UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Faculty in the Penn State College of Education, along with some alumni currently working in the education field, are helping reform Pennsylvania’s science teaching methods as part of a broader effort by the state to modernize how students throughout the commonwealth are taught.
Looking to support the adoption of the new Pennsylvania Science, Technology & Engineering, Environmental Literacy and Sustainability (STEELS) Standards, Scott McDonald, professor of education (science education) and director of the Krause Studios for Innovation in the college, said the group’s mission is to implement the idea of what is known as “3D teaching” because of its three-pronged approach based on the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).
“There are the disciplinary core ideas, which you would typically think of as the content — photosynthesis or the forces and motion, that kind of thing,” McDonald explained. “Then there’s science and engineering practices. Traditionally, these would be thought of as process skills — developing models, collecting and analyzing data, developing explanations, etc. The last of the three dimensions is cross-cutting concepts. These things appear in all the different subareas of science but are not specific to any one area of science — things like cause and effect, size and scale or other items.”
McDonald, who is partnering with Carla Zembal-Saul, a fellow professor of education (science education) and head of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, in addition to a team including several College of Education alumni, said now that the new standards are finalized, his group will work with the state’s network of 29 intermediate units (IUs) to bring teachers from all parts of Pennsylvania up to date on what the standards demand of them. Staff at the IUs will provide professional learning directly to teachers from the schools they serve.
“It is important that teachers and students engage in the three-dimensional approach to science as this approach models the actual work of practicing scientists,” said team member Peter Licona, who earned a doctorate from the Penn State College of Education and is associate professor of Pre-K-12 science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) Education at Elizabethtown College. “The attention to disciplinary core ideas, cross-cutting concepts, and science and engineering practices provides a much more robust and active science teaching and learning experience. Starting with this approach in elementary school not only has the potential to develop future scientists early but also allows students to understand the science that is part of their out-of-school worlds.”
Localized curriculum for science
One significant component of the new standards is for science to be localized as much as possible, meaning studying what is happening in nearby areas because McDonald said that makes science more relevant to students.
“We want teachers to take professional ownership over the learning, and we want them to localize it as much as possible,” he said. “We still want kids to learn big ideas in science. You can learn photosynthesis in lots of different ways. You can learn it in a community garden, maybe rooftop gardening, and maybe other folks, their families live on a farm, so they know lots about photosynthesis. It engages kids in science learning if what they’re learning is meaningful to them and is grounded in their experience and their view of how the world works. Those are essential pieces. It isn’t one-size-fits-all.”
McDonald continued, “What we want is a professional responsibility for teaching the kids in front of them. We don’t want them just marching through a curriculum where who the kids are doesn’t matter. Nobody wants that.”