Forming+Inquiring+Minds

Summer 2004 //Rick Allen// Wondering is a great entré for teaching kids science: How do clouds get into the sky? Why do stars twinkle? Or how do the sparks fly out of the mouth of my T-Rex windup toy? That last question was pursued by one Indiana middle school student whose class had studied Newton 's three laws of motion along with force and friction. The teacher, C. Jill Swango, wanted her students to apply their learning to toys they were curious about. The student with the T-Rex not only concluded that friction and a sandpaper-like flint wheel made the sparks fly but also learned about the mechanized dinosaur's gear ratios and the related concept of torque and how that made the feet move. “He went much farther than I anticipated, which is good for me as a teacher. If I know the answer to a problem, I'll sometimes stop at that. But when children extend the questioning, they become not only problem solvers but also problem finders,” says Swango, a science teacher at Brownsburg Junior High School in Indiana and coauthor with Sally Boles Steward of the book //Help! I'm Teaching Middle School Science//. “Problem finding” is a key part of good inquiry, say experts. “Inquiry provides kids an opportunity to investigate a phenomenon or discrepant event that leads them to question what's going on. These questions stem from children's natural curiosity, and research tells us that the more personal the process [of inquiry], the more ownership children have in finding solutions to their questions,” says Douglas Llewellen, director of science for Rochester City  School District in New York and author of the book //Inquire Within//. Educators agree that the 1996 National Science Standards have prompted changes toward more inquiry-based K–12 science. The change has been slow in coming, however, because an inquiry requires teachers to put up with noisier—but more engaged—classes and to be more active in moving around the room, asking prompting questions, observing, and listening closely to assess students' understanding during a lab, educators say.
 * Science**
 * Forming Inquiring Minds**

A Balancing Act
It's a delicate balance: teachers need to lead, helping students focus on good questions, and step aside, allowing students to control how they set up a lab, says Inez Liftig, field editor of //Science Scope//, the National Science Teachers Association's magazine for middle school teachers. “By middle school, giving directions should start to fade,” says Liftig, who teaches science at Fairfield Woods  Middle School in Fairfield, Conn. “In inquiry, you get kids to generate a question, but sometimes you also have to teach teachers how to elicit good questions. Shifting to inquiry has to be a gradual transition for teachers—you can't expect a 6th grade class to master inquiry to the same level as an 8th grade class.”

Captivating Students
In K–5 science in Connecticut's Glastonbury Public Schools, students use manipulatives; gain training in processes of observation, classification, and measurement; and learn initial inquiry skills from teachers who pose questions and guide their students in experiments, says Kenneth Roy, Glastonbury's K–12 director of science and safety. “In the primary grades, it's the processes of science that captivate kids. By 5th or 6th grade, there has to be a marriage of science concept with content. But in the past, the content and the reading of science tended to over-shadow the doing of science,” says Roy. Yet the need for content among older students shouldn't stifle inquiry, say educators. In Liftig's previous “cookbook lab” approach, a lesson on solubility would have her first telling students that “adding a solute elevates the boiling point of a liquid.” As students dissolved a teaspoon of salt into a test tube of water being heated over a Bunsen burner, they would take the temperature every minute to be recorded on a fill-in-the-blank grid. Now, after Liftig introduces solutes and solubility, she invites students to ask questions. During the solubility experiment, some students have suggested using sugar or baking soda, which Liftig has allowed in the spirit of open inquiry. If students are done early, she suggests they examine the effect of solutes on a liquid's freezing point. “Inquiry allows for differentiated learning. It lets kids think and work the way scientists do,” Liftig says. “For those of us in the middle schools, we feel that we must keep the flame alive and keep that interest in science going.” Copyright © 2004 by Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development