After a scary foray or two into administration, I have happily re-established myself as a classroom high school science teacher. I was a relative newcomer to teaching back in the late 1990s when the California Content Standards were first adopted. As those Standards were adopted across the state, and especially after the State of California started throwing STAR and CST tests at my students, I joined the rest of my science-teacher colleagues in modifying our instruction to fit the new standards.
Much like a frog in gradually heated water, I spent the next 10 years slowly adjusting my classroom. (“Adjusting,” as used here, is a word which means, “eliminating most of the inquiry, cooperative learning, and hands-on laboratory experience in order to maximize student scores on mediocre standardized tests.”) Like the proverbial frog, I probably kind of missed the fact that, even though I had started my career hoping to prepare my students to be curious, self-motivated investigators, the environment had become somewhat uncomfortable–possibly even dangerous–to constructivist learning.
Now, the reform pendulum seems to have just finished its first complete cycle since I started teaching. The physics teacher in me would say that the observed period (T) of “educational policy” simple harmonic motion is about 17 years. Instead of listing the things that are currently changing in public education in California, it might be easier to list the things that aren’t changing, but I will try anyway:
1. Over the past year, teachers like me have had to start adapting to a completely new set of curriculum standards (NGSS), which were officially adopted last fall by the California Department of Education.
2. The NGSS is kind of like the younger sibling of the Common Core standards in mathematics and English language arts, which have changed the standards of virtually every K-12 classroom in California, as well as 42 other states.
3. Most schools are radically implementing expensive and game-changing instructional technologies. In my case, a large amount of taxpayer money is being spent to put a wireless-connected Chromebook in the hands of each and every one of my students next fall.
4. Speaking of money, the way schools are funded in California has radically changed over the past 2 years as well.
5. Oh, and just to throw something else into the mix, my high-poverty, high-English Learner community, like most of the rest of America, is finally emerging from an economic depression that, oddly, no one wants to call a depression, even though it has been going on for 6 years.
So, naturally, I’ve been asking myself lately, with all of the amazing and frightening changes that public education is currently going through in the US and in California, what will science classrooms look like over the next 17 years? I picked 17 years because I suspect that is about how many years I will be teaching from now until my retirement, give or take another depression or two.
Well, one thing we can say for certain is that our students will be inundated by an astounding array of technology. I was recently excited, but also a little frightened, to see Microsoft’s vision of what 2019 will look like:
I also have been hearing from the folks in Sacramento that classroom teachers will be moving away from the direct instruction model that has carried us through the past decade of educational reform. Now, the emphasis will move to the 4 C’s: Collaboration, Communication, Critical thinking, and Creativity. I think I could get used to these 4 C’s, because I cut my teeth as a young scientist by working together in small groups to solve problems. I wasn’t a “real” scientist for very long, but I did notice that the folks who actually got paid money to “do science” were not necessarily the sort of people who efficiently bubbled all the right answers on standardized tests. They were the people who worked hard, used their noggins creatively, and played well with others.
I also like to think about the long-range future because I am frightened by how seldom educators actually do that. We science teachers are currently obsessed with the daunting changes that face us in the next couple of years. And to be sure, this is going to be a wild ride: In high school, we will still give the NCLB Life Science test to 10th graders for at least the next two years, even though we will be phasing in some new exam, presumably an electronic, higher-order thinking test full of questions that will probably have us scratching our heads as much as our students. The new NGSS standards include chemistry at every grade level from K through 12, even though it was previously taught a little bit in 7th grade and then not at all until 10th grade.
But here’s the thing: I don’t want to be like the frog in the slowly heating water this time around. I hope that the test-writing companies and the textbook-publishing companies don’t get to sit in the driver’s seat this time around. I’d like to think that we can band together as professional teachers and incorporate the best aspects of the 1990s reforms–like moderate accountability, attention to all subgroups, and collaboration, while infusing just enough guided inquiry, laboratory investigation, and process skills to ensure that our students actually are learning science. And I also hope we can get the reforms right this time, which means implementing new standards and assessments without largely ignoring English Learners and students with special needs.
Hey, I know I’m dreaming big here. But we’ve got a golden opportunity here to improve science teaching right now, for today’s students. A few years from now, I hope we don’t find ourselves stagnating and waiting another 17 years for that pendulum to complete its next period. In fact, I hope we band together and fight to make sure we don’t. Do you know why? Because, according to the California Department of Education, the United States is currently the 48th-ranked nation in quality of K-12 math and science education. And, among the 50 states, California placed 49th last year. How did we slip so far in one or two generations? My friends, the stakes are too high for us to fail this time.
mild.mannered.teacher 