Last spring, I had the chance to "host" a pair of students for a May Term internship for school. I drove the two junior gals to Des Moines, Iowa and spent the week taxi-ing them around town to their internship sites (Southeast Polk's Ag Ed program, Iowa Public Television's Market to Market production, and Iowa Farm Bureau's Spokesman writing staff). All the windshield time provided opportunities to visit and catch up. The most poignant conversation for me, though, was when we talked about their academic success at school. Especially how their agricultural education courses had contributed to success in other courses such as chemistry and biology. One of the young ladies said, "Bloom, if it hadn't been for the CASE pH activities in 9th grade, I would never have understood chemistry."As a teacher, I LOVE that light-bulb moment. You know, when a student has struggled with a concept and it finally clicks into place. That conversation, that morning, was a bit of a light bulb moment for me. For years, I watched students struggle and get frustrated with my inquiry lessons.
But I realized in that conversation that just because the light bulb doesn't go on in "my" class - in my room - during my lesson - it doesn't mean learning doesn't take place. My own narcissism - wanting instant gratification and feedback for a lesson or unit that I might have taken a lot of pain to plan, design, and set up - comes second to student light bulb moments.
I've always been late to the party....
Making The Light Bulbs Happen
I've been learning about and using backward design (aka Understanding by Design) for over 10 years now.
I was resistant to the idea, originally. I didn't have time in my schedule to dump all my carefully curated powerpoints, lectures, lessons, and activities and start over from scratch. Then it became part of our school district professional development (probably the best two years of PD we had at Sioux Central) and we had to implement lessons/units we wrote ourselves. I was also working on my masters, and had to have a creative component, so I chose to rewrite my horticulture curriculum following UbD principles.
Holy cow, talk about teacher light bulbs. Kids were having FUN in my class because of the curriculum organization, not because I was cracking jokes during lectures. I quickly swapped textbooks, PowerPoint, and lectures for focused readings, projects, and rubrics. The new lessons were not amazing by any stretch of the imagination - I did not have time to really plan six preps using UbD. It was very much a rotating system. Lesson by lesson, course by course. But every time I completed one, I got instant gratification from my students. They were learning.
(Side note: A lot of teachers do NOT enjoy designing and writing curriculum. I do. Being a Pathway Coordinator - being part of the CASE Writing Team - is a dream job for me.)
When a fisticuffs NEARLY broke out over who had the right method for figuring some type of formula on some statement among my Farm Business Management course, I knew we must on to something. That year our FBM CDE team placed in the top 20 at state. WITHOUT practice. WITHOUT intense prep sessions. JUST curriculum in class done well. Then one of those students transferred his knowledge of Excel formulas gained in FBM to his Calc class. Blew both of us teachers away... more on that later.
At about that time (2009) Mr. Matthew Eddy (a powerful force in Ag Ed) introduced Iowa Ag Ed to Curriculum for Agricultural Science Education, a purposeful, intentional collection of courses written using the UbD methods (shameless promotion, here). Every course spirals and scaffolds relevant experiences within the course - and upon previous courses within the pathway (see pathways and courses below). I was hooked. The work was all done for me!
Another CASE hero, Aaron Geiman, described it this way (paraphrased): "Teachers have finite time and energy to prep for class. We can either pour energy into writing our own great curriculum, or we can pour that energy into DELIVERING good curriculum."
I chose to deliver good curriculum in a great way. I had become a 7:30-4:30 ag teacher (plus evening, summer, and weekend SAE and FFA events) due to the need for a better work-life balance, so CASE provided a great curriculum that I could focus time and energy on delivering. I had so much fun teaching the next few years. I am really anxious to see research on how curriculum and PD (such as what CASE offers) is impacting teacher efficacy and retention.
How do Inquiry and Transfer work Hand-in-Hand?
One educational obstacle that we keep talking about is the lack of transfer from course-to-course in the typical Carnegie unit high school. Students may learn how to calculate area of a rectangle in their math class, but a half hour later in ag class, they cannot TRANSFER that skill to calculate the area of a garden or field. Using inquiry learning, such as that promoted in What is Inquiry? - by galileo.com, I have seen first-hand how using inquiry makes a concept or skill more relevant for students. I believe that relevance strongly influences transfer.
Remember the student who transferred knowledge and skills related to Excel formulas to his advanced math class? He created his own calculator, getting the correct answers in seconds compared to his classmates who took much longer. He wasn't cheating. He was completely competent in his knowledge - in order to build the calculator, he had to have a firm grasp of the content. His math teacher and I just sat back and had fun watching the transfer.
Imagine if our high school students had started inquiry learning like this in elementary:
In elementary. When almost all kids still love school and learning. Before they get bored.
Inquiry and Integrated Science
So, the College Board set forth this document in 2009: College Board Standards for College Success. Similar to the Next Generation Science Standards. I'm not here to promote the Common Core State Standards - or to detract from the initiative, either. I do like how, in our increasingly transient society, students have fewer seams in their educational experiences when we're all working together, teaching from the same pages every year.
When students attain information in such a way that transfer occurs, then inquiry deepens. Students can apply concepts from multiple disciplines to solve the problem at hand. Need to calculate planting dates for a retail plant sale? Develop, transfer, and use math, meteorology, and communication knowledge and skills to make that happen. Utilize information previously learned in the course about germination rates, timing, scarification, and seedling care to put all of this into real-life use. Customer service, marketing, and teamwork will come as the project unfolds.
How many things have we all learned from our successes? How many things have we learned from mistakes, errors, lapses in judgement, or failures? Allowing students to make mistakes - and learn from those mistakes - is critical in a safe high school education environment.
Observe, predict, gather resources, attempt, and evaluate. Implement adjustments. Repeat. Learn from others and adjust again. Repeat. Repeat until the problem is solved. THAT is integrated science. Not getting a high score on a test.
How does CTE Improve Relevance?
I'm also a fan of providing the opportunities for every student to be career and/or college ready upon graduation. I see Career and Tech Education as absolutely imperative to help accomplish this - especially because students have less rocky adjustments to trade school or college when they have completed a CTE program in high school. CTE focuses less on always having the right answers and more on the importance of thinking clearly and utilizing skills to solve problems.
Teachers have to follow the same framework, or run the risk of becoming irrelevant themselves. As a teacher friend of mine keeps saying, "If I'm going to fall, I'm at least going to fall forward and learn something."
We cannot be afraid of failure. We have to learn from each experience and be able to apply that knowledge in the next set of circumstances. Our students will see us grow professionally when we take risks and feel safe to do the same thing.
That right there, is what inquiry and transfer are all about.
Submitted by:
Melanie Bloom, Iowa
melanie.bloom@case4learning.org
@Ag_In_Bloom
Plant Pathways Coordinator
Curriculum for Agricultural Science Education
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