Jim Churchill, from Lake Washington High School, left, and Gail Pintler, from Shorewood High School, examine the way gears work on a bicycle. The math teachers were participating in a project that is part of the UW’s educational outreach program.
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Kindergarten Profs: Math, science programs take ‘brains-on’ approach to partnerships with K-12 schools
Editor’s Note: The University of Washington has embarked on more than 140 partnerships with K-12 schools to reform the way children learn math and science, This three-part series reports on UW efforts to bring more experimentation and discovery to K-12 classrooms. Today: An overview. Next week: Science. April 13: Math.
Gail Pintler peers through spinning spokes and ponders deeply, for the first time in his 55 years, why the pedal twirls faster with the chain on the big sprocket of the wheel.
Yet Pintler and the two dozen other high-school math teachers at this workshop aren’t just studying the geometry of bikes - they’re riding an educational revolution.
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Jim Churchill, from Lake Washington High School, left, and Gail Pintler, from Shorewood High School, examine the way gears work on a bicycle. The math teachers were participating in a project that is part of the UW’s educational outreach program.
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They’re learning how to teach math and science by letting kids do math and science - the buzzword is “inquiry-based” learning - and are bringing those techniques into their K-12 classrooms with the help of a growing crew of University of Washington researchers, coordinators and coaches.
As a result, oceanographers take middle-school teachers on summer research cruises and astronomers help elementary kids build telescopes, to name just a couple of the hundreds of UW efforts under way to build high school graduates able to solve problems through observation and discovery.
“What we’re doing is not ‘hands on’ science,” UW physics professor Lillian McDermott said of the educational movement she helped launch a quarter-century ago. “It’s ‘brains-on’ science.”
Put simply, it’s math and science performed by students rather than inflicted on them. Or, as one course title puts it: “I Don’t Know, Let’s Do the Experiment.”
McDermott was a campus pioneer when she launched the Physics Education Group in the mid-1970s to study ways to imbue science teaching with the spirit of scientific inquiry.
“People at the UW didn’t think K-12 was worth getting involved with,” McDermott recalled.
By the spring of 2000, however, the same University has made the quest for K-12 renewal a top priority. Winter quarter’s biggest campus press conference heralded the arrival of Rudy Crew, former New York schools chancellor, to head a fledgling K-12 Leadership Institute to enhance the effectiveness of principals.
But with less fanfare, hundreds of other joint efforts to foster inquiry-based learning already are transforming area classrooms. The UW’s K-12 Institute for Science, Math & Technology Education counts at least 140 town-gown partnerships in those subjects alone.
The institute, part of the UW Office of Educational Partnerships, seeks to coordinate the numerous projects, which range from an individual professor leading field trips to multimillion-dollar systemic reform programs involving dozens of university scholars and thousands of schoolteachers.
Ethan Allen, director of the K-12 Institute for Science Math & Technology, said the institute is developing tools to help participants gauge the effectiveness of inquiry projects, a resource library of teaching tools and state educational standards, and a Web site (http://depts.washington.edu/k12smt/) for sharing all this information inside and outside the University.
One of the most ambitious of the projects joins the UW, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Boeing and the Seattle Schools in a $4.2 million quest to bring 100 hours of science enrichment to every K-5 teacher in Seattle. More than 850 teachers have learned the new techniques from “resource teachers” and UW professors and graduate students.
A second National Science Foundation grant last year extended the program to middle-school classrooms in five area districts. And now, UW faculty are making plans for a high-school version.
UW mathematicians, meanwhile, have won similar large grants to transform math education in six school districts, beginning with elementary schools and moving through the secondary grades.
So integral have such educational partnerships become to the UW’s mission that Dana Riley Black, the K-12 institute’s associate director, said professors increasingly find that research grant proposals require an educational-outreach component.
The institute can help formulate those projects, Black said, but barriers remain.
“There are a lot of questions to be answered,” she said, “about what sort of incentives we can offer people at the University.”
For graduate students, school involvement might bring a stipend or letter of commendation for the portfolio. But a more complicated challenge is rewarding faculty members already stretched thin by research and teaching loads.
The University receives an obvious benefit, of course, when freshmen arrive with stronger analytical abilities.
But what is a university’s role in getting them prepared? The UW, it turns out, already plays at least three major roles:
If there’s one thing teaching through inquiry demands, it’s mastery of content. You can’t lead students to discover, say, electricity, without understanding it yourself. That proves an extra challenge for the 90 percent of elementary teachers who did not major in science.
So several UW partnership programs offer teachers weekend, evening and summer workshops with UW graduate students, postdocs and faculty.
“Teachers cannot teach inquiry-based science without the content,” said Elaine Woo, Seattle schools Inquiry-based Science project director. “We couldn’t have survived without the UW’s help.”
At the recent bicycle workshop, for example, Pintler, of Shorewood High, and his colleagues were being coached by UW mathematicians Ramesh Gangolli and Virginia Warfield, and by Jack Beal, professor of education. The UW scholars mingled with teachers in a Shoreline multipurpose room crowded with upside-down bikes. The goal was to observe the shifting of gears in relation to pedal and wheel.
“Consider which is the sprocket that attaches to one revolution of the wheel,” said Gangolli, an internationally known probability theoretician. “The smaller one is faster to get the same amount of distance. Notice the relationship.”
Gangolli and the other UW participants say concentrating on such basic principles doesn’t just help the teachers they’re coaching; it enhances the professors’ ability to teach university students.
“By doing this, one discovers the ways in which different people learn,” Gangolli said. “One has forgotten how one learned a concept when one was younger.”
A model for what academic units throughout campus could be doing, Allen said, is McDermott’s work to connect the UW physics department with public schools.
Since the mid-70s, McDermott’s Physics Education Group has been designing courses for current and future K-12 and college instructors. The curriculum - published in the group’s popular Physics By Inquiry text and repeatedly tested in an annual summer institute for teachers - builds upon sequences of carefully structured questions that bypass common learning difficulties.
“We try to approach the teaching of physics as a science,” said McDermott.
Despite the numerous UW programs,
K-12 teachers rarely have more than occasional contact with University faculty. Teachers mostly learn from other teachers. So educational reformers are pushing hard to break down barriers between classrooms.
What the UW can provide, reformers say, is a setting for these cross-classroom “conversations,” a “third space” where teachers learn and discuss.
“Before, teachers didn’t have time for conversation with other teachers, let alone learning opportunities,” said Caroline Kiehle, a veteran math and science teacher who now oversees the Middle School Science Systemic Change Partnership. “None of this would be happening without the UW.”
For the town-gown “marriage” to last, however, it will take strong leadership at both the University and school level, said Mark St. John, whose Inverness Research Associates firm was hired to monitor the UW science partnerships.
“You certainly have that in Seattle,” St. John said.
“What’s unique here is the community leadership,” agreed Leroy Hood, the former chairman of the UW Department of Molecular Biotechnology who formed a private company last year.
Hood continues as the principal investigator on several UW grants despite his departure from full-time faculty status, and the molecular biotechnology department remains a hotbed of educational reform projects with 10 staffers orchestrating a half-dozen outreach partnerships.
Louis Fox, UW vice provost for educational partnerships, praised Hood as one of the University’s major K-12 advocates, along with Ed Lazowska, chairman of computer science and engineering, and Ronald Johnson, vice president of computing and communications.
What has made their efforts pay off, Fox said, is the fact that off-campus leaders in business, government and K-12 education are pulling in the same direction.
“It’s a sort of moment in time that I’m not aware has ever existed before,” Fox said. “This region is really poised to be a significant contributor in this field.”
UW President Richard L. McCormick, who threw a banquet last fall honoring the math and science partnerships, has been a relentless and outspoken advocate.
“Our stake in the success of the public schools is higher than ever before, and so is our responsibility,” McCormick declared. “If there ever really was a time when higher education held itself apart from the broader educational system - aloof and elite - that time has passed.” ¶
Steve Goldsmith, News & Information