GFirmer
commented
4 years ago This week, I wanted to outline my plans for my research. My story, my vision, and my initial plan of attack!
My story
One of the greatest challenges for me personally as a teacher, and also for other teachers I have spoken with, is the availability of resources.
My favourite times teaching were when I felt that I had a good grasp of where my students were at, and the learning journey they needed to embark on in order to understand the concepts we were dealing with. Thanks to my involvement in the TFA program, the first two years of my teaching experience I had a Deakin University library login, and access to thousands of papers and resources that could enrich and enhance my teaching. I spent a lot of time learning about how my students build conceptual frameworks and scientific skills and researching ways to facilitate this transformation.
This changed in my third year of teaching when my access was cut off, and I actually felt that the quality of my teaching started to decline because I could no longer explore and learn about my students' conceptions in topics I hadn't had time to cover yet. It was frustrating and disappointing. So much time was spent scouring the internet and books for things that might help me build a great lesson - and so many times where hours later, I gave up and built something from scratch because I just couldn't find anything that was right or adaptable. (Actually, this was even true in the first two years. Yes, there is a lot of literature out there - but I'm going to be controversial and claim that a journal article doesn’t actually help a teacher pick up the researcher's ideas and roll with it in any kind of time-friendly manner! Not to mention the fact that the learning experiences they refer to are normally not included in the paper…)
Sometimes, more experienced teachers can point you in the right direction, but how often is there really more than one chemistry teacher in a school?
My most disheartening and frustrating times as a teacher were when I had to patch together something too quickly, and didn't feel like I could really guide my students confidently. Where I had to take a step back and rely on more transmissive pedagogies than I would have liked. Yeah, it might have been 'good enough' - but it didn't make me feel good. And always, the less prepared I was for lessons, the worse the behaviour was. For me, engaging students in interesting concepts and explorations was the key to a captivated and well-behaved class. These feelings are important to acknowledge because they can make or break your longevity in the teaching profession.
My research vision
The main goal of my research project is to develop an open-access platform through which teachers across Australia are able to find and share resources that are based on up-to-date research into chemistry teaching and learning. They will mostly involve active learning resources such as experiments, modeling, class debates, Socratic discussions.
I am picturing a platform structured by the literature around learning progressions, so teachers can easily track forwards or backward on a concept to find learning experiences that will help them teach to their students' level. For students that are behind - easy access to learning experiences that will help bring them up to speed. For students that are all over it already - easy access to ideas that will allow for extension (I'm thinking independent, project-based work that allows those students to dive deeply).
I want this platform to be peer-reviewable in a way that facilitates pedagogical discussions online and helps connect teachers. I hope that this is a place where we can share chemistry lessons that include Indigenous perspectives from all over the country. I also hope that this platform might be a place where teachers who are interested in innovative assessment strategies can discuss, design and share. It would be wonderful if this project could encourage teachers to be innovative and creative in their chemistry classrooms.
The plan of attack
To start off with, I am planning to use content analysis techniques to create a map of the chemistry curricula across Australia. I then want to delve into trying to understand the similarities and differences in concepts, intellectual demand, assessment and teacher autonomy in different states and territories. Theoretically, with the recent changes in Queensland, all states and territories have modeled their year 11-12 curriculum on the Australian Curriculum, so they should all be quite similar - but in my preliminary investigations, that's not actually what I'm finding.
To measure intellectual demand, I'm looking through different taxonomies I could use, such as the revised Bloom's Taxonomy, SOLO taxonomy or learning progressions literature. As well as being a good starting point for the design of my platform, I think that having an analysis of the curriculum will be really useful in highlighting the intentions of the curricula and facilitating reflection on our own visions and practice as teachers.
Once I have my curriculum map, I'm going to try and work out which areas of the curriculum are covered by research into teaching and learning, and which are not. Which topics have published and validated learning progressions? Which topics have an abundance of interesting experiment ideas available online? How many of these resources are open-access (ie can teachers actually get to)?
From there - I will try to fill some of the gaps.
Wish me luck.
Hi everyone,
I'm the latest addition to the SCOPE research group, having just started my Master of Philosophy at the University of Sydney with A/Prof Alice Motion and A/Prof Siegbert Schmid.
To start off with, I’ll dedicate this post to telling you a bit about my background and my interests. I’m sorry there are so many. I tried REALLY hard to thin it down.
I have been teaching for the last four years in a small T-12 school in Katherine, Northern Territory. I was lucky enough to teach science across a range of year groups there, but my experience is fairly concentrated in the year 10-12 sphere. I've taught Chemistry, Biology and Scientific Studies and held the position of Leader of Teaching and Learning for Years 10-12 in 2019. I love teaching science because it is so malleable - there is something that will interest each and every person in your classroom, and there are so many fun ways to engage with learning, whether through hands-on activities, in-depth online research tasks, class debate and discussion or getting out into the community. I would like to add a shout out in here for the Teach For Australia Program that both inspired me to become a teacher and gave me a fantastic foundation - learning to teach by learning the theory and doing my 'practicum' all at the same time was the most incredible way to make sure I made the most of every little thing I learned in my teaching degree. The support they provided me while teaching in a remote school with very few resources (including other science teachers to talk to!) made the impossible possible. I’d also like to acknowledge all of the incredible students I taught over my time in Katherine – they were and are my most important educators.
Over my time in the classroom, I came to favour particular methods and pedagogies because my students responded to them. I understand that there is no universal answer when it comes to teaching - and what worked for my unique students in Katherine will not necessarily work for any other students, but that is where I'm starting from. I understand that as a researcher I will now need to weigh academic research equally if not more heavily than my own experience, but I would like to use my experiences as a compass to point my research in its initial direction. Please also forgive me as I learn to swap to the academically accepted lingo over my own messy terminology!
I am really interested in:
In the classroom/curriculum · Learning science through hands-on activities. I love devising small experimental (or non-experimental useable model) representations of each concept students need to explore, and structuring questions, discussion and reflection that support my students to reach their own conclusions based on their own evidence. I would love to have a tool-kit of a couple of quick experiments/models I could use for every concept we cover in secondary chemistry (all science, really, but chemistry is definitely my main jam). · Scaffolding student-led independent research tasks so that students can delve deeply into something they are really interested in. I don't know everything, and the world will be totally different in five years' time, so I think it's really important for my students to have strong independent 'finding things out' skills. The most motivated I've ever seen my students is when I give them total autonomy to chase whatever rabbit-hole they like best. · Teaching science through contexts that really interest my students. This includes industry and community connections locally and being a little more creative than we have traditionally been about what constitutes science. I want to learn all the chemistry behind hair-dressing and make-up, innovative materials for computer and aircraft design, mining chemistry and textiles, in order to be able to link everything in the curriculum to something that my students are passionate about - as well as sparking new and unexpected interests. · Scaffolding genuine scientific discovery in the classroom. What strengths do my students have that could contribute to new science? Kids have so much more imagination than adults, so they're much better at asking twisty questions if you give them permission and confidence. · What knowledge and understanding do my Indigenous students have that could be investigated in a scientific way in the classroom? How can that contribute to their confidence but also genuine innovation and enterprise in their future lives? There are many Indigenous students who know SO MUCH that science doesn't know yet. Along with an incredible ability to speak and understand a million languages, there is so much richness here. It breaks my heart that so many of these students have been taught not to value their own knowledge and skills. I see a future where my students have grown up and are leading and owning innovation in climate science, ecology, medicine, nutrition, earth history, human evolution, sociology, mathematics, child development, sustainable agriculture, engineering, maybe even mining! as well as everything else (looking at the lawyers). How can we make this happen? · Allowing students to do explorative experimentation and innovate with their experimental controls. Do we really need a traditional variables-based experiment to find things out? What about observational experiments in biology?
Learning theories/Cognitive psychology · I want to read more about how teachers can implement structures in their classrooms to build student confidence. I have observed that the more I manage to get an accurate picture of my students' Zone of Proximal Development and teach to that, the more they start believing in themselves. · I want to know what everyone out there thinks about the importance of building a sense of comfort rather than discomfort around the idea of 'not knowing yet'. I have observed in many adults that an inability to admit you don't know something yet robs you of an opportunity to learn something new. I have seen many students feel a sense of shame around not knowing the answer. Isn't not knowing yet what science is all about?! Shouldn’t we be showing our students that not knowing yet is exciting? · I want to know what work has been done to make sure learning progressions in the Australian Curriculum (Science) match the current understanding of brain development. In my experience, students are extremely well placed to understand more difficult concepts earlier than when the curriculum introduces them. In fact, I wonder if there is value in introducing abstract content like cells and atoms to students in upper primary when students’ imagination is running wild and before they take that puberty brain backward step (technical term). I want to know more. · I have seen research about student autonomy and choice helping with student motivation, and this has been the golden key for both student output and behaviour in my classrooms for the past four years. Is there any research out there discussing the importance of building those independent learning skills? · Someone please provide me with research about how much more students learn when they're having fun. Particularly year 11-12 students. Please. I want to be able to argue it when I’m told I’m teaching wrong! · We know that some students prefer to work in certain ways. Is there an accepted value in supporting students to learn in many different ways? Is there a research base to support this?
Assessment · Developing rubrics and assessment that can help us track conceptual and skills development in a chemistry-specific arena · Being flexible and imaginative with assessment - how can we measure real conceptual understanding and remove rote-learning as a mark-winner? How can we measure students' inquiry skills, and their ability to construct arguments based on evidence (I suspect the English teachers might have some answers for us there)? How can we measure their ability to interpret the data they will come across in their everyday lives? How can we make sure we are assessing skills that are really important for scientists to have - collaboration, imagination, curiosity, creativity? (I cannot believe how many people think that science is not the right place for creative people) · I think that innovation in formative assessment and middle years assessment is a good starting point for teasing out the details. Once we see that it's tangible, possible and comparable, I can't wait to apply it to senior sciences.
Supporting Teachers · How can we establish a culture of reflection and learning in the teaching profession? How can we support teachers to change their practice over time? How can we make pedagogical resources, developmental psychology resources and stimulating ideas about teaching available to teachers? · We need more national science resources. We need more access to top-quality lesson plans. Shout out to Olivia Belshaw Vagg & Mark Harris for starting us on this sharing journey! · We need to do more work in the area of sharing the work of teachers who have been really successful in their schools and communities, celebrating their achievements and inspiring other teachers to innovate. I would love an opportunity to travel around the country, chasing rumours of incredible teaching and sharing their stories. I would start at Yirrkala Bilingual School.
Please feel free to comment on any of my blogs with ideas or questions about any of my thoughts. I would love to discuss them with you, or for you to share papers with me that might completely change my mind! It is important to me that I remain a life-long learner.