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8
A Vision of the Future
The committee recognizes that implementing its recommendations will re-
quire adequate continued funding, changes in institutional values, and systemic
reform at many levels. Nonetheless, our review of programs that are helping
teachers to improve science education in many parts of the country makes us
optimistic that improvements are possible. This report should help to promote
many more such programs. Focusing on empowering teachers in their classrooms
and providing scientists with support for involvement in continuing professional
development can improve science education for all students. If that happens,
teachers, classrooms, and scientists will be different in the future. We describe
here our vision of the future.
A FUTURE TEACHER
Dr. Preston Jordan is a secondary-school teacher in the twenty-first century.
He is no longer considered to be a biology or chemistry or even a science teacher,
because his professional development has included opportunities to become
knowledgeable in at least two major subjects (mathematics and science) and to
work with the partnership team at his school, which consists of a humanities-fine
arts specialist (from the community), a social-sciences professor (from the local
college), a vocational-arts and career counselor (from a local industry), and four
aides, two of whom are college undergraduates seriously considering teaching as
their future profession. His teaching team is responsible for coordinating the
educational activities of a group of ninth-grade students throughout the school
year.
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83
As a former research scientist, Dr. Jordan obtained his teaching credential
through a special work-study program that enabled him to continue working part-
time at a nearby biotechnology laboratory. His preservice experiences were quite
similar to those of people who graduated from the regular credential program, in
that most of them spent at least one summer and usually part of the school year as
interns with one of the local businesses or industries. That enabled them and
Dr. Jordan to develop some important practical connections to what they would
be teaching.
His teaching credential stipulates that he must continue a professional-devel-
opment program for his entire career. The choice of activities is determined by
him and his professional-development counselor (a district employee who works
part-time as a student counselor or for a local industry) subject to approval by the
district's professional-development coordinator.
The science curriculum, well integrated into the other major subject pro-
grams, has been developed from the National Science Education Standards and
his state's Science Curriculum Framework. The American Association for the
Advancement of Science Project 2061 developed some innovative curriculum-
implementation models, one of which has been adapted at his school because of
its interdisciplinary structure. The Scope, Sequence, and Coordination Project
produced by National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), has stimulated the
development and dissemination of various integrated science units, some of which
he has adapted for use in his classroom.
This summer, because Dr. Jordan will be team-teaching a new integrated unit
next year that involves some basic botany concepts, he and his counselor have
decided that a special summer institute on Fast Plants would be most appropriate.
This program has now developed a network of satellite resource centers through-
out the country, and several possibilities are within driving distance.
The 2-week summer institute is wonderful: several well-known botanists
from the nearby college and community college have teamed with two experi-
enced secondary-school teachers to present the program. They group-teach the
institute and model and provide a variety of effective learning activities, includ-
ing field trips, that all the participants enjoy. A special provision has been made
to help all participants to obtain the necessary equipment and supplies for their
classrooms through the sponsorship of the institute and partnership with some
local nurseries and florists. Followup activities during the school year will in-
clude some classroom visits by the institute staff for both consultation and guest
presentations, school-year sessions for continuing opportunities to network and
share experiences, and some special laboratory activities and field trips to expand
their knowledge base. Next summer, several internships will be available with
the nurseries.
Thanks to his summer and school-year professional-development activities,
Dr. Jordan has established professional relationships with scientists throughout
the region. Several years ago, he took a fascinating earth-science workshop and
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PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE TEACHERS
met a geologist who works at the U.S. Geological Survey. They keep in touch;
recently, she provided him with some special topographic maps that helped his
students to understand the geology of their area.
Dr. Jordan's district provides 10 professional-development days beyond his
normal teaching schedule each year. He may also submit minigrant proposals
related to his professional-development activities that will help him to implement
what he has learned. Dr. Jordan used three of his days to attend the national
convention of NSTA, where he gave a talk on the challenges and rewards of
teaching an integrated science curriculum.
Since he joined the district and began his teaching career, Dr. Jordan has
been a part of a teacher-support program that was originally developed for new
teachers. (His district had the wisdom to see that all teachers, not only beginning
teachers, need support.) The support program provides him with two mentors-
one at his school and the other at another district school. All teachers have the
opportunity to meet regularly during the school year; during these interactions,
they may serve as peer coaches or team teachers or merely provide comments as
they observe one another teach. Next year, now that Dr. Jordan will have taught
for 5 years, he will become a mentor to one of the new teachers recently hired by
the district. He is looking forward to expanding the variety of roles played by a
truly professional teacher.
A FUTURE CLASSROOM
Imagine a future classroom. It looks and feels very different from the "old
days." There are very thin textbooks with eight or nine basic concepts on two or
three topics integrated across mathematics, science, and societal issues. Learning
is not book-centered, but centered on information access, management, and use.
Each table or learning station has several sets of objects to manipulate to rein-
force hands-on, inquiry-based learning. Each learning station also has a modern
information-access facility, including computers, Internet access, CD-ROM
reader, and satellite feed.
In the classroom of the future,
· Learning takes place in teams of students and is based on themes that are
relevant to students and society.
· Teachers show students how to learn with analogies, by posing questions,
and by demonstrating methods of finding answers.
· Teachers are linked or partnered with scientists in research facilities or
related businesses.
.
Students work on actual problems in the business, medical, and research
worlds. For example, student teams work with local agencies and companies to
examine local problems in transportation, urban water supply, waste disposal,
recycling, and new-product development.
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85
· Students carry out both short- and long-term research projects that require
integration of science and mathematics. Students write up their observations and
interpretations in their personal journals.
· Students gain access to data from the National Institutes of Health, the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other agencies to work
on real problems with teams from other high schools in other states and countries.
· Students have direct access to the questions being posed by research
teams, to their data, and to the teams themselves.
· Students are no longer isolated in the classroom, nor is their education
confined to 6 hours per day, 9 months per year. Instead, many options are avail-
able, such as year-long classes, evening classes, and work credit related to team
involvement in community projects that real address real issues and solve real
problems.
· Vocational-biology classes are popular and allow an emphasis on learn-
ing job skills needed by laboratory technicians who monitor robotics in labora-
tory experimentation. Student teams isolate genes in plants, feed into national
databases, and help to develop new medications, engineered plants for agricul-
ture, and so on.
A FUTURE SCIENTIST
Dr. Irene Martinez has just been promoted to associate professor with tenure
after 6 years as an assistant professor at a research university that is in the top 20
in extramural funding. She has maintained a continuously funded research pro-
gram in molecular biology as an assistant professor, but her grants have been
supplemented by education funds to support undergraduates and teachers in her
laboratory. For 3 years, Dr. Martinez had two high-school teachers working in
her laboratory during the summer. They worked most directly with a postdoctoral
fellow in the laboratory and participated in regular laboratory-research meetings,
presenting their findings to the group. As part of their summer experience, they
met weekly with teachers working in other laboratories in the department and
discussed their experiences and planned how to translate them into activities in
their own classrooms.
During the school year, Dr. Martinez and the students and postdoctoral fel-
lows in her laboratory visited the teachers' classrooms and helped them with their
experiments. They also described their own personal background and how they
got interested in science. Dr. Martinez's laboratory was "adopted" by the high-
school teacher's biology-laboratory class. Because the teacher's school is con-
nected to the nationwide computer network, the students in the classroom can
communicate electronically with these scientists, whom they now recognize as
"real" people. They can send questions on the network that are posted on a
bulletin board in Dr. Martinez's laboratory. Researchers in the laboratory see the
questions and help the students to find answers. The answers in turn are posted in
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PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE TEACHERS
the high-school classroom. Laboratory members often debate the appropriate
answers to ethical and social questions. They often send pictures, diagrams, or
short movies from their university's science library, which contains CD-ROMs
and videodisks. Once, when a high-school student inquired about a specific
experimental technique, an undergraduate student in the laboratory videotaped
herself doing the experiment and forwarded the video over the network.
Dr. Martinez was worried about how much time she was spending in work-
ing with the teachers and students, although she and her laboratory found it both
rewarding and fun. She was encouraged by her department head to treat this as an
important responsibility of all university faculty and to assume that success in her
efforts would be rewarded.
As part of Dr. Martinez's record of accomplishment for university promo-
tion to tenure, she described how she had used the education supplements to her
research grants. The supplements enabled her to work with the teachers and to
provide the computer-network equipment and the training to use it so that they
would be able to communicate with the university laboratory.
Dr. Martinez had gotten interested in this technology and in working with the
teachers through the university's Center for Science Education. The center pro-
vided well-equipped laboratories for high-school teachers and students to work
with university faculty in larger groups than could be accommodated in indi-
vidual laboratories. Half the permanent staff of the center were permanently
funded by the university; the remainder were funded by the school district, the
state, and a federal grant. Two of the center staff were specialists in education
evaluation. Dr. Martinez could not help applying the same rigor to her teaching
activities as to designing her experiments, and she wanted to learn which of the
activities she conducted with teachers were most effective in helping the students
in their classrooms. The staff of the center first helped her to find and analyze the
education-research literature on the value of research experiences for teachers.
She then decided that she and three other faculty colleagues in her department
and six colleagues at a different university would try different kinds of followup
activities with the teachers, varying the roles of students, postdoctoral fellows,
and faculty in visits and comparing electronic communication with a newsletter
and written and telephone contact. Their results suggested that electronic com-
munication worked best because the rapid feedback and somewhat indirect nature
increased the comfort of students and led them to ask the questions that they
really wanted to have answered, some of which they thought might sound "dumb."
Dr. Martinez and her colleagues, with the help of the center staff in analyzing the
data from questionnaires and students' standardized testing and hands-on labora-
tories, published two papers on their findings. They also presented them at the
national conventions of the American Society for Cell Biology, and they and the
teachers presented a poster at the NSTA national convention.
The paper on the education experiment was regarded by the university's
promotion and tenure committee as strong evidence of scholarship in teaching. It
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87
recognized that the time spent by Dr. Martinez and members of her laboratory
working with high-school teachers and students decreased the number not the
quality of her publications, but the teaching accomplishments more than com-
pensated for this. It also noted that the education supplements to her research
grants made her one of the best-funded assistant professors in her department.
The promotion and tenure committee was impressed that Dr. Martinez's experi-
ence in using electronic communication with the high-school teachers and stu-
dents encouraged her to expand the use of electronic communication in her up-
per-division cell-biology course, whose enrollment had increased to more than
300 students. There she found that electronic communication among the students
themselves facilitated their cooperative learning and that they often answered
each other's questions before she had a chance to reply.
Dr. Martinez's success has encouraged her faculty colleagues to work with
teachers. Their department has now adopted a whole school in their district and is
working with teachers and principals to expand electronic communication both
within the school and between the school and the university. That has attracted
the interest of the English and art departments, which have begun working with
other teachers in the school.
PREPARING FUTURE TEACHERS
Dr. Nahn Daung joined the Upstate University Biology Department 10 years
ago as a research geneticist and assistant professor of biology. In addition to the
work with his graduate students in the laboratory, he has been teaching the
second core course in biology for freshmen every other spring semester. He has
found that he enjoys teaching basic conceptual biology because it helps him to
translate his own research in the human-genome project into classroom and labo-
ratory activities. It is hard to tell what careers the freshmen will pursue, but
because of his love of teaching Dr. Daung has become a mentor for a number of
students who plan to become secondary-school science teachers. His goal is to
ensure that all future science teachers who pass through his department have
worked with a scientist to experience investigative activities in science laborato-
ries. All those students will learn how to design inquiry-based laboratory exer-
cises that can be used in the classroom.
Recently, Dr. Daung has worked with a faculty team in teaching a course for
senior science majors who plan to go into teaching. He, a chemist, and a nuclear
physicist have been conducting a semester-long seminar in which students from
all the sciences re-examine the primary concepts from their undergraduate study
and make connections with students who majored in other science fields. During
the seminars, he has gotten to know science majors just before they began student
teaching. He has kept in touch with several of his beginning teachers through
electronic mail and has given several guest presentations for one of them by
video conference. In that way, he has been able to show the high-school students
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PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE TEACHERS
what is being done in his laboratory and to engage students in thinking about the
kinds of questions that his laboratory is working on.
Dr. Daung also has periodic meetings with the faculty in the school of educa-
tion. Through a team approach, faculty in the sciences and education work
together to develop undergraduate curricula that couple science content and pro-
cess with pedagogic skills. He enjoys his dual role as researcher-educator. He
was most pleased when he was recently appointed to serve on the Science Advi-
sory Board of the State Teacher Credentialing Commission.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
science teachers
