cultivatin 21st century skills inscience learners
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Cultivating 21st Century Skills in Science Learners:
How Systems of Teacher Preparation and Professional Development Will Have to Evolve
National Academies of Science Workshop on 21st Century Skills
February 5-6, 2009
University of Washington
In this document I offer recommendations for the design of teacher preparation and professional development models that can sustain the career-long development of ambitious pedagogy including approaches to instruction that can cultivate 21st Century skills in young learners. I begin by describing what it means to be a reform-oriented teacher, articulating characteristic performances of advanced instruction with the kinds of 21st Century skills they foster in young learners. Following this I review the landscape of science instruction in classrooms today, then use the current literature to build a case for a different vision of teaching and what it would take to prepare educators to support this vision. Finally, I summarize the evidence around how teachers take up practices that are pedagogically sophisticated but rarely modeled in classrooms. Current vision of reform science and its relationship with 21st Century skills Over the past five years, ideas about effective instruction in science classrooms have achieved new clarity through converging scholarship across the areas of science studies, student learning, assessment, and curriculum (summarized in National Research Council, 2005a; National Research Council, 2005b; National Research Council, 2007). The recent volume Taking Science To School (NRC, 2007), for example, identifies four strands of proficiency for students and for teachers who are responsible for guiding young science learners. Students and teachers should be able to:
Understand, use, and interpret scientific explanations of the natural world Generate and evaluate scientific evidence and explanations Understand the nature and development of scientific knowledge, and Participate productively in scientific practices and discourse (p. 334).
These proficiencies are embodied most clearly in classroom activities such as content-rich inquiries and non-routine problem-solving. What these proficiencies look and sound like in practice however, has not been well-translated into models for teacher performance (such as a Learning Progression for teachers), nor have underlying skills and understandings required for these performances been articulated. In the following table I lay out eight specific elements of reform teaching. For each of these elements I then describe the teacher skills and understandings necessary to enact this kind of instruction and the 21st Century skills for students that these teacher performances might support. The purpose of the table is not to outline a template for effective teaching, but to provide a picture of the types of pedagogical skills necessary to help students learn complex concepts, participate in authentic scientific practices, problem-solve with others, and self-monitor their learning.
Selected features of reform-based science teaching
Skills/knowledge needed by teacher
21st Century Skills involved for students
1. Teacher identifies in curriculum the most fundamentally important scientific ideas; treats these as the basis of instruction.
Requires understanding of core concepts and explanatory theories in a domain, how these are connected with one another and how they apply to a range of phenomena.
2. Teacher elicits students initial conceptions of focal phenomena; guides students to represent what they know, then adapts further instruction based on these understandings.
Requires ability to craft questions or tasks that are richi.e. have potential to reveal multiple facets of student thinking about target idea. Requires analysis of student responses and comparison against target understanding, to make principled judgments about how to design further instruction.
Complex communications: Students organize their beginning understandings of an idea in terms of verbal descriptions, analogies, diagrams, tentative models, other representations. Skills in processing and interpreting both verbal and non-verbal information from others in order to respond appropriately. Systems Thinking: Students initially attempt to understand how a system works, how an action or change in one part of the system (i.e. model) affects the rest of the system.
3. Teacher co-constructs with students hypotheses and problems related to scientific phenomenon. Focuses these with an essential question that organizes both instructional flow and students intellectual work.
Requires understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge-building, how hypotheses and questions emerge jointly from observation and tentative models underlying phenomena. Requires discursive strategies for making several ideassome of them competing hypotheses public and testable for students. Requires vision of what type of question is complex enough to be meaningful and can sustain inquiry over days.
Complex communications: Students try out scientific discourses of posing hypotheses; they connect questions and hypotheses with initial models or problem. Students asked to craft a model-grounded scientific question. Systems Thinking: Includes abstract reasoning about how different elements of a natural system interact.
4. Teacher provides students with resources, experiences relevant to answering essential question. These could be readings, technology, other tools, hands-on work. Also supports students in deciding what other kinds of resources and experiences needed.
Requires understanding key conceptual components of the big idea, how they fit together, should be sequenced. Requires understanding of how to help students see ideas in individual representations and how to make more complex forms of meaning across representations (meta-representational competence). Requires understanding of how experiments and other forms of testing are designed, understanding the data these observations yield, and how this data can be used as evidence to support solutions or explanations.
Self-management: Students decide which resources or experiences are relevant to answering big questions. They design (with guidance) scientific tests that will generate evidence. Systems Thinking: Students hypothesize how a system works, how an action, or change in one part of the system affects the rest of the system; adopt a big picture perspective on work. Non-routine problem solving: Students examine broad span of information, recognize patterns, narrow information to reach diagnosis of the problem.
5. Teacher supports students in monitoring their own progress toward defined goals.
Requires understanding of how to model and foster metacognition, self-regulation in students. Requires specialized discourses around the questions: What additional information do I need? How do we know weve solved the problem? What evidence will count to support an explanation? How do we address alternative hypotheses?
6. Teacher monitors student understanding of science ideas and engagement in authentic scientific discourse and practice.
Requires broad repertoire of formative assessments. Understands in what contexts they should be used, how they can provide both teacher and student with targeted feedback.
Non-routine problem solving: Students use metacognitionthe ability to reflect on whether a problem-solving strategy is working and to switch to another strategy if the current strategy isnt working. Self-management: Students able to work in teams, but also able to think and work autonomously. Students ownership of problems encourages self-monitoring.
7. Teacher presses students to compare and integrate ideas across different representations, use secondary data and primary data as evidence to support explanatory models and arguments relevant to essential question.
Requires understanding of how to weigh different forms of evidence, coordinating evidence and explanations, differentiating between theory and evidence. Requires orchestrating productive discourse by students in collaboratively evaluating solutions to problems or explanatory models. Requires understanding of the rhetorical practices of authentic science.
Complex communications: Students select key pieces of a complex idea to express in words, sounds, and images, in order to build shared understanding. Non-routine problem solving: Students move beyond diagnosis to a solution requires knowledge of how the information is linked conceptually. Students use creativity to generate new and innovative solutions, integrating seemingly unrelated information; and entertaining possibilities others may miss.
Systems Thinking: Students adopt a big picture perspective, reasons abstractly about how the different elements of a model interact.
8. Teacher asks students to critique the intellectual work of others in ways consistent with scientific practice and in ways that advance the thinking of others.
Requires ability to manage a community of practice in classroom. Needs to model discursive interactions over ideas that are appropriately challenging, based on evidence, and civil. Needs to model how one learns from feedback, how one re-considers ideas in light of input from others.
Complex communications: Students use skills in processing and interpreting both verbal and non-verbal information from others in order to respond appropriately. Negotiate ideas with others through social perceptiveness, persuasion, and instructing.
The vision of how 21st Century skills play out in classrooms is closer to studio-based scienc