Module 4

Advanced Qualitative Research Methods

Spring 2006

Erin E. Peters

Jen: Working toward Positive Experiences for Children in Science

Narrative Analysis

Jen is a successful 7^th grade science teacher in an east coast metropolitan area. Her success in teaching using a science inquiry method has drawn attention from her supervisors even though she has only been teaching five years. However, her experiences with science education have not always been successful. In 7^th grade, Jen’s science teacher told her she was a poor science student and Jen reacted by shutting down in his class.

I remember when I was in 7th grade I hated science because it was taught as completely factual and we never, all of our labs were out of a cookbook. You had every piece laid out for you, you didn't get to think, you only got to see the result, which is exactly what you expected, because at the beginning of the lab they told you what you were going to see. There was basically no freedom. You came in and sat down, he gave us notes, and we might do an experiment, but it was always a cookbook experiment. In seventh grade, my science teacher told me that I didn't have a scientific mind and I should never even think about going into science. I just kind of went to science and didn't really care a whole lot about it. So he put me in the lowest science class and he wouldn't recommend me any higher when I went into high school and I set out to prove him wrong. I can't remember learning anything in the class. But I think a lot of it was that I was so discouraged by the teacher and his comment to me and I basically checked out at that point. I did enough to get myself an A, but beyond that I didn't care if I learned anything.

Her later years as a science student were also in didactic classrooms, but Jen had the opportunity to work on some projects and this experience intrigued her.

We basically were teaching ourselves. She would give the base knowledge in notes and then we would do experiments and she had all sorts of activities set up. So that since it was an AP class, we weren't just being fed facts, but we were finding stuff out for ourselves. That and then I took physics was a class where we did a lot of experiments and the teacher was really good. The biggest thing I remember from that was that a small group of us worked on a project with bean sprouts that we put up. . . now it was seven times on different space shuttles. And they are starting to look at the information. So it started with our class designing the container that these bean sprouts were to be put in. To look at the effect of gravity. There was enough struture that it wasn't completely chaotic. We knew what equipment we needed and what we needed to do. As far as what we found out, it was really up to ourselves of how deep we wanted to go into the material. And that is the first time I realized that OK, I don't have to sit in the classroom to learn about this. I can go out and experience it for myself and I can come up with new ideas. So it allowed me to explore more, what I thought.

Jen’s interest in science as a child was maintained with good experiences during science-related family activities

My family always did a lot of stuff outside, so I was already interested in the environmental part. We would go camping and hiking and that got me interested in that part. And then in ninth grade, I basically taught the class because my teacher was very poor and I sat there bored. It was stuff I knew about stars and all of that and then I vowed from that point on that I would put myself on the AP place and get into all the AP classes and so I did that. I also grew up near the Mayo clinic and everyone, and their mothers and their fathers were doctors. So I got into the mindset that well, you go to college and everyone becomes a doctor. So I was thinking when I went to college that I would be pre-med, but I always wanted to be a teacher so I decided to mix the two. I really enjoy the biology but at the same time I love being in education. The more I got into the higher education classes and getting into classrooms, I loved being able to share what I was learning in all of these different science classes.

As a teacher, Jen wanted to show her students a different experience in science than the ones she had in public school, but she didn’t know how to put her ideas into operation.

It was more chaotic. I struggled a lot about how to get a lesson planned and I knew I wanted to do more activities but I wasn't sure about how to go about that. So I think I ended up doing more lecturing, which I have tried to move away from. But at that point I was coming straight out of college, so I was used to having a lecture based class and other than science classes, they were the only classes where I had labs. So I thought everything was lecture. Plus I had never been in a middle school(as a teacher). I had done all of my student teaching in high school. And my last student teaching, I was teaching AP biology, so there was a lot of lecturing and a lot of lab mixed. The teacher that I worked with had it all laid out, so I didn't have to plan a lot. And I didn't know how to plan then in my own room.

I really got trial by fire there.

Jen started to seek out information early in her teaching career regarding inquiry science. She started by examining how she learned best, watched how her students learned, and then looked for resource materials.

One of my learning styles is that I am better at learning by actually doing something. For me it makes more sense to have the kids doing stuff because I learn along with them. I learn, they might find something out that I didn't know exactly. So by watching them come up with an answer and researching it myself, I always learn something new.

Just observing last year what the kids were getting out of certain labs. Finding even more resources about how to do different activities. I just have a lot more ideas this year and because I knew more about things like basic class management, and some of the other stuff that goes into just being able to operate the classroom. I didn't have such a big learning curve, and I could focus more on how to create an activity and then implement that into the classroom.

Jen moved to her current school and saw that the teachers in the department were teaching inquiry rather than lecture. She used her colleagues as resources to further her understanding of inquiry teaching.

And I think here, people really work on the inquiry of it and you give the students a question or you give them a problem and it is not necessarily, they don't have the answer, they don't know what they are going to find. They might have a good idea, but they don't know until they actually have to work through the experiment on their own. And I am starting to see that more in schools, that people are combining inquiry and letting the kids think for themselves, and not telling them exactly what to do. Combined with the nature of science and how it should be inquiry based.

I feel like here rather than where I did my student teaching or some of the stuff we did in college, the resources are much better. Where I did my student teaching was very much a traditional school. It was cookie cutter labs. I think here with the county helping with the Problem Based Learning scenarios and having everything laid out, setting up the scenario and having a timeline and a list of materials and give ideas for the teaching of what to do. I can use that as my jumping off point and develop my own take on stuff, which I pass on to the students. And with all the stuff on the web, that is a huge resource. I think there are a lot of teachers who want to do inquiry and have really good ideas on inquiry. And by being able to post it, you can draw on other ideas and create your own activity.

Jen’s experiences in the classroom have strengthened her pedagogy about inquiry science. She is concerned about her student’s understanding of the thematic ideas in science.

I want them to leave with this idea that whatever they see, they may not remember the name of a part of a cell, but they will understand that the cell relates to how they function everyday. Or when they are outside looking at water streams, they won't know the exact organisms, but they will understand that everything around them depends on that water for life. So it is kind of the big idea that everything correlates to each other and works together.

You have to understand some things about science. And you may not remember the specific parts of a cell, but you will understand the general concept of how that cell works and how all of the cells in your body work together for you to live. Going back to my own science experience. I want to make it so the kids are learning something that again, they can apply the big pictures to themselves. (My experience as a student) 8th grade science I don't know anything about because I checked out. And now I wish I knew some of the stuff that he'd (her teacher) been talking about. I guess one of the biggest things is that most of the kids won't go on to scientific fields, but we all need to understand what does exercise do for you, what does healthy eating . . . again, 7th grade you begin that knowledge about the basic parts of the body and how the body works. Then in 8th grade you are learning chemistry and then you repeat that stuff in 9th and 10th grade but you are learning it in more detail and hearing it a second time, you are going to gain more from it. And so the stuff you were struggling in 7th and 8th grade to understand, you now have those basic concepts and you can build on that. And just looking where science is going, there are so many big things happening now and even for these kids to function as adults and make decisions when they are voting. There is going to be so much legislative stuff happening when they are voters that they need to understand the basic background and how making a law about different topic is going to affect their lives.

Just the fact that science is, for me, is lab based and so with Problem-Based labs that we do, each group has to be able to develop their own ideas. They might start in the same place as another group, but they are going to run into different problems based on what their group does. They have to be able to think through, the facts I know are concrete and the same as every other group has. Based on what I have done to change that, what can I do to improve my experiment or how do these little snags that have been thrown in, what does that change about my ideas? How can I find stuff to support what I think is happening?

The ability to share the information. That's how we've been able to discover most of the stuff we have today. It's just by scientists openly sharing what they found and then by taking one concept that was found over here to be true and here in a completely different area. By combining those then you can develop a bigger picture and see how all of it works together. I mean, even if you look at biology and chemisty, they are two separate fields, but they overlay so much into each other and if those scientists were not sharing their information, then we probably wouldn't know about half of what we do.

. . . that people looked at this stuff in the past and what can we take from what they know and build upon it. I think it is really important to understand that. So then once you take that and look at what someone else has done and not just copy their experiment. What can you do to change it and take what this person found here and what another person has done in another area combine those two ideas and develop your own idea. And figure out how to test it out. Like I said with the PBLs, I don't generally give them steps or I will give them very basic steps for setting up their control and that's it. So they have to think through, if we are growing plants, do I put all of the plants in the same window, or do I put them on different window? What are we trying to test out? So just understanding how to think through all of these different ideas coming from all of the different disciplines and also looking at once you have done all of this you must ask yourself, "Who cares?"

Once Jen solidified her thinking about what she wanted her students to know, she was better able to implement inquiry.

From the first week of school, I will pose a question and let one kid answer and wait. I give that wait time they talk about and I think that when I do that the kids know that there is not just one answer and I'm looking for the kids to build on the previous answer. For me that seems to work better to let them discuss it more and let them create the ideas. And then a lot of times, when you combine ideas from students from whatever their prior knowledge is, they come up with the correct answer and I'll just put it in a more concise form than what 5 students just said.

I think a lot of them come in with the idea that science is going to be boring. And so they just start off with no interest. And a lot of it is building the interest and saying hey this is really cool stuff and scientists are not just geeks that sit in white lab coats.

I like the discovery. When the kids are doing a lab, the kids may bring in ideas that I may not have thought about. They bring in a question that relates to the material but it is something that I haven't studied, something new.

Regarding the developmental, I think at this point you are going to get some kids who aren't quite ready to move into inquiry based. But I think it is still important to expose them to it and kind of force them into it.

Jen’s students had prior experiences in science that were not inquiry-based and were more didactic. The students felt that Jen offered something different in her science class.

I think she wanted to relate it to us, because we are humans and she wanted to show us what is being done to make human's lives better.

Yes, because if you learn something totally useless about a little plant, it's not going to affect you in your life.

(In a different science class) on Friday, we took some notes and on Monday we forgot what they were about. When I do notes I am just copying them down. I'm not thinking about them. But we actually got to interact with the material (in Jen’s class).

The things about labs, is I remember in 6th grade (a different year than in Jen’s class), she gave a lab and it was supposed to have a specific result and I didn't get that result. And I got a bad grade and I said you did what you told me to and I mean, I got different results, so how come I got a bad grade like this?

I've had a different experience with science (in prior classes). If I get the right answer, I don't have to do anything else. But if I get the wrong answer, I either get a bad grade or I have to go back and do it all over again. I think if you do it that way, you should find out why you got it wrong so you know more.I also think they shouldn't tell you the ending. You are supposed to discover something and it's no fun if you are just going to put 5 liters of water into the beaker or something.

One thing that I really don't like about science (in prior classes) was the notetaking and it goes on forever. I just feel like she has these fill in the blanks, so she'll show us the word and we'll just copy it down and I'll just doze off when she is talking because I don't learn anything like that. I find it boring.

At the end of the year (in other science classes), I know everyone does this, you forget everything. You cover details, details, details like with the ribosomes. You just need to cover the important stuff and that will stick in your head, not the little stuff. You only want the important stuff so when you learn the next year, and the next year and the next year. It goes on and on and on and hopefully more facts will stick in your head and you'll know more and more. You don't need to know the details.When you grow up and you are 30 and you have a job, you won't remember that there are tiny little ribosomes in your cells. What you want to know is why you need cells and if you are losing them what is the problem? Because you don't need to know if a ribosome is missing, but you need to know if you hand was flaking, why is that happening. It is because of cells.

I don't like that you memorize you notes and you take the test and then it is over, you don't need to know it anymore (in other science classes). I think it would stick more in my head if we didn't have to do it by notes and book learning.

I think (the activities in Jen’s class) will stay in my head for a really long time. It was really interesting to me.

When students first entered Jen’s class, they were confused about the inquiry process because they were used to didactic structures in classes. They tended to seek structure from Jen at the beginning of the year.

While it is fun to have freedom in class, there are some aspects that you have to know and be more disciplined.

You can't have freedom without guidelines. I mean then it would just crumple.

If the science teacher said "do whatever you want" then we wouldn't be learning science. So you need to have guidelines.

Pretty much everyone was "wait, what are we doing" for pretty much every science class (during inquiry units).

I think if we don't have as many guidelines, we are a little more creative when we are doing stuff. But also we do need a lot of instructions to do stuff because we are used to following instructions.

Once students began to take responsibility for their part of the learning process, they saw importance in learning the thematic ideas taught in Jen’s class through inquiry.

You had to write a paper (in Jen’s class). Explaining your viewpoint on the topic, talking about it, giving information about it, while still showing what you thought. I thought that was pretty important, I didn't want to write it, but afterwards it did help me. Writing it always helps you because you have to process the information. You get the research and then you have to process it - write it back out. So then you actually remember half of it. As opposed to just researching it . . .and saying you got it when you don't got it.

(Jen’s class) was different. You didn't have to listen to teacher instructions every single time. You got to go and find the research by yourself, which makes it more interesting than just having the information fed to you.

I thought it was good, the freedom that we said before, to do your own research and decide the topic you were going to do and have some say.

Without creativity, you just are going to be doing everything the teacher says. You aren't thinking one bit about what you are doing.

In science, it is the study, not really the study, but finding out and learning about the world around you. I mean that may sound a bit like history, but that is really in the past. And science is in the future. It is working toward the future. And so if you are not doing anything that is going to have a different result, and come up with, you'll be able to branch off with that. Just the same thing, an already known result is not going to get you anything in the future.

This year (in Jen’s class) has been, because we are getting older, there is a lot more freedom. There is a lot more different things we can do. Like in probably my worst science year ever was in 4th grade just because it was so strict and it was like math. There was no other result, if you didn't know what a class was, you were wrong. A species. . . You had to know if it was right or wrong. And now, you got to decide if cloning was right or wrong and if it was 4th grade, cloning would be either right or wrong and there would be no other decision.

I think this year, say instructions for labs, we didn't get it as laid out as in 6th grade and we were given all of the instructions and you had to get one specific answer. It (inquiry) makes it more fun. When they say, here you are supposed to get this answer, and you don't and you get something totally different, you say "Why did I get something totally different?" and you actually want to figure it out rather than getting it and saying "oh well I got the right thing so it must be OK."

If you know, you are given a lab sheet, if you know the ending, you don't have to do the lab. You can just go home and finish off all of the answers and pretend you did the lab. And you don't learn why. You just say, of course it is going to have this answer. Oh great, you don't try to find out why that is, it is told as a fact.

Jen sees inquiry learning as the opportunity to address the diversity of student questions about science. She uses inquiry to achieve student interest and proceeds to teach thematic science content when the students are hooked. Jen actively teaches the way she wanted to be taught as a student and in the process, provides students with a positive experience in her science class.

I love science teaching. I think it is kind of the broadness. I think a lot of it is factual based, but then, I set my classroom up to be kind of discussion based and the kids raise their hands and they have a sorts of questions, and we may be totally off topic, but we might go completely off topic but it still draws science into their question. Which is a lot of fun for them and for me, I can kind of see, we've got this idea over here and they will think back to some stuff we talked about a while ago and bring those together. I love the big picture stuff, and so being able to teach that. And having fun doing experiments.