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Voices in Urban Education
Archives
Toward Proficiency
VUE Number 14, Winter 2007
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
The Investigators Club: An Alternative to Textbook Science
By Richard Sohmer and Sarah Michaels
Richard Sohmer is director of the Investigators Club.
> Author's biography
Sarah Michaels is an associate professor in the education department at Clark University.
> Author's biography
By drawing on the knowledge students bring to school about the world, the Investigators Club enables middle school students to
understand complex physics theories.
Students come to class with well developed theories of how the world works. Students are already dedicated and successful investigators of the physical world: they know how to jump out of the way of an oncoming bus, transfer liquids, move heavy or clumsy objects around, and deal with friction and force. They have theories (largely implicit) of invisible causes (suction, heat, pressure, gravity) underlying apparent effects in their environments.
The way science is typically taught in schools — "textbook science" deprecates students' already-existing knowledge. On the one hand, the extent, complexity, and workaday utility of student knowledge are rarely appreciated. On the other hand, even when student knowledge is taken into account, it is likely to be framed as a pernicious snarl of misconceptions — useless impedimenta that are to be extracted and replaced by canonical prosthetics (think dentures!).
The Investigators Club
Over the past ten years, the Investigators Club (I-Club) — a research-based science program — has sought to bridge the gap between what students know from the world and what they are taught in school as "science." The I-Club has been used in a variety of after-school and in-school settings. In its original design, the I-Club program is an afterschool program with a central focus on teaching and learning science, meeting three times a week with students from a wide range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, predominantly low socio-economic-status students who are struggling or failing in school.1
It has since been expanded to include an in-school program in middle schools, as well as a pre-kindergarten curriculum that is currently being piloted. In-school programs provide support for teachers to adapt the curriculum to meet their curriculum frameworks and standards. In this report, we highlight activities from the fifteen-week after-school program, but all the activities described have been used in schools by practicing teachers.
Notes:
1 As a design and research site, the program has been supported over the past ten years by foundations (Spencer and Davis foundations), federal grants (Eisenhower), and schools and school districts (e.g., Springfield [Massachusetts] Public Schools; a number of middle schools in Massachusetts [Sullivan Middle School,Worcester East Middle]; the Denali Montessori Elementary School in Anchorage, Alaska; the Navajo Immersion School in Window Rock, Arizona).
Archives
Toward Proficiency
VUE Number 14, Winter 2007
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
The Investigators Club: An Alternative to Textbook Science
By Richard Sohmer and Sarah Michaels
Richard Sohmer is director of the Investigators Club.
> Author's biography
Sarah Michaels is an associate professor in the education department at Clark University.
> Author's biography
By drawing on the knowledge students bring to school about the world, the Investigators Club enables middle school students to
understand complex physics theories.
Students come to class with well developed theories of how the world works. Students are already dedicated and successful investigators of the physical world: they know how to jump out of the way of an oncoming bus, transfer liquids, move heavy or clumsy objects around, and deal with friction and force. They have theories (largely implicit) of invisible causes (suction, heat, pressure, gravity) underlying apparent effects in their environments.
The way science is typically taught in schools — "textbook science" deprecates students' already-existing knowledge. On the one hand, the extent, complexity, and workaday utility of student knowledge are rarely appreciated. On the other hand, even when student knowledge is taken into account, it is likely to be framed as a pernicious snarl of misconceptions — useless impedimenta that are to be extracted and replaced by canonical prosthetics (think dentures!).
The Investigators Club
Over the past ten years, the Investigators Club (I-Club) — a research-based science program — has sought to bridge the gap between what students know from the world and what they are taught in school as "science." The I-Club has been used in a variety of after-school and in-school settings. In its original design, the I-Club program is an afterschool program with a central focus on teaching and learning science, meeting three times a week with students from a wide range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, predominantly low socio-economic-status students who are struggling or failing in school.1
It has since been expanded to include an in-school program in middle schools, as well as a pre-kindergarten curriculum that is currently being piloted. In-school programs provide support for teachers to adapt the curriculum to meet their curriculum frameworks and standards. In this report, we highlight activities from the fifteen-week after-school program, but all the activities described have been used in schools by practicing teachers.
Notes:
1 As a design and research site, the program has been supported over the past ten years by foundations (Spencer and Davis foundations), federal grants (Eisenhower), and schools and school districts (e.g., Springfield [Massachusetts] Public Schools; a number of middle schools in Massachusetts [Sullivan Middle School,Worcester East Middle]; the Denali Montessori Elementary School in Anchorage, Alaska; the Navajo Immersion School in Window Rock, Arizona).
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