Conference Material

Rubenstein 1999 Keynote Address

Theory into Practice

Now, how do we put these prescriptions into practice? The first one is easy. Partner with scientists. Scientists can do what I call the three M's. They can mentor teachers by bringing them into their labs during the summer. They can provide understanding of content, and they can be called upon to direct teachers where to go to enhance their scientific background. Second they can also model the process of science. They can demonstrate the critical thinking skills, the ‘what if' gymnastics over and over again. Scientists do not need to tell teachers the answers, but they can increase their comfort level so that they can mutually share thoughts and insights on how to attach problems.

When scientists raise self-confidence to levels where discussion and dialogue ensue, science in the schools will be in great shape. And lastly, the third M is to motivate districts to integrate science into curriculums in ways so that they do not compete with 'whole language' or all the other demands that elementary school teachers have to balance. Rational integration will liberate time to allow students to reflect upon their answers and extract generalities and fundamental principles.

I want to share with you two other ideas that I hope will serve as food for thought as you go through the rest of the workshop. The first is to increase intellectual sharing among students. The second is to foster collaborations between students and parents by changing the nature of homework.

Why don't we do this in the schools as part of our assessment process? Not the science fair type of symposium where demonstrations crafted by parents masquerade as science. Why don't we give students a choice of projects by grade level to solve and let them work in teams along with their teacher as true partners, and then let them present their work to others in the grade or in the entire school? Who might assess these presentations? Certainly not the teacher who was part of the process. But what about other teachers from the district? What about middle school teachers assessing elementary school symposia, or high school teachers assessing middle school symposia? Wouldn’t this be a novel way of vertically integrating the curriculum and building esprit de corps.

And why not have senior citizens as taxpayers come in and fill out questionnaires about the presentations? Do the students understand the problem? Were they convincing? Were the questions compelling? What were their answers? Was I convinced as a listener? By asking these types of questions, partnerships are built that bring all the stakeholders into the system, not only to sustain the science, but also to sustain the systemic process of improving and maintaining quality science teaching and learning. Because schools are not going to continue receiving large sums of money from outside to keep this process going, we have to invent ways to internalize the funding of inquiry based science teaching. And with its ‘disposable’ hand-on materials, this process is not cheap.

And second, why not institute a concept that I call ‘Integrative Homework’? Integrative is an interesting word. Not only does it mean interaction, but it connotes inter-digitation and coordination of disparate bodies of knowledge. Integrative homework could for example, entail a teacher sending home those pre- and post-drawings to the parents and having the parents comment on them. This idea is an extension of a process the English use called ‘Shared Reading’.

English kindergartners learn to read by sharing reading experiences with parents. Students take engaging paper back books home in their little packets with a little notebook. Parents read the books to their children and then write down in the notebook whatever their children thoughts are about the book. They don’t criticize; they just record. Then they comment on the thoughts and talk to their children about them. And when the notebook returns to school the next day, the teacher writes comments on the comments from home and a dialogue is created. Of course, this process engages students and builds partnerships in learning. It is a very proactive way to encourage students to begin reading, and I contend that it can be used to engage students and parents in doing science. Only I would reverse the process. I envision students bringing home their work, such as pre- and post drawings, asking their parents to comment on it. Students will write them down and initiate a critique of their parent’s views. And when it comes back to the teacher, the teacher and other students can comment on the dialogue thus drawing together different perspectives, comments or insights.

Such an interactive process provides a way for students to look through different windows on how the natural world works. Like the student symposium, this interaction will keep the science vibrant and changing. It keeps the teacher, the students, and even the parents guessing about what's next. And it's rewarding because it provides access to different questions, hypotheses and disconfirmatory tests that we've seen scientists generate all the time. So those are the types of sharings and collaborations that I suggest are critically important, and brings everybody in a community into the process of doing science and making the enterprise intellectually and structurally self-sustaining.

Figure 25 shows the transformation that is taking place with respect to who participates actively in the process of teaching science in the schools. In the old days, the system consisted of teachers and students connected by a one way arrow from teacher as ‘source’ to student as ‘sink’. The administration, the parents, the taxpayer may have provided support, but the teaching and learning of science was a self-contained classroom operation. This is very different from the situation today. We have students and teachers coaching each other. Two way arrows and circles of feedbacks have been created. We also have teachers working with teachers. They go to workshops together, they come back with ideas, they all understand and they act as each other’s safety nets. At times administrators and even school board members join in providing important top-down support.

In the future, however, we need to push the circle of active engagement outward by bringing in parents and taxpayers. By doing so we not only have a way to sustain the doing of science, but also a way of sustaining systemic initiatives that will maintain these changes. Let’s now return to the cartoon I began with. If we overlay it with a different sheet of paper, we can change some of the wording (Figure 26). Let’s call the cloud Nature, which is appropriate since nature is obscure. It poses plenty of compelling problems that we don’t have the answers for. As a result these problems rain down and fill the minds of the students in the schools.

Teachers and students then attempt to solve these problems. But what about scientists, administrators, parents, and taxpayers? In an ideal world, all are now actively engaged and act as participants inside the system because their values and views are important. They can supply insight, especially scientists who can provide content and who can model the process. When working together these stakeholders generate insights, energy, and resources. Just like the sun, these groups provide enormous energy that fuel the search for solutions to these compelling problems. The best solutions will be buoyed up by this energy. The best will evaporate and rise above others. If they are not complete solutions, then the simple parts will diffuse away while, the thorny parts of the problem will condense and form new clouds. These in turn will rain down new, more compelling problems into the minds of studensts. And so we have the self-sustaining science system where the science gets better, driven on by compelling problems. Teachers and students behaving as scientists produce solutions that rise up with the total support, insights, energy, and resources from other players in the system. By going back and forth, using ‘if-then’ questions to generate testable predictions, self-sustaining science emerges.

Questions

Q: I think your model of the wolves captures the essence of the problem. Your exercise unites process and content, two separate things, but how do you handle situations in which students don't know enough to solve the problem without giving them the facts? And what are teachers to do if they don’t know the facts? How can they push the students? As a project director, I get questions such as, "I don’t know that, so I can’t help."

Rubenstein: No one knows everything. So each exercise quickly moves outside the domain of what any teacher knows. In the wolf exercise students first put the grass in the system. Can they get the grass to grow? Then they put one grazing ungulate species into the ecosystem. And most of the time, the ungulates go extinct. If the ungulate species manage to survive, then can students put predators, such as coyotes into the system? Again if all survive, then they then can introduce wolves. And so in a very real sense, I don't have to know the answer about the dynamics because the dynamics build upon themselves. In other words, if they can't build a stable ecosystem, they can't do the problem. Once the system is stable they can deduce the parameters that made it so. In this way they master basic concepts that even I could only guess at.

And so what they're doing is they are continuously asking themselves questions such as why is the ecosystem crashing? What is going wrong? What I didn't show you is there's a tremendous amount of biology that goes into this back and forth process. For example, each species has a set of critical life history variables. How many babies does a female bear per year? What's the survival rate of those babies? What is the cost of investing in those babies in terms of reducing a mother’s survival rate? All this is captured in the first equation the program uses, but for the program to work the students have to find the facts by delving into the content of the discipline. Then they do the same for each species at each trophic level.

Then there are inter-species interactions to be characterized. For example, how much of the vegetation is necessary to fuel baby production? In return how much does a dead carcasses fuel the production of the grasses? Students have to characterize these linkages and in the process of doing so, they are asking themselves whether the interactions are competitive or mutualistic. They have to figure out the feedbacks from their own simpler simulations or from what they read in the literature. In fact I do very little lecturing or fact giving. I just have to ask the right questions, such as ‘why do you think it went extinct?’ or ‘What may have you overlooked?’

This type of teaching is based on Socratic method. I don't answer questions in the classroom. I just ask more questions. But I ask the questions in a way that focuses students to go and find an answer. Ultimately they build the ecosystem, but I know enough to focus their questioning. In the end, another group can say that they don't buy the assumptions because they tried that as well and failed. But the key to overcoming the problem you feel teachers have is to convince them that it is students that must discover the content and that teachers do not need to be content experts before the exercise begins.

Q: Okay. But you're leading a class in biology or ecology, for which you have a very broad background.

Rubenstein: Right. That's where the content comes in.

Q: So you're focusing their perceptions, you're channeling and focusing them.

Rubenstein: That's right. I made a decision to allow them to explore this rich array of population dynamics around a problem that I knew something about. But I don't know all the details about wolves that might be important to make an ecosystem function. But I knew enough about the dynamics of the system and I knew the problem was compelling enough so they'd want to work hard at understanding it, and searching for the ‘facts’ necessary to ‘tune’ the models.

Q: As an elementary project director, I get asked, or I get told, I don't have the background to do that with kids. As an elementary teacher, I don't have the background to do that because I'm not a scientist.

Rubenstein: Right. That's what they tell you. And then the question is: is that really true? Our job is to actually explore whether that's fear of losing control, or whether it's really ignorance. I don't believe that people are as ignorant as they say they are. I think people hide behind the fear of not knowing all the facts. When they make those statements they may not have really thought about the problem and what they really know. In fact, most people's intuition about an ecosystem is more complete then they appreciate. They know competition, predation, and mutualism. And the program asks you these questions straight up. It gives you a matrix. You have to fill it in. It specifically asks if you expect a ‘plus/minus’ relationship between two species? And then it translates your answer into English. For example, when you indicate ‘minus’ it says "when wolves eat your elk, elk numbers go down." So it gives you the sign, it puts it back in English, and then it builds it into the model. If the sentence does not match what you thought a ‘minus’ means, then you can change the sign, or at other times the value, until the program is doing what you want it to do.

Q: Maybe it would be fun, because you just did it to me, to brainstorm some questions back, to respond to "I can't do it because I don't have the background." And it might be kind of fun to then pose some of these questions back to teachers such as, "what is it that you need to know." That might be good.

Rubenstein: That's a good point. And we can do that. There are times when I run exercises that I know very little about. I'm not a physiologist, but I teach physiology. I build labs around concepts that I'm not the expert. And what makes teaching fun for me is when a student asks me a question for which I don't know the answer. That's when I get really engaged. That's when I really get excited by the problem. I don't run from it, I embrace it. So they empower and engage me and we become partners.

I can go to the library and learn as much as I can on a topic, but I'm going to find out very quickly that my students are bright enough – and your elementary students are clever enough – to ask questions to which neither I nor you are going to know the answer. It won’t be in a book, nor in an article, nor in a very readable journal such as Natural History Magazine. It won’t be on TV, and it might not be on the Web. Eventually the only way out is to ask the question in an ‘if-then’ form. That's when the fun begins. That's when they're teaching you and they're challenging you and you become co-equals. You may have more experiences than they do to draw upon, but you don't have any more answers than they do.

Spresser: This is such a rich discourse that I hate to interject with the fact that, for many of you, it's probably been a very long day and it is getting late in the evening. So may I take this opportunity to thank you, Dr. Rubenstein, for sharing his expertise and insights on how the scientist thinks and what it means to do science, on the differences between school science and real world science, and on some ways of bridging the gap between the way a scientist thinks about and practices his discipline and the way students learn and practice science.

As we begin this local systemic change PI meeting this evening, we have returned once again to the disciplines of science and mathematics as a touchstone for the vision of mathematics and science education. The structure and values that are intrinsic to the disciplines are an essential part of the creation of lasting change in K-12 mathematics and science. These are very much our roots. We thank you, Professor Rubenstein, for helping us return to our roots this evening. And please join with me in thanking him once again.

For the efforts you've made to be here this evening. We've made a substantive beginning on this journey of the next two days towards thinking more deeply and critically about creating lasting change. We hope you have a restful night. We look forward to seeing you again in the morning. Thank you and good night.