Students to think, act like scientists
Changes in social studies on hold
BY LORI HIGGINS DETROIT FREE PRESS
The State Board of Education approved new science standards Tuesday that will alter the way students are taught the subject, while the Michigan Department of Education put changes to social studies standards on hold.
The change in the science standards means there will be greater emphasis on thinking and acting like a scientist and less emphasis on memorizing basic facts. The idea is for students to have a deeper knowledge of the subject.
State education officials believe the change will improve Michigan students’ dismal performance in the subject. Results of the state’s new exam — the Michigan Student Test of Educational Performance (M-STEP) — found that only 12% of fourth-graders and 22% of fifth-graders passed the science portion of the exam.
Those numbers “reflect the fact that what we’re doing today may not be working as well as we want,” said Casandra Ulbrich, D-Rochester Hills, the board’s vice president.
The new standards — a slight adaptation of the nationally created Next Generation Science Standards — were approved by a vote of 7-1, with the only dissenting vote coming from Richard Zeile, R-Dearborn.
The board heard mixed views about the science standards from a stream of parents and educators.
Critics said the standards are unproven and cited a report that gave them an average grade.
“Why are we moving in a lateral, slightly lower direction instead of up?” asked Michelle Frederick of White Lake Township.
But they were countered by people like Emily Pohlonski, president of the Network of Michigan Educators, who spoke about how the standards will affect her daughter, who will enter third grade next school year. Under the current standards, her daughter would simply have to identify the force that holds objects to the Earth. But under the new standards, her daughter would have to plan and conduct an investigation to provide evidence of the effects of balance and unbalanced forces on the motion of an object.
“Let’s pay attention to the verbs. Do we want our kids identifying ... or do we want our kids planning and investigating?”
Meanwhile, MDE said it was delaying updates to the standards for social studies to address concerns raised by Michigan residents.
Meanwhile, MDE said it was delaying updates to the standards for social studies to address concerns raised by Michigan residents.
“We’re not going to rush it. We’re going to get it right,” state Superintendent Brian Whiston said during the meeting.
Both sets of standards outline expectations for what students will learn. It will be up to local schools to determine how to teach them.
The MDE has already addressed some big criticisms. For instance, the standards referred to the U.S. as a “constitutional democracy” rather than as a “constitutional republic.” The MDE said the standards have already been revised to make that correction.
The state also made some changes to address concerns it appeared to be dropping the study of World War II, the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel.
The proposed social studies and science standards were both sent out for public feedback from late August to early October.
About 74% of the 450 people who responded to a survey said they believed students would be better prepared under the proposed update to the social studies standards. But 26% didn’t agree. While that’s a relatively low number statistically, MDE said it was too high.
“That’s something that needs to be looked at and considered,” said
Linda Forward, director of the office of education improvement
and innovation at MDE.
Linda Forward, director of the office of education improvement
and innovation at MDE.
The update — to standards last approved by the board in 2007 — was designed to reduce the number of social studies standards from 652 to 552, make them more concise and make them more rigorous, emphasizing students’ ability to apply what they’re learning to real-world situations and focusing more on completing projects.
The changes will align Michigan’s standards with those developed by the National Council for the Social Studies.
The department will address all concerns, then put together an external committee to review the changes. A new public comment period will take place after the beginning of the year, and the standards likely will go before the State Board in February.
State Sen. Patrick Colbeck, R-Canton, provided more than a dozen recommendations to the social studies standards.
“My goal is to make sure we’re presenting both sides of the story.” For instance, he said, “When we talk about progressiveness, why aren’t we talking about conservatism?” The goal, Colbeck said, should be to give kids the tools “so they can make decisions on their own.”
John Austin, president of the board, said it can be difficult to find balance in a subject such as social studies because there are often
“warring viewpoints” about topics covered. It’s the responsibility of
the board and MDE to “get that balance as good as possible.”
“warring viewpoints” about topics covered. It’s the responsibility of
the board and MDE to “get that balance as good as possible.”
“I’m glad we’re taking the time to do this,” said Austin, D-Ann Arbor.
OPINION
The Future of Education Demands More Questions, Not Answers
Technology alone can't educate students. It’s not some mystical, magical ingredient one sprinkles over core curricula like salt on a meal. The magic is inside the child. If designed correctly, technology only extends the creative powers of the individual. Technology needn’t be “high-tech” to be effective, either. Chalk on a graphite board is one of the earliest forms of technology in the classroom; a printed book is a kind of machine; a magnifying glass is technology for investigation of the natural world; string is a tool for building things.
A Pedagogy of Answers
Too many schools apply a paint-by-numbers approach to tech: “Let’s cover this fixed information, in this exact way, in this set amount of time, and judge ourselves as educators and students based on standardized test results.” Even our national conversation about the education crisis in the STEM subjects(science, technology, engineering, and math) focuses almost solely on America’s competitiveness on the world stage and students’ qualifications for the job market of tomorrow. That stagnant conversation has leeched much of the joy, magic, and love of learning from the study of those subjects and replaced it with an R.O.I. model of education.
Take Los Angeles’s plan to put iPads into the hands of each of its 650,000 students, which was a complete disaster; the nation’s second largest school district demanded a refund from Apple and Pearson, the company that designed the $1.3 billion curriculum. The mistake made in L.A. is that the city’s iPad experiment focused on answers: information, knowledge, skills, and tests. Children don’t learn that way.
To date, tech in the classroom has been used mostly to prettify an outdated model of passive learning. Examples of this kind of misapplication might be, “Let’s take the latest laptop computer and put a flashcard app on it!” Or, “Let’s make a math game where kids shoot at the right answer like they’re space aliens!” That kind of tech in the classroom hasn’t worked because it simply propagates into new mediums a broken model of how people learn.
A Pedagogy of Questions
Our national teaching model has for too long been a pedagogy of answers. In its place
I’d like to suggest a new pedagogy of questions—one that prizes interest-driven, project-based, exploratory studies. Personal gardens of learning with no single pathway through them. More open play and less rote memorization. More learning by discovery than following set instructions. (It’s for these reasons I’d always choose a bucket of random Legos over a manual to build a colored-brick Batmobile or Death Star. . . ) And technology has an important part to play in making that vision a reality. Let’s imagine for a moment a classroom where children are encouraged to:
1. Go about and wander until a salient question arises.
2. Paint and model and code solutions or experiments or musings to dig deeper into the questions raised.
3. Build things and try them out, politically, socially, or physically.
4. Share and modify results.
That school environment can exist today with the tools at hand. As an inventor and
father, my advice to those looking to make digital in-roads into our nation’s schools is this: promote learning that encourages kids to choose their own problems and solutions rather than a single, siloed system. Rewards are inherent if students find novel ways to use the technology with which they’re presented; friendships are stoked, and the technology is now owned and created by them rather than the other way around. Embrace the fact that students might find ways to hack the tools you present them; if you expect it then you have created space for it to happen. Finally, tactile learning is too often overlooked in digital classroom initiatives, so think about what a student’s hands will be doing when using technology.
Just as new media have not replaced our fundamental need to tell stories, invent characters, and instill moral lessons, so technology in the classroom will always be an aid for learning, never an end in itself. Putting the right tools in kids’ hands can help children explore the world they know and reinforce that “magic” is the silent “M” in STEM. Tech isn’t the answer, but it can help us create a new pedagogy of questions.
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