Back to Science
The middle of summer is not the time of year children typically get excited about schoolwork. But during a photo shoot on a hot July day to document Barrington District 220’s elementary science curriculum, students in a Hough Street Elementary School classroom cannot contain their enthusiasm when, to their surprise, science happened before their eyes.
“The cricket is shedding!” one of the 8-year-olds shouts. Putting down the tuning forks, mirrors, and magnifying glasses they are using at other tables around the room, six children join the first in front of a laptop computer’s screen and watch the live feed of the shedding cricket. The insect itself is about 8 inches from the computer at the base of the school’s new electronic microscope — purchased last school year as part of the new science curriculum.
Second-grade teacher Jen Burton, who taught most of these children at Hough Street a few months earlier, stands behind them and watches as they watch the whitish, almost transparent cricket wriggle out of its dark carapace. Recognizing a teaching moment even in the summer, Burton asks, “What’s that called?”
“Molting,” says Charlie Frank.
Smiling, Burton nods and tells the students, “Remember, a good scientist observes.” They continue to do so until, with a final kick of its hind leg, the cricket frees itself of the exoskeleton it just outgrew. Several of the students shout, “Cool!” — a word they have murmured often in the last few minutes.
“It’s exciting to see kids get excited about science,” Burton says a few days later.
The cricket incident is exactly the type of student reaction Dr. Becky Gill, Hough Street’s principal and Barrington 220’s elementary coordinator for math and science, hoped for two years ago when the district decided to revamp its elementary science curriculum. A key goal of the new curriculum was to excite students about science — “Stimulating their passion for the natural world and how the natural world works,” Dr. Gill says.
The district’s eight elementary schools are in the middle of a two-year implementation for the curriculum. Instructors in second, third, and fourth grades began teaching the new science program in the 2007-08 school year. The rest of the grades begin the curriculum this fall. “Kindergarten, first, and fifth grades — we’re preparing to take the plunge into the new science curriculum,” says Janel Kovarik, fifth-grade teacher at Arnett C. Lines Elementary School.
Beth Nelson, first-grade teacher at Sunny Hill Elementary School, looks forward to the new opportunities. “I’m excited,” she says. “This is going to give the kids the chance to actually do science.”
The curriculum unifies and aligns how science is taught throughout the school year and throughout the grade levels. Each year students will study one unit in life science, physical science, and earth science. In second grade, the life science unit will focus on the life cycle of insects; the physical science unit on sound and light; and the earth science unit on the sun, the moon, and the Earth.
Unifying concepts
Every grade also has a unifying concept that ties together lessons learned in the three science units. “Each unifying theme at each grade level has an essential question attached to it for student understanding,” Dr. Gill says. “For example, second grade’s unifying theme is ‘Patterns of Change’ and the essential question is, ‘How can I predict changes in my world?’ The question focuses student critical thinking on application to the so-called ‘big picture’ of our natural world and how we function in it.”
Sarah Dowdy, a third-grade teacher at Arnett C. Lines, says the unifying concept also helped her as a teacher to focus her lesson plans. “We now have these main topics that are clear and concise,” she says.
Unifying concepts also strengthen students’ understanding of science as they progress through the grades. The unifying concepts have been planned to build upon ideas students learned in previous years. Students are introduced to the idea of systems in kindergarten with the unifying concept “Systems of Sorting,” then they revisit the idea in third grade (“Systems and Relationships”), and fifth grade (“Systems and Interactions”). Change is introduced as a concept in first grade (“Change Over Time”), then built upon in second grade (“Patterns of Change”), and fourth grade (“Change and Constancy”).
“We’re talking about those ideas building over time as you go through grade levels,” says science education expert Dr. Anne Grall Reichel, who helped develop Barrington’s new curriculum as part of the district’s Elementary Science Team. Dr. Reichel of Lincolnshire has been involved in science education since 1974. Her roles have included science coordinator for the Lake County Regional Office of Education, staff development coordinator for Lincolnshire School District 13, and assistant professor at National-Louis University. Through her consulting business, Reichel’s Essential Curriculum, Dr. Reichel has helped school districts in Lake and Cook counties develop curriculums. “She is known within many science circles,” Dr. Gill says. “Her expertise is very valued.”
Building the curriculum
The Elementary Science Team went to work two years ago when former Barrington 220 Superintendent Mary Herrmann gave Dr. Gill permission to overhaul the curriculum. “We had a good science program,” Dr. Gill says. “We wanted to have a great science program.” The district’s current Superintendent Dr. Tom Leonard adds that as good as the prior curriculum may have been, it was out of date. “It wasn’t in line with what is considered best practice,” he says. “It didn’t make students what we consider active in the learning process.”
The Elementary Science Team had two top goals at the outset. “We wanted to have an aligned curriculum and make sure it was research-based,” Dr. Gill says. The team consulted the research of many educational institutions and societies, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Science Teachers Association, the National Research Council, and the National Science Foundation to determine the best way to educate Barrington 220’s students.
The team arrived at an approach that relies heavily on a concept called inquiry-based learning. “The best definition I’ve heard for inquiry-based science is ‘disciplined curiosity,’” Dr. Gill says. That is, the instruction taps into children’s natural curiosity about the world around them and prods them toward thinking like scientists. Students are presented with questions and are encouraged to ask more questions until they understand how a mealworm transforms into a beetle (in second grade) or why a parallel electrical circuit differs from a series circuit (in fourth grade). “The kids are doing the work,” Kovarik says. “We’re not directing them as much as we’re facilitators.”
Burton says her students have taken enthusiastically to the approach. “They love it because they’re engaged. They have ownership of their learning.”
Hands-on and minds-on
Hands-on experiments, a major part of the new curriculum, help to engage the students in science. Eight-year-old Gracie Bishop, one of Burton’s former students who will be in third grade at Hough Street this fall, says she enjoyed doing experiments last year. “It’s like you’re playing with toys,” she says. After considering her words for a moment, she adds, “But you can’t mess around with them. You’ve got to be serious.”
While the experiments are key to the program, Dr. Gill says there is more to them than hands-on activities. “It’s mindson,” she says. “Not just hands-on, but minds-on.” After conducting the experiment, students must use critical thinking to explain it. Dr. Reichel further explains the concept: “We’re talking about hands-on, minds-on science. If I give you a handson experiment, there has to be time to talk about it, to draw about it, to write about it. It’s in that process of writing where you really begin to know what you know about something.”
In addition to the three science units, the school year also includes one activity called “Design Tech,” which is meant to challenge and build a student’s critical thinking. Students are given the pieces for a project and are asked to put it together without receiving instructions. During their unit on force and motion, third-graders are given the pieces to build a balloon car. Once the cars are finished, students race them to see who built the fastest car. Then, they must explain why some of the cars are faster than others. Fourth-graders, during their unit on electricity and magnetism, are given a common cardboard storage box and are asked to wire it as if it were a house, using different types of circuits.
Materials and books
In the past, Barrington 220 has used elementary science kits and materials from the same educational publisher for the entire school year. But for the new curriculum, the Elementary Science Team chose materials for each unit separately. The three units used in third grade, for example, come from three companies. “We would pick and we chose from the best out there,” says Burton, who, like every teacher interviewed for this story, is part of the Elementary Science Team.
The teachers are especially happy that the district bought enough kits so each classroom has its own set of materials for each unit. “We have our own material and are responsible for it,” Dowdy says. “It’s 100 percent nicer.” Previously, the eight elementary schools shared one kit for each science unit. Teachers had to request the unit weeks in advance and when the kit arrived, materials were often missing.
Dr. Gill adds that stocking classrooms with science materials ensures the same unit will be taught concurrently in every grade and in every school. “Because we shared the materials [before], the teachers couldn’t teach the same material at the same time,” she says.
Students also do not read from a single thick science textbook for the whole year. Instead, the Elementary Science Team selected sets of short, glossy, magazine-sized texts to support each unit. Once again, they chose texts from several educational publishers to get what they considered the best books for each unit. “We used a lot of National Geographic texts,” Dr. Gill says, “because it’s good science. It’s solid. And they have a lot of great leveled readers.” By leveled readers, Dr. Gill means that each title in a series is available in four different reading levels. Each title has identical covers and identical illustrations and it presents the same material, but the text varies according to a student’s ability to read. “The literacy is supporting the science, and the science is supporting the literacy,” Dr. Gill says.
Teachers consider the leveled readers another boon of the new curriculum. “When students are able to read at their independent reading level, they can actually grab onto it and own it,” Burton says. Leveled readers help students who need easier texts. “When you’re struggling to read and you don’t understand the vocabulary, you don’t understand what they’re trying to say,” Dowdy says. Kovarik points out that providing different versions also benefits students reading at an advanced level. “You can’t forget the student that needs to be challenged,” she says.
Training the teachers
Besides procuring all the materials, Barrington 220’s other major commitment for the new curriculum was preparing the instructors to teach it. This required a major commitment from the elementary school teachers as well, which has earned them Dr. Gill’s gratitude. “I think that speaks to the dedication of our teachers,” she says. “They’re willing to put forth all the effort, and it’s amazing.”
During the curriculum’s debut year, second-, third-, and fourth-grade teachers met for in-service days prior to the beginning of each unit to familiarize themselves with the materials and experiments. Such in-service days will continue this year for teachers new to the curriculum, while those who already have taught it will compare notes. The teachers had similar get-togethers several times during the previous school year. Burton says those sessions helped her greatly. “You can just glean from each other: ‘Well, this worked for me. This didn’t work for me,’” she says. “That was phenomenal.”
During the summer, Barrington High School science teachers presented seminars for the elementary teachers, giving them tips on conducting experiments and leading inquiry-based studies. Dr. Reichel’s involvement also will continue as she meets with teachers to discuss and offer advice on the new curriculum.
Dr. Reichel says Barrington 220’s investment in teacher development is rare. “Barrington made a tremendous commitment that you don’t often see school districts make, and that is the ongoing training of teachers. Barrington certainly went above and beyond what other districts do,” she says. Dr. Leonard also praises the Elementary Science Team’s foresight. “They made sure to do quality staff development on the front end,” he says.
Dr. Leonard gives Dr. Gill high marks for her work on the curriculum. “From everyone we talked to, whether it’s the principals or the teachers, they can’t say enough good things about her leadership in this adoption,” he says. “She obviously has a passion for teaching science, and she cares about kids.”
Dr. Gill joined the Barrington district 12 years ago as a teacher at Grove Avenue School. In 2001, she won a Presidential Award for math and science teaching. Now entering her third year as Hough Street’s principal, Dr. Gill says her love of science dates to her childhood. “As a kid my family would go fossil hunting,” she says. “That’s when I really got interested in science.”
Implementation: So far, so good
With one year down and one to go in its implementation, Dr. Leonard calls the new science curriculum a success. “We’re thrilled with the implementation,” he says. “I would say the implementation is going beautifully to date,” Dr. Reichel agrees.
Dr. Gill is also pleased with the curriculum’s first year. “It was very successful. I can’t say it was perfect, but the learning process is never perfect.” While feedback from the staff was positive overall, teachers remarked that some experiments required more preparation than they expected. Dr. Reichel says a few bumps are normal when a curriculum is introduced. “The first year you implement something a lot of questions will emerge,” she says. “It’s like everything you do. The second time you do it, the third time you do it, you get better and better at it.”
Dr. Gill is happy to report the new science curriculum is a hit with students. “So far they have shown much excitement and eagerness to learn,” she says. Better still, the students seem to be taking to the program’s inquiry-based philosophy. “They enjoy communicating and dialoguing about what happened,” she says. “They’re comfortable acting and talking like scientists.”
A teacher from Barbara B. Rose Elementary School told Dr. Gill that when she surveyed her students on their favorite subjects on the first day of school last year, only two listed science. When the teacher conducted the survey on the last day of school, following the first year of the new curriculum, every student placed science among their favorite subjects.
“You can’t get better data than that,” Dr. Gill says.
With the new elementary curriculum in place, Dr. Leonard believes Barrington 220 students will receive a top-notch science education from kindergarten to senior year of high school. “Over 12 years of schooling, it’s going to create a great experience for kids and hopefully lead to much deeper understanding of science and the natural world,” he says.
The new elementary science curriculum also should strengthen Barrington 220’s already enviable academic reputation. “Because we’re using a research-based, well-implemented science curriculum, we’re in the best place a district could be in this domain,” says Dr. Leonard. “There’s nowhere we can be that’s better.”
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Resources
St. Anne Catholic School
319 E. Franklin St., Barrington
St. Anne is a parochial school serving grades kindergarten through eighth. Enrollment for 2007-08 was 528 students. Science teacher Donna Konie says students study science every day for 40-minute periods. Elementary-level students learn general sciences, including earth science, astronomy, and “a little bit of kitchen chemistry,” Konie says. She teaches several types of science each year to vary the subjects and keep students interested. “If it’s a student who doesn’t like earth science and you teach earth science for an entire year, you have a student who’s not going to like science,” she says. A highlight of St. Anne’s science program is the school’s up-to-date science lab with computers, microscopes, and interactive white boards. “I’ve got a science lab with everything I need,” Konie says.
For more information on St. Anne Catholic School, call 847-381-0311 or visit www.sascardinals.com.
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Quest Academy
500 N. Benton St., Palatine
Established in 1982, Quest Academy is a private school for gifted students in preschool through eighth grade. The school currently has an enrollment of 307 students. Mary Cunningham, the school’s director of admissions and marketing, says Quest Academy has two science teachers who are passionate about the subject. In the lower school, grades preschool to fifth, instructors take an interdisciplinary approach to science and other subjects. For example, in fifth grade while students are learning about Lewis and Clark in social studies, they are learning astronomy in science and discuss how the explorers used the stars to plot their course to the Pacific Ocean. The school encourages students to learn using their own resources and imagination. In fourth grade, every student adopts an element from the periodic table and is instructed to give a presentation on the element in any format he or she chooses. “We’ve had game shows about oxygen,” Cunningham says. “We’ve had interviews with zinc.”
For more information on Quest Academy, call 847-202-8035 or visit www.questacademy.org.
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Elgin Academy
350 Park St., Elgin
Chartered in 1839, Elgin Academy is a private college preparatory school serving students in preschool through 12th grade. The school has an enrollment of approximately 450 students. Elgin Academy’s science program will get new classrooms and labs when the Harold D. Rider Family Media, Science, and Fine Arts Center — the campus’ first new building since the 1960s — opens in October. According to Roberta Nabor, upper-school science teacher, students in the lower school (elementary level) receive two hours of science instruction a week, and that it often is integrated with their social studies lessons. Students learn a mix of biological science, earth science, and physical science each year. “They’re getting a bit of each kind of science in each of the years,” Nabor says. She adds that a major advantage at Elgin Academy is the small class sizes of 12 to 16 students. Small class size allows students more of an opportunity to participate in hands-on science activities and allows teachers to make sure each student understands the lesson, Nabor says.
For more information on Elgin Academy, call 847-695-0300 or visit www.elginacademy.org.