and Synthesis, it is delivered in a didactic modality. We know the words, but don’t incorporate them into our lives because we haven’t done them.

Here’s an interesting way to engage your own learning curve: start, once you’re comfortable with the concept of dimensions of inquiry, at the top right of the cube (See the diagram in Effective Work Groups: When you know them, they will change your world), reserving the lower left corner for training on instruments, etc. This top-down learning is effective, as students begin in a context, and work their way down the cognitive function hierarchy as they develop needs to know.

For instance, you can use temperature and dissolved oxygen in a stream and a lateral channel to start in the upper right, at least to the Correlational segment of the Experimental dimension. Lead students to the stream and ask them to see where water is. They’ll notice the main channel of the stream, but may take a while to notice a lateral channel. Then ask them where they think temperature and dissolved oxygen are more suitable for juvenile salmon. You move to the lower left corner of the diagram by showing them how to measure temperature and dissolved oxygen. Then they will move themselves almost immediately toward the upper right corner as they explore your question. This is how humans learn.

In the activity described above, you have moved from Application to Evaluation. Instead of starting with Knowledge, moving to Comprehension, then to Application, students start at the Evaluation level of the cognitive hierarchy, then migrate through its levels as they pursue their inquiry. Should you observe them carefully, you’d find they were using pieces of each level as they solve the problem they started out with. They don’t have to move in lock step, in one direction, up the hierarchy. They simply integrate the functions of the hierarchy into their repertoire.

Let’s explore a template that may help you reverse the sequence contained in the hierarchy, and so doing, leads to learning for understanding. The template is called the Learning Cycle, another structural concept, and it starts somewhere near the Unstructured and Inquiry dimensions of Inquiry. Instead of learning all about something before they go into the lab, community, or environment to explore it, students explore first, experiencing the content at a higher cognitive level. Let’s use the temperature and dissolved oxygen activity to demonstrate this.

The concept of the learning cycle has evolved over several decades, has generated a large body of data to support its efficacy, and is generally described as having 3-5 phases. I’ll paraphrase five phases here, and describe what students would do in each. The cycle can be used in any discipline; in our case let’s relate it to the stream and lateral channels activity described above. What the students and teacher did fall into the five phases in the order they were done.

• Engage: in which a student engaging in an activity becomes interested in a topic. Students exploring stream channels, main and lateral, become engaged with the content.

• Explore: in which the student to constructs incipient knowledge in the topic through questioning and observation facilitated, but not directed, by the teacher. When students, facilitated by the teacher, pull experiences together to formulate an inquiry question, they begin to construct knowledge and incipient concepts about the content. (This takes time.)

• Explain: in which students explain what they have discovered, and engage in a discussion of the topic to consolidate their understandings. When students assess their questions and design their investigation, they negotiate the meaning of their new understandings, testing their understanding of them as their plan evolves.

• Extend: in which students apply what they have learned and elaborate these new skills and understandings. As they collect data and analyze it, students are applying what they have learned about measuring temperature and dissolved oxygen in parts of the main and lateral channels they have chosen. As they work, they are elaborating their incipient understandings about temperature and dissolved oxygen in response to readings from the two microenvironments, and are observing and categorizing more details of the two channels. Doing this, they begin to develop incipient conceptual schemata about main and lateral channels They also encounter problems in knowing just where to sample, and are learning new information about how temperature and dissolved oxygen change in the two microenvironments.

• Evaluate (may now be evolving to ‘Create’): in which the teacher and students assess their knowledge, skills, and understandings. Students present their findings to the class. This forces them to assess the coherence and validity of their new learnings. When students interpret their data and ask if it answers their question, they are ground-truthing and clarifying their understandings. As they communicate their findings to the rest of the class, they are observing and correcting themselves, as is the teacher, within a collegial context. (If you’ve never done this, you’ve missed a very powerful experience. Find a teacher who does this and visit when students are communicating findings.

During the trajectory of the stream and lateral channel study, the ownership of the work migrated from the teacher to the student. The teacher must get them into contact with the content, then follow up on their initial findings to assist them to develop a clear inquiry question. After this, they carry most of the load, and you can scope and zoom to learn more about how this kind of learning works. Remind yourself if you forget, a brain is an autonomous learning machine. It starts in the real world, where it evolved, then moves to the abstract, to conceptual learnings. Back at school, those brains will peruse the books to fill in information they need to know.  They learn.

Next time, we’ll take a trip from the end of an inquiry to its inception. Working backwards is a good way to nail down understandings.

This is the eighteenth installment of “Teaching in the Environment,” a new, regular feature by CLEARING “master teacher” Jim Martin that explores how environmental educators can help classroom teachers get away from the pressure to teach to the standardized tests,  and how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula. See the other installments here, or search Categories for “Jim Martin.”

Share on Facebook