“I think the main influence of this institute
has been the turnaround of my thinking, planning and executing of curriculum.
I will probably never teach the same way again.”
- Eighth-grade teacher in Earth Science by Design
Across the country, teachers are
struggling to meet new demands for accountability that focus on standardized
testing, while still leading their students to a deeper understanding of core
scientific ideas and the nature of science. Observations of science classrooms
continue to document the poor quality of most lessons. And studies of textbooks
reveal an overwhelming number of topics in the curriculum, leading to the charge
that the U.S. science curriculum is “a mile wide and an inch deep.”
Part of the solution to these shortfalls may lie with a new professional development
program called Earth Science by Design (ESBD).
The Earth Science by Design Summer Institute
marks the beginning of the year-long professional development program in which
teachers create and teach a curriculum unit. Image courtesty Zoe Keller/TERC.
ESBD promotes creating stronger, more professional earth science teachers, fully
versed in the core ideas of their discipline and skilled in the curriculum design
techniques that the best developers have used for years. Based on the “Understanding
by Design” approach developed by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe in 1998,
the program, funded by the National Science Foundation and created by TERC (a
nonprofit education association) and the American Geological Institute (which
publishes Geotimes), is turning middle school earth science teachers
into “educational designers.”
The year-long program begins with an intensive two-week summer institute in
which each teacher creates an earth science unit to teach during the following
school year. During the institute, teachers practice a three-stage approach
to designing an effective curriculum unit. The program continues during the
school year with e-mail-based mentoring and two face-to-face teacher conferences
at which teachers share their implementation strategies and experiences.
Stage 1 of the unit design process poses a new challenge to teachers: to identify
the “big ideas” in advance of the lesson. Surprisingly, most teachers
report that identifying the big ideas during the planning stage of a unit is
a new practice. The typical approach to planning a unit of study is to assemble
activities that are more or less related to the topic and that the students
will find interesting to do. In contrast, the ESBD approach is rigorous —
forcing teachers to think about the key questions that lie at the heart of the
earth science domain that is the focus of the unit.
One teacher wrote in a program evaluation: “Developing my essential questions
pushed me to think more deeply about the content. I found myself researching
online and finding images to decide what basic facts needed to be covered —
almost all of them new knowledge to me. I moved beyond vocabulary and basic
facts to really applying the ideas and making connections that I had never thought
of before.”
In Stage 2, teachers create a suite of assessment activities designed to reveal
whether students have achieved understanding. In our experience, teachers find
putting assessment before the design of activities to be counterintuitive. They
report that they seldom think about assessment until well into the unit of study.
The point of designing the assessment early is to have a clear idea of where
the lesson is going and ways to measure its success. It is not enough simply
to march through a selection of activities and then hope for the best.
In Stage 3, teachers select learning activities to help students understand
the big ideas and address the essential questions. However, having gone through
Stages 1 and 2, the selection of activities is more focused and deliberate.
To assist teachers in their Stage 3 work, the program collected a set of teaching
resources on the ESBD Web site organized according to an earth systems approach.
At the end of the program, the units are reviewed, and the best become part
of a growing online library of teacher-designed units.
During the two pilot years of the program, ESBD has had remarkable success with
both novice and experienced teachers whose geoscience content knowledge ranges
from minimal to substantial. Teachers have said that ESBD represents a new way
of doing business for them, a watershed experience in their development as teachers.
The program’s success is likely due to the fact that teachers are learning,
in most cases for the first time, how actually to design effective units and
lessons. Many of these teachers are now adopting a more integrative, systems
approach to their earth science teaching and all are making more effective use
of scientific visualizations.
The ESBD package of professional development material is currently being field-tested
by staff developers in eight locations around the country. The final package
of materials will be available to educators in the spring of 2005.
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