“I was not taught science and math this way”

When many of us were in school, we learned science by memorizing a bunch of facts and had to recall them on multiple-choice tests. Old ways of learning math were similar. We had to memorize procedures without understanding the reason behind the procedure. We did not do what scientists or mathematicians did for the most part. We sometimes did labs, where the procedures were pre-determined as well as the outcome. And the labs usually occurred after we had taken the required notes and defined the key terms. This is no longer regarded as best practice in science teaching.

“…traditional views of science learning focused on individual learners’ mastery of factual knowledge. As a result, lecture, reading, and carrying out pre-planned laboratory exercises to confirm already established findings were common instructional strategies (National Research Council, 2007, 2012a). Contemporary views of science learning and teaching instead emphasize engaging students in the practices of a science framework including asking questions, developing and using models, carrying out investigations, analyzing and interpreting data, constructing explanations, and engaging in argumentation…”

(National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018; p. 145)

In our courses, we will learn about the current thinking in science and math teaching and how we need to ensure students have a chance to DO the science and math and engage with the practices and processes for themselves. We must give our students the chance to find out answers for themselves through meaningful opportunities to explore, learn, explain, and collaborate. Through projects such as those you will find in the chapters that follow, we aimed for our prior pre-service teachers to learn this way too…to create projects like Unit Plans or interactive notebooks, and to the extent possible, actually deliver them to small groups of students prior to the typical “placement” or “residency,” in order to see for themselves how to teach this way and how this approach might help students learn science, math, and integrated STEM. In past years, we have used the term “microteaching” to describe these small, applied teaching experiences. This might sound like it draws from constructivism, which we discuss below. In our courses, we want you to create a project that you will draw from to teach real students, and that practicing teachers may eventually use in their own classrooms.