1 Introduction To be able to teach them all, you have to get to know them all.

To build an inclusive science classroom it will be my job to help students reflect on how and where they see science in daily life. My first step has to be to take the time to get to know the students and build a collaborative environment for group work tailored to scientific inquiry and observation. To be effective, I will need to assess their prior knowledge or pre-conceptions of science. I will need to know what they think about science, what it is, and how it is already relevant in their lives. With this information, I can fine tune my lesson plans to create cultural relevance for all my students. My overall goal as a science teacher is to help students find their inner scientist and, hopefully, develop a passion for scientific inquiry to get them interested in the content. My immediate objective for teaching is to establish with them a definition of: what is science? and what is scientific method? and in that process help them define themselves as scientists. The definition of science acts as a foundation that supports learning scaffolding for using his, or her, own powers of observation and inquiry. Understanding scientific method, or basic hypothesis testing, relies on the application of first principles, an Aristotelian concept of applying deductive logic to use knowledge attainted from the results of previous experiments to design, execute and interpret the results of subsequent experiments. As Sir Isaac Newton is quoted as saying If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.1 or to re-phrase, science is based on the application of prior knowledge of the works of other scientists combined with the application of scientific method to extend that knowledge. I define science education has having three critical pedagogical elements that each student will learn: 1. Hypothesis testing, including inquiry and observation skills.

2 2. Meta-cognitive skills, including planning experiments, recording and presenting data. 3. Deductive logic to make interpretations, develop theories and build systematic means of describing observations. Inclusive scientific pedagogy seeks to emerge the inner scientists by helping students understand of the value of their own inquiries and observations. Initially I want the students consider various forms of scientific measurement, or cause and effect, in their own decisionmaking daily things as simple as: how things work, or making decisions about what to eat, how travel, how to dress, problem solving, etc. Inclusive science requires creating the link between where and how students unknowingly applying their scientific method and relating that to their leaning in science class. Collaborative learning is ideal for developing the inner scientist. Students working in groups to discuss and process experimental observations demonstrate superior learning.2 Traditionally, secondary science classes establish lab partner pairs assigned to a lab station. Enforcing a rigid relationship between two students for the entire term creates many limitations and unintended consequences, limits lesson planning, is not optimal for the use of resources, and can have some other severe drawbacks for inclusive leaning. Ideally lab stations should be flexible so group sizes can adjust for the goals of the lesson. Collaborative work must include groups of three or more, and the group members need to change regularly. My initial goals for teaching would be the following: Introducing the students to each other to create a foundation for collaboration. Gaining an understanding of the students for my own teaching. Introducing students to science and establishing classroom norms conducive to

collaboration for inquiry and observation.

3 Help them to self identify their own inner scientist. Introduction to scientific method. Introduction of meta-cognitive tools for scientists, in particular journaling

and vocabulary. My Observations and Lessons Learned Unfortunately, I have many experiences with bad science instructors at all levels. Further, there are systemic design flaws in scientific education, mostly stemming from the compartmentalization of scientific disciplines into discreet courses in a forced sequence. Physics, chemistry and biology are not autonomous, and are far too tightly interrelated to make them into compartmentalized sequential courses. Compartmentalization has generated pedagogical work-arounds to considering the inter-relation of scientific disciplines. These pedagogical work-arounds create confusion with students and the perception of a hierarchy between the sciences. This brokenness in scientific pedagogy is my motivation for my study here at Teachers College and this paper combines my new learning with ideas I have had for over thirty years. Since science requires precise measurement, it has developed with a tradition of privileging students who are more able to make precise measurements over other scientific skills. Therefore the ability to measure has been given more value than critical intelligences such as observation, deductive logic, and developing meta-cognitive frameworks for recording or planning experiments and observations which selects for lab technicians not scientific thinkers. In my own teaching, I have seen how students struggled to use archaic lab methodologies to make measurements that are fully automated in the modern laboratory.3 In traditional chemistry programs students were required to be able measure precisely using manual tools, specifically glassware in other words the curriculum was defined to be abilist; students who couldnt use

4 glassware to the appropriate standard could not complete the coursework. In the modern lab, measurement is far more a function of choosing instrumentation and assessing the purpose of the measurement skills that rely on different intelligences not abilities. A critical learning in my experience as a science teacher was the need to emphasize vocabulary. I came to the realization came from reading undergraduate lab reports that were polysyllabic kluges of buzzwords made to sound scientific. Typically none of the papers made any sense, yet somewhere, someone had taught these students this was how to write a lab report. My response was to include vocabulary terms with each lesson so that the students knew what terms they needed to discuss. I graded just as rigorously on proper grammar, as on the scientific content. Students were relieved that I asked them to stop trying to create complex narratives and to write deliberately, often in single sentences, to communicate meaning. Retention and understanding of my students dramatically increased, and they scored better on lecture course exams than other teaching assistants lab groups. As a student, I have repeatedly witnessed science instruction delivered with a strong emphasis on competition, fear and patriarchal bias. The dominant cultural approach to teaching science is highly abilist and performance driven. Students are driven to work individualistically and competitively with a trajectory that drives them exclusively towards standardized tests. Traditional scientific pedagogy has a strong emphasis on memorization and testing. One of my key observations about scientific pedagogy is that science educators typically bypass the scaffolding of scientific method (at least until graduate school). There are many reasons for the dysfunction of scientific education, but the root cause is likely a trickle down from the hierarchical demands of higher academia, which requires superlative standardized testing scores for participation. The hierarchical abilist model of scientific education is created by a research bias that does not consider pedagogy important. Without the scientific context for

5 learning students look for other meanings such as social or economic constructions science classes often fail to give students any relevance or context. Typically students participate in science class because the class is a prerequisite for another class or completion of various requirements. The result is that students tend to retain a free association of eponyms and random memorization that is more confusing than useful. When students are taught this way, they dont acquire the requisite knowledge they were supposed to attain for the next class in the sequence, and the cycle continues. Yet -- this is how we train doctors in this country. In higher academia, science education is considered a service for other applied programs such as medicine, agriculture and engineering. Scientists are an enclave within academia who have created their own hierarchies and they are resentful of being a teaching service. When I attended Brown University all the chemistry professors were hyphen chemists, who primarily had doctorates in physics or theoretical math. Their research studied some related aspect of chemistry but most of them were pure theoreticians, few did any experimentation, and those were really physicists. Not a single one of them were synthetic chemists, the lowly pot-boilers that make up the majority of chemists in chemistry departments. Brown did not have any chemist in the subdivisions of analytical or chemical education or any of the subdivisions of chemistry that were considered vocational. The American Chemical Society rated Brown as the seventh best chemistry program that year. Even when I worked at University of Idaho and Montana State University, they had long since shut down their chemical education division there was no funding for pedagogy. Tenure track academic research positions are highly competitive and highly coveted; they create a downward pressure on graduate student scientist to focus on research, and not consider teaching. I was repeatedly told in graduate school that my teaching services were valued and appreciated, but not important and a distraction from research. I was told I needed to carefully

6 contain my office hours and limit my availability to undergraduates. One professor out-rightly told me showing an interest in teaching was career limiting. Content and Assessment A key aspect of being a scientist is keeping a notebook of observations or a lab book. Industrial scientists still use hardbound paper journals and submit their lab book everyday to a notary public to catalog their intellectual activity for their employer. Lab books help students develop meta-cognitive organizational skills and help construct ways of thinking about observations. Lab books are not just for writing down data or observations, but they are also used to prepare procedural notes, or write down ideas, or draw pictures, or record results anyway possible. The modern lab book usually comes equipped with a glue-stick to include prints out from automated measuring devices. A key element of the lab book is that everything goes in there in other words, the lab notebook becomes their diary, their journal, their cookbook and most important the reference for any derivative work. Lab notebooks are very powerful and provide a tool for students to reflect on their growth and progress. I will bring some of my favorites in to share. With the lab book, students will be introduced to keeping a vocabulary journal. My approach is to start from the back of the lab book to catalog the new vocabulary words, writing out definitions and examples of the word used in context. Each entry is dated so it can be referenced to the journal entries starting from the front of the book. In addition to lab notebooks, students will prepare formal lab reports. Students are often intimidated by lab reports, so I like to use a format that is simple and closely mirrors what they write in their lab book. Therefore the report is little more than formalization of what is in their lab book as follows: Title

7 Purpose usually a sentence to describe the context of the experiment Methods / Procedures detailed description of process Results / Observations varies depending on the experiment Conclusion this is typically that involves writing paragraphs.

The most important aspect of lab reports for the secondary student is the understanding of the process of formally documenting an experiment. Getting to know you My approach to the first day would be to have the students perform collaborative group work to first create a self-assessment, and then develop relationships with each other based on commonalities in that self assessment. These also provide me with an understanding of their prior knowledge. By starting with group work, it also establishes that the class will be collaborative and sets the tone for future sessions. To build an inclusive classroom, I would start with the three collaborative exercises on the first day of class including: A combination of Thats the Story of My Life,4 and Its a Small World5

exercises, where students create their own definitions of who they are and their interests. Subsequently seek other students that share common interests. Top Ten Lists 6 of what they consider to be the most important discoveries they

know from science and collect these points of knowledge from the class for discussion. This will demonstrate prior knowledge of what is science? Group Resume7 follows from the first two activities to help more clearly define

themselves as scientists.

8 To apply the Its a Small World Approach the students will be given a worksheet to answer biographical questions. The work sheet helps establish how they define themselves, their culture, and how they begin to see themselves as scientists. Biographical information would include birth month, where they were born, favorite color, favorite performer, etc. Part of the self-identification step will include asking them about hobbies and interests that can be used as examples of where they might have scientific prior knowledge, or any familiarity, with comparative measurements, or deductive reasoning. Students would be asked to name three things that they know about the subject (scientific discipline) and what makes them scientist? Next students seek out each other individual student in the room and collect the names of students that shared common interests and biographical data. This provides a means for students to get acquainted. I will collect the class response on the blackboard, or Smartboard, looking for common asnwers. Questions like birth month and favorite color provide sample data that can statistically analyzed and put into charts to represent the data. This provides an immediate opportunity to demonstrate how anything can be scientific data, how data is gathered, and how data can be analyzed and presented. Additionally I would lead a discussion to collect answers to what makes me a scientist? Since the question is going to be unusual to students, this should stimulate conversation so they can better form that answer the question in their own minds. The next exercise would be to create their own individual Top Ten List of the most important scientific discoveries that they know. Again these would be processed and ranked from the class responses as a means to define what they think is relevant or important about scientific events or discoveries. This will further stimulate thought about what is science? and what it means to them individually.

9 Finally the class would break into small groups and create a Group Resume. To perform this exercise, they must once again self-assess what makes them a scientist or what are their strengths as a scientist. Given that they have already attempted to define how they are a scientist, and discussed what they thought was important, the previous activities will help generate clearer definitions for the students of who they are as scientists. These activities allow the students to get to know each other as emerging scientist, and allow me to assess prior knowledge. Additionally, the students see the example of performing collaborative work in order to collect observations and from this we have a basis to define classroom norms. Most important I would gain some insight for further lesson planning to create cultural relevance. First Lab To teach students what scientific method is, and how simple science can be, the first experiment will pertain simply to measurement. This process serves to set the expectation for the assessment aspects by relying on the lab book and lays the foundation for further scaffolding on how science works in practice. Students will make and record some measurements. They will need to consider the various deviations in their results. Scientific method relies on measurement and therefore statistical variation in measurement and measurement methodologies are critical to observation skills. Scientist must be able to assess sources of error in their observation. The lab class would include multiple stations that would introduce various concepts of measurement including some that will present some unusual challenges to engage creative thinking. Each station would require that the students repeat the tasks at least five times to begin a conversation about accuracy, standard deviation and the validity of measurement techniques. I would use the approach described by Jones 8 to create four stations including the following:

10 Using a stopwatch to measure the rate of speed of HotWheels cars on a

track as a way to measure time, and therefore speed to introduce the idea of rates. Measuring water volumes in a measuring cup vs. a graduated cylinder v.

weighing the water. This creates an opportunity to discuss the some of the basic properties of fluid measurement techniques and accuracy. It also introduces the concept of density. Measuring a beach ball, a baseball, a banana and some other unusually

shaped objects like objects from nature like leaves or squirrel tail. Students would be give a ruler and a one-foot long piece of string and have to consider what is the best way to measure and describe their measurement. This forces the students to consider the best way to measure or consider measurement of these objects. The last station would include various materials including a lump of clay,

some foil, a wood block, and some pebbles. In addition there would be a tub of water. Students would be asked to consider if they could make the objects float, either the objects alone or the objects together. This station makes students consider density. Depending on the level of the class this could include a scale and a ruler so students can measure density. At any level, it is fascinating to watch students try to build boats, or see if they even decide to try to build boats and how they characterize them. The lab class teaches students about the variation in simple observation. It also allows them an opportunity to consider hypothesis testing and the effectiveness of their observational skills. There are natural tie-ins of this lab to each discipline of science and the lab can be modified to match those disciplines and grade levels.

11 1. Newton, Isaac, (1676, February 15) letter to Robert Hooke, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants 2. Johnson, R.T., Johnson, D.W., (1994) An Overview of Cooperative Learning, Ch. 3 3. Merriam, M, (2011). Learning by Teaching, Retrieved July 15, 2011, from http://mattmerriam.com/2011/06/learning-by-teaching/ 4. Udvari-Solner, A. & Kluth, P. (2008). Joyful Learning: Active and collaborative learning in inclusive classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. p. 1. 5. Ibid., 16. 6. Ibid., 4 7. Ibid., 117p 8 . Jones, D. J. (2007). The stations approach: How to teach with limited resources. Science scope, 30(6), 16-21.