I understand that confidence comes with experience, but I was wondering if you have any tricks or tips that helped you become more confident as a teacher?
– J., Ohio

To calm my own nerves, I would remind myself:

• No one expects perfection. Just be reflective of your lessons and interactions with students.
• I was older and more educated than all the students I taught.
• This is my job and nothing was going to stop me or mess with that.
• Most of the time, only I would know that a lesson didn’t go as planned.
• Safety concerns are always the first priority. I never questioned my decisions to maintain safety.
• Unless the building burns down or students are hurt, any mistake is relatively minor and nearly always fixable.

Making snap decisions can be difficult, particularly early in your career and hesitancy can be interpreted as a lack of confidence. To help prepare them to make decisions, I would ask student teachers to think through some scenarios and describe their vision of a perfect classroom. What were they doing as the teacher? What were the students doing? What were the outcomes? What were the interactions like? Every decision you make should be based on your vision of what your perfect classroom would be like.

If you are naturally quiet, you can consciously work on projecting your voice. I have seen teachers who become different people in their classrooms!

Hope this helps!

NSTA’s Discussion Forums and List Server groups often have questions from teachers looking for lesson ideas. Whether they are student teachers or beginning teachers looking to begin their library of science lessons, or experienced teachers looking for new ideas, NSTA’s K-12 journals have many articles that could be helpful.

Much of this interest seems to come from the elementary level, including teachers who struggle with trying to provide meaningful science lessons within a limited time frame. Two monthly features in Science & Children are relevant to this challenge.

Teaching with Trade Books explores a concept with recommended books and detailed lessons. Each article lists two books (grades K-2 and 3-5) and two lessons related to the books. (You could substitute other books related to the concept if the suggested ones are not available.) The lessons use the 5E format and have a chart showing the correlations to the NGSS. Here is a collection of recent Teaching with Trade Book articles (through the NSTA Learning Center).

The Early Years features easy-to-use lesson ideas for our younger scientists (PreK to grade 2). The article begins with a discussion of the unique needs of young children followed by an age-appropriate lesson that fosters the developing interests and curiosity of these young scientists. Here is a collection of recent Early Years articles (through the NSTA Learning Center).

NSTA’s Science & Children is a good source of other lesson ideas each month (and you can search the back issues by keyword or by year.) NSTA members can download the articles at no cost.

Many authors share resources related to the lessons and strategies in their articles through the Connections link for Science & Children. These resources include rubrics, graphic organizers, handouts, diagrams, lists of resources, and complete lessons.

For more on the content that provides a context for projects and strategies described in these articles (and additional activities), see the SciLinks: Alternative Energy Resources, Behavior, Constellations, Engineering Structures, Forces and Motion, Fossil Fuels, Genes and Traits, Heredity, How Do Animals Grow and Reproduce?, Inventions/Inventors, Life Cycles, Morse Code, Ocean Floor, Plant Growth, Seed Germination, Seasons, Simple Machines, Stars, Sun

For engineers to design and make the systems and devices all of us depend on in our daily lives, they need scientific and mathematical knowledge. Simultaneously, scientists benefit from engineering advances evident in the devices, instruments, and processes they use to test and understand the natural world.

Project Infuse, a National Science-funded project, has been exploring the complex and interdependent relationship between science and engineering to help physical science teachers enrich their teaching and learning with engineering design projects and other real-world applications. Some of the logistical challenges this project revealed were selecting and designing appropriate classroom activities; managing projects which required group work as well as multiple solutions to problems; and the need for new assessments and pedagogies.

So a team of five experts (Rodney Custer, Jenny Daugherty, Julia Ross, Katheryn Kennedy and Cory Culbertson) came together to write Engineering in the Life Sciences, 9-12, a compendium of teacher resources, engineering-infused life science lessons, and assessment tools, all of which were pilot tested with real students in a real classroom.

The book’s content is spread across six chapters, beginning with an overview of how engineering fits into life science education.

Chapter 2 offers six engineering-infused life science lessons which Project Infuse teachers deemed the most important components of the book. Each lesson includes a comprehensive list of core elements: an overview;  goals; assessment criteria; recommendations on when the lesson should be taught within a unit; a content outline; needed materials; resources; time recommendations for each stage of the lesson; instructional sequence; differentiation options; research on student learning; connections to the Common Core State Standards; source references; engineering and live science rubrics; and a matrix for lesson development and assessment.

Chapter 3 focuses on the practicality of delivering engineering design challenges and projects in science classrooms, beginning with the rollout (setting the stage), moving into ideation (guiding students toward good design), prototyping, and wrapping up.

Assessment (both summative and formative) is the focus of Chapter 4, which explores the implications for assessment under the NGSS and describes practical classroom issues and tools.

Chapter 5 offers additional lesson ideas across a broad range of interesting topics such as bio-security, green city design, invasive species control, next-generation prosthetics, and unnatural selection.

“The intent of this chapter is to plant some seeds of ideas that teachers may wish to develop into lessons,” according to the authors.

The book’s final chapter presents five engineering case studies to ignite classroom conversations around how engineering was used to find a solution to a real-world problem or opportunity. The examples were deliberately selected to span a range of science and engineering fields and can be used:

• To introduce students to engineering concepts (constraints, design, systems, and/or tradeoffs);
• As a starting point for a larger research assignment; and/or
• To spark student conversation to open-ended questions.

“In our work with science teachers and students, discussion of these as studies have provided a starting point to view and understand something of how engineering works in a variety of real-world situations, and we trust that others will find them equally useful,” explained the authors.

High school life science educators who are seeking teacher-tested and classroom-ready resources will find this book contains a treasure trove of fresh ideas. Ready to learn more? A free chapter is available, and the book is also available as an ebook.

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Take a look at this short video from my high school chemistry class:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNHmVEJLAvI&feature=youtu.be

Now ask yourself, were you surprised by my choice to use ice to reboil the water?  What did you feel when you watched that event?   Were you curious about why that event could take place?  Did you have your own unique questions you wanted answered?  

If so, your experience is similar to the findings from the recent report from the National Academy of Sciences on what middle school and high school science students should experience when learning science and engineering.  Students want to ask THEIR OWN questions AND solve real problems THEY SEE in their own communities.

As teachers, we know that Science is fundamentally based on asking questions about one’s surroundings and about seeking answers to questions that resonate with an individual scientist. 

Investigation and design are the very activities that students need most in order to optimize science learning as well as to motivate them to explore and persist in STEM career pathways.

However, as the report points out, few middle and high school science teachers have truly experienced this type of investigation-based science themselves  and have minimal to no experience from which to draw upon to design these types of learning experiences for students.  Even fewer teachers have experience with authentic engineering design and problem solving. 

This gap between teachers’ learning experiences and research-based recommendations on how students will best learn creates an urgent need for action by all STEM education stakeholders to:

1) Profoundly change how science teachers’ professional learning is funded, designed, delivered, and evaluated for effectiveness;

2) Innovatively create new models of STEM teacher roles (policy making, state and local curriculum development, and assessment design) to better utilize teachers with investigation and design experience without removing them completely from the classroom setting;

3) Strategically invest in the development of Open Education Resources by states (OER can be shared by ALL teachers throughout the country) that provide students with strong investigation and design experiences at the middle school and high school level.

Teachers need help to make this shift to investigation and design focused science learning.   I like to use the analogy of teachers to surgeons.  Who do you want operating on you?  Do you want a practicing surgeon or someone who hasn’t been in an operating room for 10 years?   Likewise, who is best positioned to train surgeons on new surgical techniques–a current surgeon or someone who hasn’t been in an operating room for 10 years?

Why would it be different for teachers?  Teaching is a rapidly changing profession that requires multiple levels of simultaneous decision making analogous to the training and re-training demands found in surgical medicine. We need to create new infrastructures to capitalize on the expertise of excellent teachers without removing them completely from the teaching practice.  

In addition, how many surgeons design their own surgical instruments or pharmaceutical tools to fulfill their job requirements?  In contrast, most science teachers are forced to design their own tools (create learning sequences/curriculum, write or secure learning activities, identify new scientific findings that students should learn) as well as their own medicines (formative and summative assessment tools) all while learning about and servicing the individual needs and interests of over 100+ students on a daily basis.  

Schools, districts and states must do better at providing the learning resources and assessment tools teachers need to create investigation and design-focused science classrooms for ALL middle and high school students in our country, regardless of zip code or ethnicity.

Our country’s security and global competitiveness depends upon us making this shift to ensure that ALL students learn science through investigations and design activities.

Editor’s Note: This presentation was part of a Senate briefing on the  National Academy of Sciences report Science and Engineering for Grades 6-12: Investigation and Design at the Center hosted by NSTA and the STEM Education Coalition; details on that event here.

Bruce Wellman currently teaches high school students chemistry and engineering design at the Olathe Public Schools’ Engineering Academy at Olathe Northwest High School in Olathe, Kansas. He is a Nationally Board Certified Teacher (Adolescent and Young Adulthood Science, Chemistry) since 2006, a 2009 Presidential Awardee for Excellence in Math & Science Teaching (PAEMST),  and is active on several professional organization committees: the American Society for Engineering Education Board of Directors’ Committee on P12 Engineering Education and various committees at the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.  He served as a reviewer for the NAS report Science and Engineering for Grades 6-12: Investigation and Design at the Center.

As a member of the committee charged with revising America’s Lab Report, I’ve often been asked the question, why are we updating recommendations now? The reason is simple: we know a lot more now about how students learn science and engineering, and how teachers can support students as they engage in science investigations and engineering design. As the committee wrote the report, we kept in mind the need to provide resources and information for teachers about how to guide and support their students.

Other NSTA blogs have already summarized the shifts in the roles of the students and teachers when investigation and design are at the center of student learning of science and engineering. The report builds on new research that shows that when we start with compelling questions that grow out of students’ everyday experiences, students actually learn more deeply, and in ways that they don’t when we focus on just concepts alone that are not connected to their everyday lives.

This is a dramatic shift in what science classrooms look like. Previously, science learning was often linear, with science laboratories placed in sequences of instruction that included lectures, discussions in which teachers asked initiating questions, students responded, and teachers evaluated those responses (also called IRE discussions), reading textbooks, and taking tests.

In the report, and based on this new research, we rethink and reposition student and teacher activity so that activities are all organized around and supporting the investigations and design. Kids are asking the questions, participating in sensemaking discussions, and engaging in arguments, among other activities (see Figure 4-1 from the report).

We know from research that these kinds of learning experiences are most effective when students are provided with thoughtful guidance and facilitation from their science teachers. These learning environments are not simply ‘hands-on,’ but go much farther. They involve the careful and mindful guidance of the teacher to help students make meaning of the evidence they are collecting in class, to share and argue their ideas, and to revise those ideas as they learn.

To support teachers as they learn to support students in this way, the report provides a number of resources to make explicit the things that teachers can do as students engage in investigations and design in middle and high school classrooms. Chapter 5 is entitled “How Teachers Support Investigation and Design,” and includes rich descriptions of what teachers can do to guide and support students as they make sense of phenomena, gather and analyze data and information, construct explanations and design solutions, communicate reasoning to self and others, and connect learning through multiple contexts. These are summarized in a helpful infographic prepared as part of the report’s release.

Multiple research studies have also examined how teachers use what have been called ‘Talk Moves’ as they interact with students one-on-one, in small groups, and in whole-class discussions throughout the different kinds of activities shown in Figure 4-1. These talk moves serve a number of purposes, from drawing out student ideas, to marking those ideas’ importance, to linking student contributions and building on students’ prior knowledge. These questions are all open-ended and designed to truly draw out and push student thinking in ways that research has shown to be generative and supportive of developing students’ science ideas as they engage in science investigation and engineering design. The report includes a helpful table that summarizes these kinds of talk moves (see Table 5-2).

Several vignettes from the classroom of Bethany, a high school Chemistry teacher, are also sprinkled throughout the report.  Bethany starts off a new sequence of investigations by introducing the phenomenon of an oil tanker that crushes after it’s been steam-cleaned and sealed, and the video of this lesson shows 11^th graders exclaiming, “Whoa!’ “Holy smokes!” “Why’d that happen?” Bethany wisely responds, before leading students into a multiple-day investigation in which they ultimately learn about the ideal gas law: “That’s a good question, that’s what we’re trying to figure out.” Bethany then asks her students to draw initial models that help to elicit students’ first ideas about what might be happening so that she and the students in class can interact with and build on those ideas, and Bethany and the students return to and revise those models multiple times as they complete a series of investigations to better understand this phenomenon (see Figure 5-1 from the report).

If you’d like to see Bethany and her students in action, the Ambitious Science Teaching website includes videos not only of this lesson, but of Bethany guiding her students through a sequence of learning experiences in which she unpacks students’ initial questions and models about what might be happening with the oil tanker. Teachers might use Figure 4-1 to rethink the way learning experiences are organized in their classrooms, or watch videos of Bethany (or other teachers) while using the ‘talk moves’ table or infographic as resources to track exactly how she guides students in their learning. It is our intention that these resources embedded throughout the report will provide new and helpful supports as teachers learn to guide their students as they engage in science investigation and engineering design.

Erin Marie Furtak is professor of science education and associate dean of faculty in the school of education at the University of Colorado Boulder. Previously,she was a public high school biology and earth science teacher. She is a member of the Committee on Science Investigations and Engineering Design Experiences in Grades 6-12.

In early childhood settings both educators and young children solve problems using available materials and an engineering design process. The process is not step-by-step because it looks different depending on the age of the children, the time available, and their engagement with adults helping them reflect on their work and process. A quick internet search for “The Engineering Design Process” shows that there are many variations, and they all include “evaluate” and “redesign” or “improve” as part of the process, and most of them are labeled “The” rather than “An” engineering design process. “Communicate” is another common part of the process, located centrally in some designs and often as a single moment. Some graphics communicate how the cycle repeats, the iterative nature of engineering design in working towards a better solution.

This cycle of trying to create a solution, testing it, then finding it needs some changes is familiar to most of us as we jury rig to deal with everyday problems. A childcare provider whose home business meets the needs of families with children five-years-old and under found that in addition to providing a stable step for small children to use at the sink, she also needed to move the water stream closer to the children. She devised this inexpensive homemade solution after trying several other designs: a just-the-right-size cup with the bottom removed, placed over the faucet to direct the water stream forward. Other homemade problem-solving designs by adults that I’ve seen include a way to hang a roll of toilet paper, a paper stand made from a cup, and using a hair rubber band to hold up a shower hose. 

“Children have their own creative ideas to build and are intrinsically compelled to act upon them. In their process of construction, children grapple with systems thinking, growing to understand that the effect of changing one part of the system may have unintended consequences for the performance of another. They problem solve and often communicate with peers to collaborate in their perseverance to be successful. In the process, children have the opportunity to wrestle with their ethical use of materials and navigate social relationships.

Just as effective science teachers look for science in their children’s world to find meaningful entry points for science investigations, elementary teachers can look for engineering in their children’s world to find meaningful entry points for engineering experiences.” —Dr. Beth Van Meeteren

2018. Guest Editorial: Elementary Engineering: What Is the Focus? Science and Children.  55(7): 6-8.

What problems that arise in your setting have children tried to solve through an engineering design process? Making their own bandage or bag? Building a stable tower? Or creating a fair way—a system—to share materials? By identifying this kind of engineering design work you’ll be better able to help children reflect on their design and extend their work to improve it.