Harlow Connections

Mikeska et a. identified three central ideas to science teaching: engaging students, organizing instruction, and understanding students' ideas. The interplay between these central ideas leads to difficulty in the classroom. Resources identified by Harlow et al. to be of pedagogical use in the classroom included teachers providing the correct answer, guiding students to the answer, models with scientific terms, and students as creative thinkers. Each resource, however, can be applied inappropriately. Since these resources can be use both appropriately and inappropriately, it is important to study the use of each resource.

The first pedagogical resource, giving away answers, discussed reminded me greatly of argument driven inquiry, for both recommend posing of questions rather than answering questions. Both ADI and Harlow et al. demonstrate that effective teachers are well-versed enough in their content area to inspire curiosity in students. It was found that telling students the right answer at the beginning or end of modeling lessons led to circumvent the lesson rather than supplementing it. Scientific concepts are both understood and retained less with explicit answer telling.

However, teachers can inspire this curiosity by both being able to answer any questions but also by being able to adapt their instruction to adapt to student thinking. Modeling is therefore difficult for beginner teachers because it requires constant adaptation whereas lectures can more prepared and less intimidating to new teachers. In other words, modeling requires teachers to both understand student ideas and to organize instruction, simultaneously. Implications from these crucial pedagogical resources stem from the need to build on top of students' ideas while at the same time organizing instruction. I can also understand how difficult it might be to remain confident that students will actually develop deep conceptual understanding through modeling and making predictions. Additionally, the type and amount of guidance provided is difficult to achieve.

The use of resources in learning, changing rather than eliminating, was another key tenant of this discussion. Creativity is key, but some teachers view creativity as a destructive force to scientific inquiry. However, creativity closely tied to science and should be welcomed into science classrooms. Harlow mentions how it can be useful to even explicitly say in the classroom that "creative thinking is a goal of science education" (1120).

The discussion of another pedagogical resource, scientific terminology, was very familiar to me. Many students of science view this discipline as a list of difficult facts to be memorized, and it will be teachers' jobs to undo this mentality in students. However, there is indeed a type of scientific language that needs to be fostered through modeling in the classroom. A big obstacle to many students' understanding is the misuse of scientific terminology. Teachers themselves can model correct use of scientific terms to help students develop scientific literacy.