Reading notes for Rosalind Driver's (1989) The construction of science in school classrooms.

This chapter talks about science classrooms, but the issues raised are relevant to teaching in any subject area. It addresses the issue of how you take students from their current understandings of important ideas, concepts, phenomena, and the like, to more disciplined understandings that reflect the Discourse communities in your field of study. Before you read, take some time to think about your own field. Are there some important things about which you can distinguish "laypersons'" understandings or ways of thinking from "professionals?" Here are some examples off the top of my head:

• How historians understand the writing of history vs. how laypersons may think of it (e.g., are first-person accounts always more trustworthy than secondary accounts? Do textbooks have the "true facts?")
• How mathematicians view problem-solving vs. the layperson's notion that math problems should be solved quickly (typically in a few minutes) or abandoned.
• The kinds of things literary critics do and think about when they read a novel vs. a layperson's focus on the plot, characterization and perhaps writing style.
• The linguist's view of language as ever-changing and developing vs. the layperson's view of a "foreign" language as a fixed set of grammar rules and vocabulary to be memorized.

In addition to thinking about possible disjunctions between they way students think about these big ideas and how adults in the discipline think about them, in this chapter Driver introduces constructivism as a theoretical perspective on learning. This is the position that the learner does not merely receive or take in knowledge transmitted by others, plugging it into memory whole, but instead constructs understanding ("makes sense") by negotiating or coordinating prior knowledge (schemata) with new experiences (observations, instruction, explanations, conversations, etc.). This is the scary secret -- as Driver says, "No matter how carefully a teacher may plan a particular activity to introduce and idea, in the end it is the pupils who have to think through and make sense of the experiences for themselves. (p. 95-96)"

But this does not get us off the hook! Teachers have a major role to play in the extent to which students make good sense of their experiences. This is the substance of much of Driver's chapter. As you read, think about the following ideas Driver discusses, and how they relate to your work as a teacher in your discipline.

"School science" and "the real world" as distinct systems (p. 103). What does Driver mean here? Are there parallels to this in other disciplines (e.g., real world vs school math; real world vs school reading of literature, writing, language-learning?) What about real-world vs school history or social studies? If there are separate systems like this, what are the implications for what students get out of schooling? How are teachers implicated in the construction of separate systems?

Negotiation of understanding between teacher and students (p.96) Compare this idea with the notion of transmitting information from teacher to students. What does negotiation mean in this context? What does it look like (start by comparing the two examples in Driver, p. 96 and beginning on 97)? Can you think of ways that you are negotiating understanding with your TEP instructors? At this moment, do you think transmittal or construction/negotiation better describe your experience as a learner in TEP?

Ritual vs. principled understanding (p. 97) What is this distinction, and how is it related to negotiation of understanding and authority, in Driver's view? Is there a connection to "school vs real-world" systems?

Teachers as diagnosticians (p. 102) - do you see any connections to Duckworth? Read the description of Mr. Kuhn's comments. Have you experienced teachers "not really listening" to students' talk, but waiting for a particular statement that fits their preconceived notion of the learning sequence? What was your response (inward or outward)?

In our class so far, we have stressed "trying to understand what the other person is thinking" in the Complex Instruction lesson, in the student learning project, and in some of our discussions in class. At the end of class on Thursday it seemed to me that people were trying to do some of this understanding and negotiation as we tried to connect the small group discussion of reading (the Flores-Dueñas chapter) to science. Let us continue to practice the important skills of listening and negotiating understanding in our classrom discussions -- what a great opportunity to work on our teaching while we are learning!