Running head: CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Role of Classroom Management in the Facilitation of Inquiry Science

Erin Peters

Qualitative Research Methods in Education

Spring 2005

Dr. Jenny Gordon

Rationale for Topic

            As I embarked on my research project, I originally intended to pursue an investigation of a teacher’s cognitive framework of the nature of science and of inquiry science. I instinctively feel that there is a connection between the two, but have found little research to connect them. I examined the research that has been published in the Journal for Research in Science Teaching and Science Education and found some related articles, but nothing that directly addresses the link between the nature of science and inquiry activities. I realized after the first interview I had with the participant that my original topics were too cryptic for a beginning teacher to describe. The nature of science has been debated among philosophers of science for decades, so it is expecting too much from the participant to be able to implement and articulate such an obscure topic as the nature of science. An idea for an alternate topic began to form as I observed her classroom. I saw various structures in place in the participant’s classroom that were not traditional. For example, her seating arrangements were not in a row, facing the front of the room. I started thinking about the student role in inquiry science, and started to see a balance between the teacher gives up authority in the classroom and her role in directing student learning. My alternate topic emerged as the influence of classroom environment on inquiry science.

            Science education in America is very complicated due to the structure of the sub-disciplines such as biology, physics, and chemistry and due to the unnecessarily rigid sequence of classes. In America students are scheduled to take biology, chemistry, and then physics, but the courses are self-contained and rarely try to make connections to each other. Science teachers are not just science teachers; they identify themselves as biology, chemistry, earth science or physics teachers. The current culture in education isolates each of these sub-disciplines because of the categories that occur in high stakes testing. In high school, students take a state-wide test after each science course. The teachers don’t have time to integrate other sub-disciplines into their coursework. Even at the elementary level I hear discussions about what content “belongs” to 4th grade teachers, and which content “belongs” to 5th grade teachers. Attend any secondary science department meeting and there will be plenty references to the unique responsibilities of each sub-discipline, but little talk of how to better connect the content from grade-level to grade-level. The National Science Education Standards and the Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy call for more integration among science sub-disciplines and offer valuable guides for teachers to aid in understanding the nature of science. I feel that students are more likely to become scientifically literate if teachers worked together to integrate the ideas from other sub-disciplines into their courses. One way to accomplish this goal is to have a collective understanding of the inquiry and draw on the similarities of the habits of mind in each sub-discipline to connect the content.

Researcher Background

            When I was training to become a science teacher, my science teaching methods professor was very progressive, and I was very attentive to his ideas. He helped me understand what scientific literacy meant and helped me work hard to develop our own understanding of how science operates as a discipline. I find that I draw on this knowledge of the nature of science when I am asked to teach a different sub-discipline outside of my field. Looking at other sub-disciplines through the lens of inquiry helps me to visualize the broad ideas and helps my students to use science concepts outside of the classroom. I was able to “jump” from teaching a class of physics to chemistry to earth science very easily because I saw the universal understanding in all of the sub-disciplines. In a nutshell, knowing and being able to utilize my knowledge of inquiry has made me a more effective teacher. I have experienced many more of my own “ah-ha” moments about how the sub-disciplines of science are complimentary when developing lessons involving inquiry. I feel that the particular lessons which are developed to explicitly teach the nature of science through inquiry are more meaningful to the students, and I am better able to express my passion for how science works by helping students think like scientists.

            When I began collecting evidence for my national board portfolio, I allowed the concepts of the nature of science drive my decisions. I chose lessons where students were better able to show their understanding of scientific operations, and the feedback I received from my portfolio indicated that those lessons were significant to student learning. When I studied for the assessment portion of national boards, I looked to the national guidelines regarding inquiry to help me understand the concepts. Assuming the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards guidelines, the National Science Education Standards, and the Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy provide helpful guidelines for effective teaching, then having a solid understanding of inquiry is a necessity for science teaching from all sub-disciplines. Understanding inquiry in science gives teachers a broad conceptual framework on which to hook factual information and make coherent the multitude of ideas in science.

            This topic choice helped me to make more concrete questions for the student focus group and the follow up teacher interview. Having more concrete questions elicited richer data than my original, abstract questions about the nature of science. I was about to abandon the idea of having the nature of science involved in this project, when I conducted the student focus group. While I was asking about the class structure, many of the components of the nature of science emerged in the conversation. Instead of having the nature of science be the focal point, I could incorporate what I feel is an important topic into the implications of studying inquiry science in a future study. My revised topic emerged into studying the teacher’s structure in the class, her beliefs that led to that structure and how the students learn due to the structure.

Implications of Study for the Researcher

            As I attend profession conferences and read practitioner-oriented books, I have noticed in the past five years that the ability to teach using an inquiry style is a sought after skill.  Learning strands at national science teacher conferences are often structured to facilitate ways to incorporate inquiry into the classroom.  Since inquiry in the classroom uses science process skills such as observing, collecting data and making conclusions, it occurred to me that teachers who set up their classroom so that students are free to explore are more successful in teaching inquiry science. I think that teachers need to retool their students’ ideas about how classrooms operate when teaching inquiry. Students often come to class expecting to have the teacher provide all of the information and they take a more passive role in learning it. I try my best as a classroom teacher to teach with an inquiry style, and I find that my students have a great deal of cognitive dissonance when they enter my classroom. They are used to the teacher asking a question, one student answers the question, and the teacher give a response to the correctness of the question. In my classroom, I give students more responsibility in the role of learning. I wanted to find out if other teachers who teach inquiry science have similar styles.

            When I have been to professional development workshops I have observed the masses of teachers clamoring for any information about inquiry.  Inquiry is such an amorphous idea, but it is an important one.  My discussions with other teachers from around the country reveal that teachers understand that inquiry is important because it is an authentic way to teach science, but teachers are having a difficult time enacting inquiry learning with their students. Some of the teachers have identified the lack of time and the lack of resources as barriers to teaching inquiry, but I suspect there is more behind conducting inquiry in the science classroom than time and resources.

            I believe that teachers who teach in an open, inquiry method have a deeper understanding of the nature of science, and their students have a better understanding of how science acts as a discipline. Teachers who are able to see the big ideas in science probably know something about how scientists think, and insist that their students think in the same way. Teachers who are more focused on smaller, factual knowledge probably do not offer opportunities for inquiry in the classroom. Teachers who are focused more on science being a collection of facts probably do not have time to allow students to openly explore ideas through open ended experiments. I chose to observe a teacher who is known for her inquiry style because I think she has already developed somewhat of an understanding of how her classroom set up helps her to teach inquiry. From my experience, I know that I was more concerned with factual knowledge early in my teaching career and that students were less likely to take away universal scientific understandings.

 Choice of Participants

            Being a full-time middle school teacher and taking nine graduate credits at George Mason University makes it very difficult to observe teaching situations outside of my own school, so I had to base my decision to find a participant for my study on convenience. I am unable to take a significant number of days away from my own classroom, so I needed to find a participant in my own building. I considered the pros and cons of collecting data inside of the school system, and found that if I approached the situation as if it were a foreign one, I could gather rich data.

            I would have to choose a sixth or seventh grade teacher to observe, due to scheduling issues. My choices narrowed to science teachers because of the decision of my topic involving the nature of science, so I had six teachers to invite to participate in my study, three sixth grade teachers and three seventh grade teachers. I knew from other interactions, that the sixth grade teachers in my building are very private about the science that they teach. In the past they were scrutinized for not being oriented to “hard science” such as using data and teaching more abstract scientific ideas. I knew that I might get a better response from the seventh grade teachers, so I considered which of the seventh grade teachers were vocal about teaching inquiry in their class. The very first teacher I asked was happy to participate and often visited my room to ask when the study was going to begin. She was very excited to learn more about her practice. Even before the study began, I felt that I had made a good choice.

            Since I worked in the same environment as my participant, I was informed about the daily routine of the participant. Although I had some background information about logistics of teaching, I wanted to know her perspective regarding issues of teaching science. The new arrangement of our physical plant helped me to act as if it were a foreign place. My participating teacher had relocated her room to an outside bank of trailers at the beginning of this year. When the participant of my study was located inside of the building, I had a different relationship with her. I was able to drop by easily and was informed to her professional and personal life; we were friends. Now that she was in a more remote location, I rarely had the chance to discuss school or personal issues with her. We were still friends, but had a bit more distance in our relationship. This study gave me the opportunity to reestablish close connections with the participant in my study, and I feel that she looked forward to this opportunity too.

            The student focus group was chosen randomly from Jen’s class list. Six students, two girls and four boys were chosen from the class period that I observed. The cognitive performance of the students varied and the focus group was conducted after the unit of study was completed. The questions focused on comparisons with the rules and structure of science classes from other teachers, comparisons of rules and structures in core classes other than science, and details of structures in their current science class related to their learning outcomes.

            I plan to continue with my study of educational research, so I look forward to researching in an environment sometime in the future where I am a foreigner. When I was a teacher in Saudi Arabia, I experienced what it was like to be unaware of the unspoken customs and the importance of making detailed observations in order to understand the main points of the culture. It was important that I observe before I participated so that I wouldn’t insult a member of the culture. For instance, my experience in Saudi Arabia showed me that in their culture, they do not form lines in order to take turns obtaining services, such as a turn at a Xerox copier. The most senior of the group gets access to the service first, no matter who was there first. If I was unaware of this detail and utilized my own experiences of forming lines, I would have offended a member of the group. From this experience, I have some understanding of the benefits of being an outsider in a research project. I can see that observations in a new environment would be more detailed because everything in the environment is fresh and new. In the future, I would like to be in a new environment so that I would have a basis of comparison to my current study in terms of the amount of detail noticed in the field notes.

Research Relationships

            Before the study I had both a professional and personal relationship with the teacher participant. We discussed various educational issues during our three year relationship and found that we had the same orientation to an open-ended student-centered classroom. Because we were two of the few teachers who strived for a more inquiry-based classroom, we had developed camaraderie early in our relationship. We often visited each other’s classroom for support when outside factors prevented us from teaching inquiry based lessons or when a particular lesson worked out well. We shared successes and failures freely, which guided my decision to ask her to be a participant in the study. On the personal side, we had very different personal backgrounds, but enjoyed talking to each other about them because we both enjoyed learning about new experiences. I think that we both reveled in the experience of the study in the same way. This was a new experience for both of us and we were energized by the excitement of the study. We were also both animated by learning new things, and we approached this study as a learning tool. We worked together in the goal of learning as much as we could and felt that the study strengthened our relationship as professionals.

            I was slightly wary that during the first interview, the participant was saying what I wanted to hear. She has some background to my beliefs about science teaching and at certain times during the interview, I felt she was trying to reinterpret my view of science teaching. At those points, I tried to redirect the conversation to specific instances of her teaching, so that she would answer the questions with her experiences. I felt that when I asked questions that caused her to generalize about big concepts, that she was saying what I wanted to hear. I redesigned my follow-up questions to try to maximize on experiences, rather than broad statements about science teaching philosophy.

            Redesigning my follow up questions to focus on her specific classroom goals and expectations reduced the amount of general statements and honed in on specific issues. By grouping questions in a past, present and future structure, I was able to elicit data that was more revealing than in my first interview with Jen. I was able to find out what Jen thought about teaching science and her methods of getting students to explore when they had past experiences in a more traditional classroom. By moving the focus to classroom environment, I was also able to elicit useful data from the student focus group. Students were able to talk about what rules and guidelines they were given and how that helped learning. I doubt whether they would have been able to discuss the nature of science without relating the concept to concrete operations.

             In the middle of the study, I was surprised when another faculty member approached me and expressed her disappointment that she is not involved in the study. This instance gives evidence that we are very unaware of people’s thoughts and feelings unless we probe them in an appropriate way. The faculty member who approached me just had a new baby and was a second year teacher, so I assumed that she was too busy to be involved. I deliberately did not ask her because I did not want to burden her with another responsibility. She was so intrigued by the possibility of a narrative analysis of her teaching that she asked if I could consider her for my next study. I considered fitting her into this study, but her schedule is the same as the current participant’s schedule and I would be unable to observe them simultaneously. I am often guilty of taking on too much responsibility, so my intuition guided my decision to wait until the next study to ask this teacher to participate.

Data Collection

            My study included an initial interview with the teacher participant, three observations of inquiry classes, a follow-up interview with the teacher participant, and a focus group of six students after they have experienced the unit I observed. I “hung out” in her room to get a general feel for the unit before I attempted any interviews or observations. I discussed how qualitative studies are different than randomized experiments with the participant in order to clarify intentions and discussed the role of interviewing as an important data source. We discussed how the interviews would take place, and that she would probably feel that the interview was a very one-sided conversation. I also described to her that this was not a comparative study and that the goal of this study was to tell a story about how she thought about science. We talked about her feelings regarding being exposed during the study, and she decided that the opportunity for learning outweighed any insecurity she had about revealing her thoughts. She told me that she was used to having people observe her class and felt that education should be an open experience. She felt that isolating yourself in teaching was counterproductive, and teachers who isolate themselves fail to learn very much from their limited experiences. On my side of the relationship, I was amazed at the maturity of a teacher who has only four years of experience.

            I felt that the “hanging out” portion of the study was especially helpful. I felt that I went into the interview with a good conceptual framework of how the teacher participant felt about sharing ideas and exposing herself. Because I had fleshed out her feelings about sharing ideas, I was able to ask tough questions during the interview. I did hold back a little during the first interview, because I was afraid to ask “Devil’s Advocate” type questions. After the interview I had a more complete understanding of the conceptual framework of the participant regarding the nature of science and inquiry, although I felt it was partial due to my lack of concrete questions. She thought about the nature of science and inquiry differently from me, and before the interview I thought we had similar ideas. Her ideas were credible and I had a little bit of a vantage on how she developed them.

            When I asked Jen to be part of the study, I approached it by being up front about my lack of experience as a researcher. I told her that I wanted to learn how to do research with someone who was willing to learn along with me. I also let her know up front that I wanted to see some exemplary inquiry lessons, and I knew that she could provide that for me. I asked her to select the classes I would observe and she was excited that I could fit her genetics unit into my schedule. As fortune would have it, I was able to observe the introductory lesson, a research lesson, and the culminating activity. The observations gave me a good framework for the structure of Jen’s classroom and I was able to do member checks with Jen and with her students. I asked Jen to select up to six students to participate in a focus group and she randomly selected students for me. She selected two female students and four male students who ranged from low ability to high ability during the unit.

            I think my relationship with Jen has flourished because of this study. We have begun planning together and sharing best practices. Since we started to discuss state and national issues concerning science education during the interviews, we have continued our discussion and have recommended books to each other. Our research relationship started off a little timid because we were both new at it, but we were very open about the learning experience. I believe this contributed to our becoming very comfortable by the follow up interview. The relationship I had with Jen’s students was very comfortable from the start. The students recognized me from the observations, and they knew that I was a teacher in the school. Because of my teacher role, I explained to them before we started the focus group that I was in the role of researcher, not teacher. I also explained to them that they should not expect me to have any reaction to what they say. I explained that as a social scientist I didn’t want to influence my subjects’ thinking. The students easily talked about what happened in class, and didn’t hold back comments regarding other teachers in the building.

Data Sources

            The first data source from my project came from the initial teacher interview. I asked questions that were very broad and indirect regarding the nature of science and how she viewed science as a discipline. We met on a Friday afternoon in her classroom and the interview was comfortable, but a little rushed since I was learning how to conduct effective interviews. In my rush to establish how Jen thought about the nature of science and inquiry, I did not consider how my questions might be perceived. Teachers live in the present and have a variety of concrete issues to deal with at a moments notice. They rarely get the opportunity to reflect on their own actions because of time constraints, let alone ponder about the philosophy of science. Data I obtained were thin compared to data I obtained in later observations and interviews.

            Three classroom observations were the next data sources in the study. As I mentioned, I was fortunate to observe the beginning of a genetics unit, a student research day, and the culminating activity, a supreme-court style trial regarding issues in genetics. Each time I observed, the teacher was welcoming and the students paid little attention to me. They were often so busy in their activity, that they did not have the opportunity to notice me. I stayed out of the way of activities and was still able to move around the room to obtain multiple perspectives. I had described my intentions to Jen before I entered her classroom, so the transaction went smoothly. I wrote notes as easily as I did for our class activity in the Johnson center. My method to my field notes was to take a broad look at the setting of the class and later narrow my focus. The first observation was during a Socratic seminar, so the whole class was involved in the same activity. Half of the class was having a discussion, while the other half reflected on that discussion. It was structured in two parts: an inner circle and an outer circle. I followed the student interactions and shifted to the teacher role, then back to the student interactions. It was at this moment when it occurred to me to look at class structure and its relationship to inquiry.

            The second class I observed was a student research day. I had a glimpse at how students gather information individually and how the teacher interacts with students when they are working independently. Since the students were working at tables of four, I was able to take a look at the class as a whole, visit the groups as I felt necessary and intermittently observe Jen interacting with individual students. The students were busy preparing for their roles in the upcoming trial. The feel of this class was different because the students were working on an individual paper rather than discussing issues as a whole class. Students had different learning styles and were at different levels of understanding. I may not have observed how the teacher handled differentiated student activities if I didn’t get to see this lesson.

            The third class was a special event, the mock supreme-court trial that addressed issues in genetics. It was held in the library of the school and the entire team of students attended for three consecutive class periods, instead of the usual structure which was approximately 25 students meeting for one class period as in the first and second observation. This observation revealed more of the structures that were in place to elicit inquiry and gave me an indication of the final products that students produced.

            The student focus group was the next data source in the study. I collected the students from Jen’s classroom and took the six randomly selected students to my classroom for the focus group. My questions were structured so that I could validate the information I observed in the class and the information I had already gathered from Jen regarding classroom practices. Although I focused my questions on concrete practices in the class, the students began to describe their understanding of the nature of science during the discussion. At that point in the data collection, I had given up on my idea to look at conceptual frameworks of the nature of science, but was reconsidering. The concepts of the nature of science took a new place in the study as the outcomes produced by deliberate classroom structures constructed by the teacher.

            My follow up interview questions were informed by my peers’ suggestions during a consultation. Rather than focusing on generic, broad questions, I was focusing my questions on concrete examples. Changing the focus of my questions elicited more valuable data from Jen. From these data I was able to take a closer look at why she structures the class for inquiry and how Jen’s past school experiences influenced her decisions in the present.

            I asked Jen for a set of the handouts that she gave to students throughout the entire unit. She was happy to provide them and I looked through them to find any structures that were not clear to me during the observations or interviews. I was able to confirm several of the structures that I discuss in the findings, but did not find any new ideas from the document analysis.

Data Analysis

            In analyzing my data, I remained loyal to the notion that you should write up full field notes within twenty four hours of the observation. I feel that this contributed to more detailed notes for the observations. When I went back to code the notes, I reflected easily to my feelings during the time of the observation because of the detailed text. I audio recorded all of the interviews and focus groups and translated them verbatim through software called “Transana.” When I printed out my field notes and transcriptions, I widened the left margin so I was able to code the text easily.

            I read through my field notes and transcriptions prior to coding them. I had some stray ideas when I reflected on the whole set of data, so I composed a “meandering thoughts memo” that had a potpourri of concepts. I felt that if I didn’t get them down on paper, they would be lost when I started to code the text line by line. As I coded line by line, I tried to stay close to the actual text, rather than trying to make the ideas more abstract. I feel that by the end of the coding, I was making more abstract codes because I was starting to see some big ideas develop and they were on my mind.

            After I coded the text line by line, I composed a matrix for each document that listed the coding categories. I felt that if I coded very broad categories, some of the ideas may get left out, so I decided that I could fold in about a quarter of the ideas into the others. That left my matrix with three quarters of the ideas listed, which was still too long to establish resonating ideas. I read over the matrix and decided that the lists could fit into seven categories: assumptions about student thinking, intentional class structure, enduring ideas in science, the value of teamwork, science as experience, connections to science, and outside audience. Although it didn’t emerge from the coding, I also felt that placing the class structure in context with Jen’s experiences as a student was important. The coding emphasized the ideas that had emerged when I was still collecting data and confirmed what I thought as I read the text before coding.

Roles and Responsibility in Inquiry Science

            For the most part, science educators agree that inquiry science is a quality method for teaching students of all ages science content as well as science process (AAAS, NCES). One of the barriers that most science teachers experience is that inquiry cannot happen in a didactic classroom where seats are in rows, and the teacher is the distributor of knowledge. In the didactic classroom students are accustomed to having information provided and their main task is to retain knowledge. Assessments in such classrooms are based on whether the student can offer back the information provided in class. In an inquiry classroom, the task placed on students is the construction of their own knowledge. In the process of inquiry, a question will be posed by the teacher or by a student, which is then refined so that it will be worthy of investigation. Students will then take an active role in investigating facts and develop conclusions based on the facts that were uncovered. A great deal of the responsibility for active learning is placed on the student, rather than on the teacher, as in a didactic model. Often the teacher must relearn how to structure the class so that the teacher is no longer the ultimate authority figure. The teacher needs to strike a balance between giving the students freedom to learn and guiding that student learning in a meaningful way. The students must understand how to go about learning actively and engaging in a scholarly manner.

            An investigation into how Jen’s classroom operated in an inquiry science model revealed how her previous experiences as a student helped her to understand the importance of an active student role in learning. Jen describes her lack of interaction with the subject matter when she states, “I remember when I was in 7th grade, I hated science because it was taught as completely factual. You had every piece laid out for you. You didn’t get to think.” She was the type of learner that had to have ownership of the content in order to understand the connections. Laying out the facts for consumption did not allow Jen to see how she related to the material, or why learning the material mattered. In 8th grade, Jen took the initiative to learn science in an informal setting. “Our nature center back home was doing a class on karst topography . . . I wanted to do it and my science teacher told me that I didn’t have a scientific mind and I should never even think about going into science.” She took matters into her own hands in 9th grade. “I basically taught the class because my teacher was very poor and I sat there bored. . . I vowed from that point on that I would . . . get into all the AP classes.” Her experience as middle school student later emerged in her teaching style in the form of allowing students to explore. As a student she was eager to learn, but the teachers became barriers in her goals. Jen understood at an early age that the teacher plays a key role in students’ access to learning. When asked why it is important to teach science, Jen responds,

“Going back to my own experience. . . I want to make it so the kids are learning something that again, they can apply the big pictures to themselves. 8th grade science I don’t know anything because I checked out. And now I wish I knew some of the stuff that he’d been talking about.”

 

Jen experienced a missed opportunity when the teacher prevented her from learning by not considering her role in the experience of learning. Teachers who structure their class in a didactic way prevent many students from engaging in material. Teachers who consider an active student role in learning help students’ ownership of the content.

            The role of the student in inquiry is as an active knowledge seeker. Students’ main experience throughout their school career is didactic teaching, so when a teacher has a classroom that incorporates science inquiry, the student does not understand how to operate in the classroom system. Jen was required to retool her students to take more responsibility for their learning.

            “From the first week of school, I will pose a question and let one kid answer and wait. I give that wait time . . . and I think that when I do that the kids know that there is not just one answer and I’m looking for 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.”

 

Because she recognized that her classroom structures were different from the mainstream, Jen realized that she needed to show the students from the beginning that inquiry learning required the students to take on more responsibility. If students took a passive role in her class, learning would not take place. She deliberately withdrew her authority over the content to show students that they were capable of taking on the role of active learners. Jen takes her inquiry style beyond classroom structure into learning by beginning the year with an open ended activity that reveals how students attempt to classify different color M&Ms into categories. “The first day I give them an M&M lab and have them sort the M&Ms in different ways. Seeing . . . their method. . . sorting them out.” Students who have little experience in an inquiry classroom are often bound to the idea that only the teacher has answers. Jen validates that students attempts to ask and answer questions will produce learning through these types of activities. As the year progresses, Jen is able to make a smooth transition from having her students invent process skills to having her students construct new ideas through both content and process.

            Jen’s students recognized the structures in her classroom management and the challenges that they faced when they entered Jen’s class. “It was different. You didn’t have to listen to the 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.” Jen’s students expressed that they learned better by taking on more of the responsibility for learning. The students recognized their lack of learning from a previous science class that operated on a more didactic level. “On Friday, we took some notes and on Monday we forgot what they were about.” When the teacher is the originator of the knowledge, students engage with content in the short-term. In a didactic format, there is no rationale for students learning the material in the long-term. “I don’t like that you memorize your notes and you take the test and then it is over, you don’t need to know it anymore.” When students see the source of information from an authority figure, such as the teacher, they fail to see how it relates to them and why they should engage with the material. When discussing an inquiry activity that took place in Jen’s class, students realize that the learning that took place was meaningful to them. “I think the trial (the inquiry activity) will stay in my head for a really long time. It was really interesting to me.” When it is essential for students to make their own meaning in order to complete the activity, students develop more detailed cognitive structures about the content and are more likely to commit it to long-term memory. When the structures are committed to long-term memory, then they can be accessed and applied to other situations, resulting in meaningful learning.

 

 

Freedom versus Guidelines

            Students needed explicit instruction in how to operate in an inquiry classroom structure. They were not adept at taking an active role in researching answers. When explaining the logistics of how their first inquiry activity took place, students talked about the learning that had to take place about how to go about learning. “Pretty much everyone was ‘wait, what are we doing’” The students were used to having all of the instructions for the process of learning explicitly presented, often in a step-by-step or cookbook format. Before learning about the new content, students needed to first understand how to develop their own process to access the information. “. . .(When the teacher) doesn’t spell everything out for you, it makes it a little harder because you had to think.” The students had cognitive dissonance with the new classroom management structure, but they saw value in it because of the potential for creativity. “Without creativity, you just are going to be doing everything the teacher says. You aren’t thinking one bit about what you are doing.” The student’s need to express themselves overcame their apathy for learning, but the students still didn’t have mechanisms so that they could operate in such a loosely-coupled system.

            Jen scaffolded their prior knowledge to new ways of knowing by providing a balance between structure and freedom. Again, Jen drew upon her prior experiences to think about how to help students learn. When she was attending an informal science activity as an 8th grader, she realized that you don’t have to sit in the classroom to learn about science. “I can go out and experience it for myself and I can come up with new ideas…” Having the structure of the science activity, but having the freedom to express new ideas was an epiphany for Jen. She realized that by providing a basic management structure and access to information, but allowing students to form their own ideas using the information, students could learn content that was meaningful. Jen sets up her classroom so she “won’t necessarily tell them the answer. I’ll turn things back to them and ask them how they think about it.” Jen provides basic guidelines for the open-ended activity and allows students to experience freedom within a loose structure.

            Students also recognize the balance between structure and freedom that is necessary for inquiry science to result in successful learning. “If the science teacher said ‘do whatever you want’ then we wouldn’t be learning science. So you need the guidelines.” Students at the 7th grade level don’t have a great deal of background knowledge about science, so they rely on teacher to connect their prior knowledge to the new knowledge. “You can’t have freedom without guidelines. I mean then it would just crumple.” The students recognize that inquiry science is not conducted in a free-for-all atmosphere. There are some rules that must be followed in order for valuable learning to take place. Some students have a difficult time breaking out of the model where they are given explicit instructions for the learning process. “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.” These students express fear in getting a problem wrong because they didn’t accomplish the correct process to get at the answer. Part of the responsibility of a teacher of inquiry science is setting up a learning environment where the teacher is not the ultimate authority and students feel comfortable in finding diverse answers to open-ended problems.

Teacher’s Role in Inquiry

            The teacher’s role in inquiry science lies more in the setup of the learning environment or “frontloading” the learning structure than in the direct delivery of information. The learning environment must show the student evidence that they are able to form ideas and they need not go to the teacher for all of their information. The teacher indirectly delivers information to the students by embedding the content into their learning environment. In her unit on genetics, Jen sets up an elaborate structure for student learning outcomes. She allows students to choose from three roles, each having a different interaction with the content. Jen also structures a culminating activity, a mock trial, which gives her students an opportunity to discuss the connections among the information they learned. The structure is built to give the students some guidance through the roles they portray, and it gives students freedom to explore their topic through research. The structure of the unit also provides validation for student-generated ideas through the mock trial.  Jen builds these structures because it makes students responsible for internalizing the material. If the students did not interact with the content, the mock trial would fail to exist.

            Jen’s ubiquitous underlying structure for inquiry learning is the development of larger ideas from a collection of facts. In her unit on genetics, students are given a general rubric as a support structure in their research and to guide them to the design of their paper. Students are expected to collect facts from various reliable sources and generate original ideas in the paper. During the class times when research took place, Jen monitored the learning of her students by fielding questions and by proof reading drafts of the papers. Jen’s role during the teaching of the unit consists of her being there to help students to the next level of the process. She embeds an assigned research paper within the framework of investigation because it helps the students to verbalize the collection of facts they bring to the trial. Within this structure lies a delicate balance between guidance and freedom that was observed in Jen’s classroom throughout the unit.

            Students continued to revert back to the didactic model where the teacher tells the student what to do to learn when they asked Jen to explicitly tell them what to do. As one student expressed, “I think more specific instructions would have helped. Like she (Jen) has a tendency to say here research this and the other teachers tell you what to do down to every last detail.” Jen had to actively withdraw from her position of authority in order to let the students engage with the material.

            Jen initiates this shift in authority by exercising the students’ acceptance for ambiguity in loosely structured laboratory activities. Where students are used to having “cookbook” labs where each step is explained in detail, Jen provides questions from which students can construct their own steps. “I will give them very basic steps for setting up their control and that is it. So they have to think thorough . . . “ Jen builds up students’ tolerance for ambiguity in science by maintaining that the students can develop their own ideas if they take careful observations and try to see connections. She “frontloads” the information for the student in the form of the basic guidelines and the student carries out the experiment, even if it yields different information than the others.

             Sometimes the inquiry structure yields less than optimal student learning, which needs to be monitored by the teacher. In an inquiry lab involving brine shrimp, Jen observed two different learning outcomes from two groups of students. “(One group) wasn’t able to draw on their previous information because they were only testing salt. And then, by chance, one of their cups was place in an area that was warmer, and so they developed this idea on their own after seeing their results.” While another group only understood connections when they looked at other student’s research. “They weren’t able to think of these concepts and develop the ideas.” Both Jen and her students see student errors as an opportunity to learn. Jen sees students as having different levels of abstract cognitive ability at the 7th grade, but even concrete learners find meaningful learning in inquiry. “Going and researching, you may not understand what they (the researchers) are talking about, but later on as you gain more knowledge, you understand how to do that and you will be able to understand what that background stuff you looked up is saying.” Jen’s students understand the value in reviewing your errors in inquiry learning. “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.” In an inquiry structure, students learn process and content when they are right and when they are wrong. In a didactic structure, students do not learn the process of learning and if they are given incorrect information, it is often overlooked and tends to develop misconceptions with the students.

Student and Teacher Mechanisms to Cope with Inquiry Process

            The students in Jen’s class understood the importance of inquiry learning and have developed some important criteria in their construction of process skills. Through my classroom observations, I recognized two informal criteria that the students developed that helped them define the process of inquiry learning: teamwork and work ethic. Jen encouraged teamwork by establishing a seating arrangement where small groups of students could have quiet discussions at their tables, which seated at least four students face-to-face. Students exhibited teamwork by listening to their peers and recognizing that science is a social activity. Due to the shift in authority from the teacher to the students, there is no one decisive authority for information. Students in Jen’s class developed ways of coping with the redefined roles of teacher and student. By listening to peers, students checked the logic of the content they were developing. “Greg and I shared a lot of our facts and ideas that we got because we were both judges (a role at the trial.) And then we got them (ideas) from all of the experts.” Students felt more comfortable with the validity of the facts if more students heard them and approved of the ideas.

            Work ethic was “frontloaded” into the inquiry structure through the culminating activity and was reinforced by the participating students. All students in Jen’s class, although they had different roles and content to research, were working toward a common goal, the mock trial. It was clear to all of the students that if you didn’t do the work that was expected of you, the trial would not run smoothly. Jen explicitly talked about the interdependence of the three roles in the trial: the judges, the experts and the lawyers. During the student research classes, Jen would visit individual students and check on their progress toward their part of the work. Jen’s students demonstrated a value in work ethic by working diligently on the project from the beginning of the class period until the end of the class period. During one class period, the school had a weather emergency drill, and by the time the students returned to the science classroom, there was one minute left of class time. Students continued to work during that one minute. One of Jen’s students explained why it was important to work hard in order to have quality ideas by the time the mock trial took place.

 “Like the trial, you were going to be part of the contribution. The lawyers, experts each role had their part. Without the experts, the lawyers can’t make their point. The experts, there wouldn’t be any use without the judges, there wouldn’t be any decision. So each part contributed to the whole trial.”

 

During the classroom research, students were very engaged and had some interactions that kept straying students on task. In one instance a girl was showing a boy at her table a picture from a book that didn’t relate to her topic. The boy noticed another student at another table who needed the book and explained to the girl that if she wasn’t going to use the book for research, he was going to give it to the boy who needed it. The exchange occurred without resistance. Students understood that you had to work hard to achieve the common goal.

Student Outcomes

            An inquiry environment yields different student learning outcomes than a didactic classroom structure. Enduring ideas about interconnected concepts are a learning outcome in an inquiry structured classroom. Students in Jen’s class expressed their dissatisfaction with the focus on detailed facts in a previous class that had a more didactic setting. “At the end of the year, I know everyone does this, you forget everything. You cover details, details, details, . . . You just need to cover the important stuff and that will stick in your head, not the little stuff.” Since students are constructing their own knowledge in an inquiry setting, the focus of learning is not on minuscule facts that are disconnected from any enduring ideas. Students’ learning in inquiry focuses on how the topic they are studying fits into what they already know. If they can hook the new ideas onto what they already understand, students can build knowledge. Jen builds in classroom management techniques that assess students’ prior knowledge so that she can help them understand new material.

A Dot-to-Dot Puzzle

            Inquiry is not just looking around for answers in books and by experimentation. It requires structure so that students will interact with the important content. Didactic science lessons give labs that are in a cookbook structure. Students follow the steps and go through the motions and they verify a result that they already knew. This didactic process is like a teacher giving students a traditional dot-to-dot puzzle and telling the students what the drawing should look like. Jen’s students talked about such cookbook labs as being anti-climactic. “. . . if you know the ending, you don’t have to do the lab. . . You just heard about it and took her word for it, but you don’t know how it got there.” Setting up an environment that fosters inquiry takes more than just hands-on activities. Jen’s class is like a dot-to-dot puzzle, but without the numbers and she doesn’t tell students what picture is formed. She lets students figure out the connections and how it forms a picture. Students rely on other students to share information to figure out the puzzle. Students can add dots to puzzle through their own learning to make a more refined picture. Jen incorporates checks during her lessons to be sure that everyone has the same general picture drawn from their dots. When students need scaffolding to get past a difficult area in the puzzle, Jen provides a few numbers to keep their momentum going. Sometimes students end up with slightly different pictures from the same puzzle, but all of the pictures are meaningful to the students and represent the same big ideas.

Validity and Limitations

            During this study, several checks on validity were incorporated. A variety of data sources were drawn from to form conclusions. Teacher perceptions were developed through interviews, student learning and perceptions were developed through a focus group, checks on the gaps between teacher perception and performance were in place during the three classroom observations. I also checked on the organization of the class through a document analysis of the handouts given during the observed unit. During the focus groups and the final interview, I performed various member checks to determine if my observations were in line with the intention of the behavior. Member checks helped me to interpret the data with regard to my participants. I coded broadly and close to the verbatim text initially, and then formed more abstract categories from those codes. Performing this during the coding process helped me to ground my abstract conclusions in concrete words and actions. It helped me to stay loyal to the intentions of my participants, instead of imposing my own ideas onto their words and actions. Another check to the validity of my conclusions was the emerging nature of the research questions. The conclusions regarding the influence of classroom management on inquiry science were not expected and formed late in the study, so I had no preconceived notions as to the relationship between them. My researcher bias was also kept in check by the feedback I received from the various assigned memos. I tried to limit the reactivity I had on my research environment by being very clear up front what role I was playing. I also tried to be explicit about the format and intention of the interviews and focus group discussion.

            Some limitations on my conclusions could come from my understanding of the school structure I studied. I am a teacher at the same building where I did my study and I may have been oblivious to factors that influenced student learning or teacher planning on inquiry science since I am embedded in the system. I also feel in one way that a limitation exists because I only studied one class, but in another way I feel that the information I discovered could be transferred to other teachers and classrooms. I also would have liked to gather more “rich” data in the beginning of the study. I did my initial interview early in the semester, and learned about some questioning techniques after the interview. Although I used these techniques during the focus group and the follow-up interview, I could have yielded better data if I had begun all of my interviews with diverse questions.

            One of the things I would do differently for this study is to gather student work for the unit I observed. I was able to do a document analysis on the handouts given by the teacher, but the real test of teacher effectiveness lies in the student work. A teacher may have a wonderful presentation, but if the students misunderstand a major concept, then meaningful learning might not take place. I also feel that it is important to get many perspectives to develop my story, so I might spend more time in the classroom and investigate other influences on the teacher. I may find out that the supervisor of the teacher told the teacher to teach this way, and then my assumptions that Jen depended on her prior experience to develop an inquiry style may be unfounded. I found the most important feature of qualitative research is its emergent nature. The nature of the data forced me to confront some of my assumptions about the nature of science that I brought into the study. I realized through the data that the nature of science is so abstract an idea that it cannot be articulated. The data drove me to make other conclusions, and I suspect that if I stayed the course with the nature of science I would have imposed some of my ideas on the participants. I see that I need to start with concrete ideas and build up to abstract, like I have done for years in my classroom. I also found that some of my skills as a teacher come in handy for my role as a researcher. Working with teenagers for fourteen years has shown me that people are not always as confident about themselves as they may appear. I was able to use some of my skills as a teacher to make my participants feel more comfortable.

            My findings from this project have helped me understand what I do the classroom at a deeper level. Since I have looked in depth at the mechanisms that operate in Jen’s classroom, I was able to translate what I find into my classroom mechanisms and critically analyze my classroom operations. A follow up goal of this project is to present my findings at the National Science Teachers Conference next year as a practical workshop in establishing environments to facilitate inquiry.

            I am starting to think more deeply about inquiry science due to this study. As a practitioner, I have always taken for granted that setting up systems in your classroom is the foundation for your style of teaching. I never really looked into why I set up my classroom in my style, it was just something that needed to be done. Now I have more knowledge about the interactions, assumptions and knowledge building that goes on in inquiry classrooms. I can speak in more concrete terms about why some inquiry classrooms produce quality student learning, while other classrooms do not. In the field of science education, inquiry is an ambiguous term. My study has helped me to begin to develop the necessary components teachers need to have a successful science inquiry classroom: guidance without tyranny, freedom without chaos.