|
Asia-Pacific Forum on Science
Learning and Teaching, Volume 3, Issue 2, Article 2 (Dec., 2002) Peter AUBUSSON and Kevin WATSON Packaging constructivist Science teaching in a curriculum resource
|
This study substantiates the view that teachers are a critical influence on the quality of teaching and learning that occurs in their classrooms. If teachers are willing and are positive about trying new initiatives, the chance of successfully employing an innovative curriculum and its teaching approach is increased. However a range of factors interact to influence attempted innovation. In this study these included, students' attitudes and previous learning experiences, teachers' perceptions of their role and the size of the teaching resource teachers were to use.
Teachers should feel free to draw on their contextual knowledge and experience to make professional judgements about their teaching rather than simply follow a sequenced set of activities. This is not to say that curriculum packages should not incorporate pedagogy or a sequence of activities. Rather, there should remain provision for the teacher to make a significant contribution - identifying opportunities for learning, adapting activities and activity sequences to respond to students' views and ideas that surface as a result of their learning experience.
For the teachers in this study, as it would seem with many innovations, things sometimes get worse before they got better. In their attempt to understand and implement an innovation, teachers learned to use new knowledge and skills. Often success was not achieved in the first attempt. Understanding the pedagogy of cooperative learning and implementing it required time - time to develop the necessary expertise and skill. According to the teachers, the professional development program helped teachers to develop such expertise.
The extent to which this curriculum package promoted engagement with its constructivist theoretical framework has implications for its implementation. As the student text was difficult to implement, teachers had to engage with its underpinning philosophy to use it well. This, in turn, promoted an evolving understanding of constructivism among some teachers. For others, the perceived difficulty of the materials simply caused them to avoid using the curriculum package. Before spending vast amounts of money on developing curriculum packages to improve science teaching, research needs to be conducted to determine not only how to design curriculum packages with a sound constructivist underpinning but to determine how to encourage teachers to engage with its theoretical framework. Providing large amounts of information only resulted in information overload. Although the inherent difficulties in using the BSCS materials resulted in some teachers beginning to think deeply about cooperative learning and then the 5Es approach, it seems unwise to recommend that curriculum packages simply be made difficult to implement.
Perhaps the most important implication from this research is that within an innovation requiring significant change, there may be a hierarchy of needs that should be recognised and worked through before teachers implement a constructivist approach. Aubusson (2002) argued that science education progresses through stages like biological succession and stagnates at different climaxes, depending on factors in the science education environment operating within systemic and school communities. Such a hierarchy of stages, through which change progresses, could be identified in this study. It was only after teachers organised their classrooms for group work and promoted team work through cooperative learning strategies that they began to engage with teaching and learning approaches that embodied constructivist ideas. The rate at which teachers progressed varied and the 'climax' type of teaching, which teachers reach may also vary. However a longer study would be required to explore this further.
It was only after using cooperative learning and the 5Es in a step-by-step fashion that teachers were prepared to consider the constructivist theory underpinning it. It would appear that there was a need for teachers to see that a theory is practical and useful to them before the theory, and its ramifications for their teaching, was worthy of further attention, reflection and analysis. It is as if teachers need to experience success with components of the approach and engage in conversations that confirm successful teaching before a deep understanding of the whole teaching approach develops.
