What Happens When Even the Teacher Doesn't Know What the Next Experiment Will Be?

Science Educator, Spring 2009 by Bove, Claire

The author describes the educational and professional experiences that helped shape her approach to teaching middle school science through openended inquiry in an urban middle school setting.

For many years, I taught science in an urban middle school. One thing I learned during those joyful, stressful years was that teaching science through inquiry is almost impossible. This is the story of my attempt to teach science through open-ended inquiry and the moments when it becomes, briefly, possible. I offer this account, not as a blueprint, but as a report from the field, in the hope that it may spark in other teachers, principals, science resource specialists, and others, new ideas to apply to their own, unique situations. This is the story of one year during which my seventh grade students and I investigated the concepts of density and buoyancy. I also describe the particular factors in my education, reading, and experiences that influenced me to try to teach in this way.

Background: A University Lab Group

A long time ago, when I was an undergrad at a research university, I worked in a cell biology lab. My lab was investigating cell division in a beautiful, little diatom (algae) called Cylindrotheca fusiforrnis, and I was in charge of the electron microscope part of the investigation. It was excruciatingly laborious and deeply fascinating. There was a lab meeting every week, and each week, one of the group members would present so that we all would be informed of everyone's activities and processes. We wouldask questions and help each other interpret our interim results. Sometimes, one of the group members would be preparing to present at a conference. The others would play the role of the conference authence, and people would ask, "Do you want us to be an easy authence or a tough authence?". I was one of the most junior members of the group, but I also presented and took part in the discussion.

In these meetings, I learned a lot about the process of scientific inquiry. The head of the group was a professor. There were three post docs, three doctoral students, a lab technician, and two undergrads in the group. With the exception of the other undergraduate, everyone knew much more than I did, but none of these people knew the answers to the questions we were investigating. The professor, although he didn't know the answers, knew a lot about finding answers, and he was good at guiding us to the most promising course. As a result, I learned a lot. But learning, in an academic sense , wasn' t the main point. The point was to use the questions and projects that we were working on to discover new knowledge.

After I started teaching middle school, I thought a lot about ways to bring the experience of actively participating in science to my sixth and seventh grade classrooms. There are, of course, one or two differences between a university lab group and a middle school classroom. For example, a bored post-doc can retreat into an inner world to contemplate a research problem or to go over plans for the weekend. By contrast, sitting quietly while others are talking is not a skill most middle school students have mastered. If you have 30 twelve-yearolds in the room, they are completely present at all times, and they need to be engaged.

Another difference between lab meetings and middle school lessons is that in our lab meetings, no one knew the answers to the questions we were asking. In the science classroom, the teacher usually does know the answer. "Good students" are adept at figuring out the answer that the teacher has in mind. Yet, in creative thinking in science, as in creative thinking of any kind, the important skill is the ability to figure out the answer on your own. My goal is to help students get past the school-savvy habit of reading the teacher's mind.

Another difference is that, in a classroom, there are a lot more people than there are in a lab group, and very few of them are as independent as doctoral students. If you were to have students conducting their own experiments, you would have 30 experiments going on simultaneously. If you have the students work in pairs, you could get it down to 15 experiments, or if you have groups of four, you could reduce it to seven or eight. But . . . many secondary science teachers have five classes. If you multiply all those numbers by five, the task approaches impossibility.

Through trial and error over many years, I came up with the ideas that led to the classroom experiments described below. The account that follows occurred many years after my work in the cell biology lab, after I had completed a Master's and credential program, and after I had taught middle school science for eight years.

A Middle School Lab Group

Over the period of a year, two of my seventh grade classes conducted a series of open-ended, student-designed inquiry experiments on the density and buoyancy of various liquids and solids. One of my goals during this year was to document the development over time of student understanding of concepts of buoyancy and density, and, simultaneously, to document the development of the strategies I used to support this understanding. Specifically, I was trying to create a classroom environment in which students could learn to pursue their own ideas about buoyancy and density by collaboratively designing experiments to test their ideas.