Engaged with Science

I hope you all had a lovely break away from all those children... I remember once having a discussion with my team during a planning meeting in the school holidays, when someone commented that they quite liked this job of teaching when all the children were away -everything seems to go much easier!

Yes, I might have a problem... but Lego's so much fun!

 I managed to take some annual leave so enjoyed a wee bit of a break too although yes, I still thought about science and yes, I also made some lego (a lovely VW Combi van!). A couple of articles popped up on my iPad news apps that reminded me how much science is really out there. After all, it does say in the Essence Statement that science plays a significant role in society (NZC, p. 17).

If science is playing a 'significant role', then we do need to get students (and I guess whaanau and the local community too) involved in science that's happening around them or to them. What might 'engaged' look like? How might we measure it (in terms of student development)? Something I like in the NZC's Science pages (p.28 and 29) is it talks about students developing their understanding through communication. Discussion around science issues can be a great way to developing students understanding how to communicate. The 1080 drops are a good example of this -I'm certainly allowed to disagree with DoC's policy of the drops but that doesn't mean I should be sending death threats or threatening violence against local DoC officers and their families (which is happening). How can we share our different views more... peacefully?

As teachers we might need to do a bit of prompting and encouraging to get students to this point of engaging with science and I think that reading time, as long as it has a healthy dose of discussion served alongside, can be a great opportunity for this. I really like class reading activities and have sometimes simplified articles so all can read, or buddied up students so that we can all look at the article together. We have a ready-made resource out there -the news! You could create your own article with a bit of cut and pasting, particularly if you are concerned about the ads that can appear at the bottom (although NZ Herald is usually one of the better websites) or send the children there with the weblink (bit.ly could work well here).

NZ Herald website

I quite like that the articles even say how long it should take to read the article! This one apparently is eight minutes and even that could start an interesting discussion -how do they know? Did they measure someone? How would someone who struggles with reading feel like if they couldn't read the article in 8 minutes? Here's the link: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?objectid=12224127. It's all about the insects disappearing in what is being called the sixth mass extinction. Students might like to read up on the other five: what caused them? What went extinct?

With this article, we're engaging with students because everyone has an opinion on insects! However, society's thinking aside, what about from a scientific point of view? If all the insects disappeared, how would that affect us? I'm one of those mad people who rushed off for sugar and water when I see a bee on the ground. I also rescue worms! I try to not kill insects but help them to rediscover the great outdoors rather than being in my great indoors -what do the students and their families do? SHould we be killing every insect? As I'm writing this, I'm also thinking about the wasp problem that seems right across NZ. I can't really think of a valid reason for keeping wasps -but what might happen if we did wipe out the biggies: the German wasp or the paper wasp? These guys weren't originally here and seem to be a health risk to humans and creatures alike. Could someone argue for keeping the wasps in NZ?

The second article I love for the citizen science aspect of it. This is a great way to engage with science and we have several projects through the year where students can contribute: the garden bird survey, the bee survey, etc. There are also ones online where children can view data and make contributions by sorting the photos. There's one where people classify deep space objects and from their efforts, new objects have been found called Green Pea Galaxies (the Galaxy Zoo website). There are quite a few of these websites around for you to choose from. Citizen science could even include schools partnering with environmental councils or DoC to gather data about their local stream or river... It's worth getting in touch with some of these organisations to ask.
Here's the link for this article: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?objectid=12224173. I really this type of thinking because so much is happening! Scientists are interacting with regular folk. Regular folk are doing science and actively contributing to science -in a way, they're being scientists!

So, the Engaged with Science capability is a great one! It picks up on all the other capabilities and in a sense puts them into practice in perhaps the best real world contexts. If you can connect to an organisation, this does seem the most effective way. Science Learning Hub can be a great place to start as they encourage schools getting in touch with scientists and will help. It also gets students asking more questions and delving deeper -for example, reading about other extinctions. I find that children enjoy these activities and talk lots about them all through the year!

Keep sciencing! Oh, and have a great term!
Paul

So how did the students go?

Well after a wee hectic week with lots of driving and especially driving down a road that I wasn't even sure was a road, the term is coming to an end!

As a facilitator, I've been thinking about my own work:

• How successful has the PLD been?
• How will I measure this success? Is it by how many lessons the teachers have taken? By their engagement in the sessions?
• Who decides the success? Me? The teachers and principals?
• I don't want to measure my success by the amount of emails received as all the schools are reasonably quiet when it comes to communication!
• What about my blog and Facebook? Are they successful and again, how do I measure that? By number of engagements? Number of comments (on Facebook, this is almost zero!)?

I know that I'm sort of successful because schools aren't turning me away (!) and some even ask for more PLD. Teachers' responses during my visits is usually great so I think I'm not doing bad... But I really don't know how much they carry on with when I'm away. I have a sneaking suspicion that the rest of the school life gets in the way!

The last of the plums... I've been really interested in the amount of bees that get into the plums!

You can probably tell where this is going... How about science for the term? Have you been successful? I'm using 'successful' on purpose as I sort of think it's a loaded word! And rather subjective! We could be doing loads of science that children really enjoy and are engaged in -but does that mean it's been successful? 

The other big question that I've been challenging schools with, and I do sort of feel that I'm harping on about this a bit lately, is How do you know the children have been improving their science abilities? I'm thinking about the capabilities mainly, but the Nature of Science Curriculum Achievement Objectives could come into play here. And there's the rub! The capabilities are more like the Key Competencies and not levelled and Science in the NZC has the same objectives for 5 to 8 year olds and 9 to 12 year olds! 

One of the reasons that Autumn is my favourite season is the lovely fungi!
And of course finding mushrooms to eat!

If we use some indicators within a capability we can at least build an idea of whether children have improved this term. If you have some science observational drawings from the beginning of the term to now, you may be able to look for improvements. The same could be said for diagrams or children writing down, for example, some observations on rocks, insects, an experiment, etc. When I have worked in a classroom, we have pulled together literacy thinking, some maths skills, as well as our own OTJs to reflect on student work. We also compare to other student work within the classroom for more ideas, particularly on 'where to next'... for example, some children may be doing labels -we would like them all to; some children may be starting to write details for the labels but need more practice at with the science writing genre.

Even just using some indicators, I could at least decide where students are. For example, under Gather and Interpret Data is an indicator Notices change. I can decide how students communicate these observations or their gathering data through measurement -the Literacy and Mathematics Progressions can help but a simple assessment could be that the students are not noticing, are starting to (or with teacher support), or noticing 'well' or independently. If I have a large group that need teacher support, I might do some more work with them. 

In terms of more formal assessment, we do have some tools: the Science Thinking with Evidence assessments as well as the Assessment Resource Bank. You can use capabilities as a search term as well as other phrases eg "interpreting tables" or "compare and contrast". The cool thing here is that the arbs are levelled! If we're not certain what level our students are, the arbs may help.

I might even get the children to decide the success criteria alongside me as the teacher -what do they think 'observing like a scientist' might look like?

Finally, as a teacher, I might just grab the essence statement on P. 17 of the NZC: have I given space for students to explore how the natural physical world and science itself work? Are they participating as critical, informed and responsible citizens? And if I was feeling a bit like challenging you, I might ask, have they improved in these too?!

So, have a think about this term. Can you clearly show students have improved? Is there evidence? And what might this thinking do to shape your planning in science for term two? And I'm also happy to receive some reviews of my work this term -I guess you're all my students in a sense!

All that remains is for me to wish you a relaxing and refreshing term break! I'd be curious as to what science people are thinking about doing next term -if there's a big enough group, maybe I can help! Oh, and remember Science Week as well! Although the periodic table seems more secondary focused and a bit knowledge-based, I'm starting to think about how primary teachers can get involved. We need good contexts and this might just do the trick!

Keep sciencing!

Paul

My dog Ollie demonstrating the correct posture for term breaks!