Over the course of the coming months Common Core will be publishing a series of guest blogs by Emma Bryant, a New Tech High School teacher who will be describing her first-hand experience with 21st century-skills education. Emma Bryant is a pseudonym.
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This year, tenth graders in my “21st Century School” aren’t suffering the annoyances that accompany studying poetry, fiction, or even non-fiction texts. Instead, students are writing instructional manuals, describing scientific processes, and using a science textbook to learn literacy skills in a joint English/Science class. No, these students are no longer plagued with requirements to read boring literature ‒ there’s simply no use for it in the utilitarian 21st century.
The process begins with students being asked to design a new piece of science equipment for use in the lab of a fictional company’s research and development unit. Using pieces of information gathered primarily from internet searches, a handful of journal articles, and much team work (95% of class time), students set out to complete their task.
Once the new equipment is created, students wrote about how to use it. With just a little imagination, the students’ “user’s manual” satisfied state English Language Arts requirements. In all fairness, I did not study each and every manual. So who knows ‒ there could have been a real literary gem hidden away. But somehow I doubt it.
Teachers facilitated the development of literacy skills with passages of the science textbook, as well as portions of manuals. Students read sentences on scientific subject matter and details on user instruction. Teachers administered vocabulary tests on scientific terms and instruction manual jargon.
In the end, students created some interesting designs and, to varying degrees, applied basic elements of science to the design process. On the whole, however, science content played second fiddle to other requirements ‒ the use of specific design software, credit for communication and collaboration, and the hard-to-define, but still-assessed, “innovation.” And “English” fared even worse.
With a world of literature waiting ‒ a world of human experience for the reading ‒ it’s a travesty for dry (but useful!) manuals to take its place.
Emma Bryant
Suddenly things are making more sense. Teaming science with mathematics courses gets difficult. Teaming a science with, what is supposed to be, a literature class is (in my opinion) ridiculous. The powers to be have placed Emma in a no-win situation. I truly feel sorry for her having to put up with this craziness.
When she put up the first post I was really mad at her for representing 21st Century skills as bad. Now I know that there is no “adult” at that school who understands Project Based Instruction and Team Teaching.
In our school each science is paired with a mathematics, with the exception of Biology(a freshman class) and Chemistry (a sophomore class) that are stand-alone classes. We have Physics with Algebra 2, Environmental Science with Statistics, etc.
Our English classes get paired with a Social Studies/World Geography/U.S. History/Government classes. So, if you were teaching Literature you could find period pieces that tie in with what is being covered in the other class. That is what makes Project Based Instruction such a powerful tool. And, that is really all it is. It’s a tool (a method) for teaching. 21st Century Skills are incorporated in how the classroom environment is established. They are NOT the content.
So, in studying literature you might have to work as a group to defend a point of view (collaboration) and you would defend this with a speech (oral communication) that has an IGNITE-style presentation (tech literacy) in the background. The final product might be a 5 page paper (done by each student – NOT the group) describing the book and your point of view (written communication). Then you might have a test (with an essay?) that covers the content.
That is how we do things in New Tech Network Schools. And, that is how Emma should be experiencing teaching at her school. Someone at the top needs to find another job. Emma doesn’t deserve this. She can come to our school anytime. We’d love to have her.
Emma, I understand your struggles and concerns, but as you and your partner were creating this project could you not have added maybe a reading or readings from, say, Shelly’s Frankenstein or Dick’s Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep or any other work of science fiction to enhance the project? As a teacher in a new tech school and one based on STEM we are asked to look for the science, engineering and math end or item in all our projects. This does not mean I do this all the time, but that it is there in the background. I would strongly suggest that you have a conversation with your NTN coach and start a dialogue between yourself, your partner and the vast array of teachers in the network who are willing to help in anyway they can. You can even email me rcheshire@greentechnths.austinisd.org. I have been doing this for six years and helped build two New Tech Schools from the ground up. We, and I speak for most if not all of the New Tech Network teachers, would love to help. That is after all what we do. We collaborate with each other everyday.
As far as English and Science together, it is difficult, but I have seen it work. You just have to plan and scaffold to get the elements you feel are important. And that as they say takes communication and collaboration (one of those pesky 21st Century skills)
Well off to the land of state mandated testing. Know you are not alone Emma and there are lots of people out there willing to help.
The idea to couple a science class with a math class is good, on the face of it, but the devil is in the details on how the material is structured.
Also, it does not really make sense to couple just any science with math. Biology hardly requires advanced math, while chemistry only needs mastery of units of measurements that should have been studied much earlier in 3rd and 4th grade math.
Only physics classes are a good match with math, but the problem is that physics is too little taught in our schools today – barely at all in middle school, and typically only one year in high school. So to couple physics classes with math thoroughly, physics should be taught continuously alongside math from 5th grade to 12th. This is not something that school districts or school networks can decide to do of their own accord – the state standards need to be modified first for this.
In this setup, new 5th and 6th grade physics classes would reinforce the units of measurement learned in 4th grade math, and would provide a practice ground for simple arithmetic and also for trigonometry. The 9th and 10th grade physics could reinforce the study of vectors in geometry. This is pretty much how the system is set up in countries that follow the French school model – this is how I had it in my days, in a remote Eastern European country.
At any rate, the coupling does not necessarily have to be done this way, but it needs to be thought out in minute detail by people thoroughly proficient in all the scientific disciplines – with the structure of the material studied in class defined exhaustively and top-down, in a well sequenced and coherent curriculum, where the teachers of class X know that students have learned Y in class Z and can rely on what has been studied before.
Of course, the idea of using Literature class time to have the students describe scientific processes and write technical documents is preposterous. The technical and scientific level is bound to be poor. English teachers are not prepared to teach science. This kind of technical and scientific writing should be done in science classes, for well defined subjects and with high rigor – otherwise it is little more than a game of dress-up and pretend.
In a 10th grade literature class, I would expect students to familiarize themselves with the history of American and English literature, and to study poetry and prose, with the goal of building up their culture, stimulate their intellect, and practice artistic set piece writing in prose or in verse form. In the words of Pablo Picasso, “good artists copy, great artists steal”, and that’s precisely what students should do in literature classes – learn about and comment on the great artists, and practice their writing hand by stealing from the masters.