explain this article using bullet points of the main ideas and important elements  for high school student:
If you spend time with a young child it soon
becomes clear that the astronomer Carl
Sagan was right when he said: “Every kid
starts out as a natural-born scientist...”. Spend
time with a typical high-school student and it’s
clear that the second part of Sagan’s quote is
also correct: “...then we beat it out of them. A
few trickle through the system with their won-
der and enthusiasm for science intact.”
Attempts to change that dynamic are
increasingly focused on teachers, particularly
the way they are trained and how they interact
with students. In the United States, the Next
Generation Science Standards, developed by
the National Research Council, outline ways
for teachers to encourage student enquiry, feed
their curiosity, and deepen their understand-
ing of scientific concepts. Meanwhile, the latest
teacher-training techniques place a greater
emphasis on pedagogy and classroom practice
as another way to improve science, technology,
engineering and mathematics (STEM) educa-
tion. Both approaches are seen as models for
other countries that seek to improve their own
STEM education.
Existing teaching methods have long been
based on “the rhetoric of well-established
conclusions”, according to Jonathan Osborne,
professor of science education at Stanford Uni-
versity in California. “The dominant paradigm
that most teachers work with,” Osborne says,
“is essentially: ‘I know and you don’t know, and
I’m here to communicate it to you and explain
it to you.’ And the problem with that is we
know it doesn’t work very well.”
Not only does that approach turn off students
but it may also be failing society. A 2013 report1
from the US National Science and Technology
Council stated that “current educational path-
ways are not leading to a sufficiently large and
well-trained STEM workforce.” The report fur-
ther blamed the educational system for failing
to produce a STEM-literate public. As a result,
up to half of those who want to pursue a STEM
education in college are ill-prepared by their
secondary schools, according to a report2 by
the educational-testing organization ACT. Yet
the demand for STEM graduates remains high.
The European Commission set a goal in 2011
of adding 1 million science researchers by 2020,
and in 2012 then-President Barack Obama set
a target of 1 million new STEM graduates by
2025. In response, many secondary schools
have been increasing their maths and science
requirements.
The number of high-school students enrolled
in maths and science courses rose by more than
60% in the 20 years from the mid-1980s in the
TRAINI NG
Building better science
teachers The latest training techniques emphasize classroom practice and design thinking.
United States, according to a study3 from the
University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. But
rises do not directly improve STEM education
— they just add more pressure to the system.
Improving outcomes, says Peter McLaren,
executive director of the non-profit initiative
Next Gen Education, will require a shift in the
classroom from a teacher-centred approach to
one that helps students work through concepts
themselves. McLaren, who helped to write the
Next Generation Science Standards, used to
teach general science in East Greenwich, Rhode
Island, and recalls a lesson he once taught on
gases. He had borrowed his ex-wife’s perfume
bottle and sprayed it around the front of the
classroom. “I asked the students to raise their
hands when they could smell something,” he
recounts. The kids were engaged and excited,
and then McLaren proceeded to explain what
was happening to the gas molecules. The kids’
enthusiasm was quickly snuffed out by his ‘let
me explain’ lecture.
What he should have done, he now knows,
is ask his students: “What would cause the
scent of the perfume to reach all the way to the
back of the classroom?”, and start a discussion.
Asking that question would empower the stu-
dents to use their knowledge and imagination
to develop scientific ideas about the concept
being discussed. Instead of ‘learning about’,”
McLaren says, “it’s about ‘figuring it out’.”
BETTER BY DESIGN
Development of the Next Generation Science
Standards has been a multi-year, state-led
effort, based in part on standards in ten coun-
tries including the United Kingdom, Finland
and Japan. At the same time, some of those
same countries are looking to the United States
as a model for how STEM education can be
improved. Merredith Portsmore, director of
the Center for Engineering Education and
Outreach at Tufts University in Massachusetts,
says that educators from around the world
have enquired about the US approach.
“They are starting to see some of the same
issues, with students not finding STEM appeal-
ing because it’s not creative,” Portsmore says.
The educators see integrated learning — like
that outlined in the Next Generation Science
Standards — as a way to create more innova-
tive and creative scientists and engineers.
However, some of the concepts might not
translate easily. Some systems are built around
strict standards or large class sizes that would
make it difficult for teachers to give students
the focused, personalized guidance they need.
The Next Generation Science Standards are
supported by large organizations such as the
National Research Council, the National Sci-
ence Teachers Association, and the American
Association for the Advancement of Science,
but smaller entities are also trying to change
the way science is taught in the classroom.
The Woodrow Wilson National Fellow-
ship Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey,
was founded in 1945 to address a shortage of
college faculty following the Second World
War. Since 2008 it has been collaborating with
US universities to revamp teacher education.
Deborah Sachs, director of the University of
Indianapolis’ Teach (STEM)3 programme, says
that in one such partnership the fellowship
worked with the University of Indianapolis in
Indiana to answer the basic question: “What is
it that effective STEM teachers need to know in
order to be successful?” The idea was to rethink
how teachers were trained from the ground up.
One realization was that trying to explain
concepts and then have students apply them
— or worse, simply regurgitate them — did
not work. Instead, teachers should create pro-
jects in which concepts become apparent as
students work through real-world challenges.
Sachs cites an example in which a geometry
teacher working on a lesson about circle cir-
cumference and diameter had students map
phone towers and their signal strengths. As
students worked through the project, they
saw for themselves where there were gaps in
mobile-phone coverage and developed a deep
understanding of the mathematical concepts.
Since its start in Indiana, the foundation has
expanded its teaching programme to 5 other
states, including 31 universities. But now the
foundation is starting its own teacher-training
academy using one of the technology indus-
try’s favourite buzz phrases: design thinking.
The term ‘design thinking’ originated in
the 1960s with the idea that design should be
rational and solve problems, rather than sim-
ply focusing on aesthetics. It involves solving
problems through research, empathy, idea-
tion and prototyping, and was famously used
in the 1980s to create Apple’s first computer
mouse. In that instance, the goal was not to
design a snazzy new pointing device, but to
give non-technical people the ability to easily
use a computer. Since then, design thinking
has been used to create thick-handled tooth-
brushes for children — it is easier for their
small hands to grip a big handle than a small
one — and to launch disruptive companies
such as Airbnb.
MAKING A CONNECTION
Located in a small office just a 15-minute walk
from the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology in Cambridge, the Woodrow Wilson
Academy of Teaching and Learning is home
to a handful of staff and incoming students.
They are busily identifying some of the prob-
lems with current STEM teacher training and
are working on ways to overcome them. One
challenge is to give teachers more practice
managing classrooms, working with colleagues
and even dealing with parents.
The staff and students came up with several
ideas to address this problem. One idea was
to send student teachers to Boston’s Museum
of Science after-school clubhouse, where they
work with kids on various projects including
3D printing, video editing and website devel-
opment. The students do not have to be there,
so teachers need to connect with them and
keep them engaged if they want the students
to stick around.
Doyung Lee helped to set up the academy’s
curriculum in 2017 as a design fellow and will
attend as a student in autumn. He says that
volunteering at the clubhouse taught him how
to create a welcoming and safe environment,
partly by being curious about his students’
entire lives. “You can be great with content
knowledge or pedagogy,” says Dan Coleman,
the academy’s chief learning and design officer,
“but if you can’t connect with students, you’re
going to fail.”
Lee’s experience at the science museum also
taught him how classrooms can suppress a
student’s enthusiasm, rather than tap into it.
He recalls a middle-school student who came
to the clubhouse and loved video editing and
animation. The student was eager to expand
his skills and wanted to share what he was
learning, but he was struggling at school.
This is exactly the sort of situation that the
Next Generation Science Standards seek to
address, says McLaren. “When kids go to an
informal education opportunity,” he says, such
as the science museum’s clubhouse, they get
to pursue their interests and that excites them.
But that’s not what typically happens at school.
“In the classroom, we say, ‘that’s very nice,
but we’re doing something else today’,” says
McLaren, and that squashes their eagerness. It
would be better, he adds, to connect a lesson to
existing student interests and then guide them
within the constraints of the curriculum.
Imagine a student with an interest in video
production taking a class on environmental
science. By asking the student to make a video
documenting an environmental-science pro-
cess, such as the water cycle, the student’s
excitement for making the video carries over
to the scientific enquiry. “If you give that kind
of freedom to students,” McLaren says, that’s
when the magic happens.
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
Another idea being tried at the academy is to
have students practise real-world situations
through a computer simulator. For example,
teachers often have to deal with upset parents
but rarely get to practise that encounter before
it happens in real life. The simulator lets the
student teacher try out different strategies
and find out what works and what doesn’t.
“People come through the experience sweating,”
Coleman says. “It feels like a real encounter.”
Gaining such experience as student teachers
is critical because a lack of classroom experi-
ence is inversely related to teacher effectiveness
— and directly related to teacher turnover. “We
found huge variations in how much practice
in student teaching prospective teachers get,”
says Richard Ingersoll,
a sociologist at the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania’s
Graduate School of Edu-cation. “Something likea fifth of all new hireshave never had practice.Their first day of teach-ing is their first day with kids. We found this was especially true for new science teachers.” A lack of practice as a student teacher translates to a lot of science teachers leaving the profession. Although this is applicable to teachers of any discipline, “it is particularly dreadful for science teachers, because they are the group that most frequently hasn’t had any student teaching,” Ingersoll says. Although the Woodrow Wilson academy has yet to graduate any students of its own — its first class of 21 future teachers began in
September — more than 80% of teachers from the foundation’s work with existing teaching colleges, such as the University of Indiana, have remained in the profession five years after entering. This figure is similar to the national
average, according to a 2015 study4 by the US Department of Education.
Because STEM often relies on technology
and experiments, it is important to practise
its use in the classroom. One of the academy’s
faculty members, Andrew Wild, knows this
first-hand. He earned a PhD in science edu-
cation from Stanford University in California
before working as a science teacher in the San
Francisco Bay Area. One day he went to his
classroom of 42 students prepared to teach a
lesson on circuits. But it didn’t go according to
plan. “I remember the wires going across the
room,” Wild recalls, “and students were trip-
ping on wires, pulling them from the circuit
boards.” There weren’t enough outlets and the
lesson was a near disaster. Although Wild was
well-versed in the subject matter, his failure to
consider space challenges and to prepare for
technical problems undermined the lesson.
MODEL TEACHERS
Another important point in teacher training,
McLaren says, is to teach the teachers using the
methods you want them to use in the classroom.
This is referred to as “modelling the model” by
the academy’s vice-president for strategic initia-
tives, Deborah Hirsch. “In order to teach dif-
ferently, you need to learn differently,” she says.
McLaren agrees and describes an example
from a professional-development workshop.
“The teachers have to be put in the position
where they are playing the role of the student,”
he says. So to convey one of the Next Genera-
tion Science Standards such as understanding
causation, teachers would be presented with
classroom situations and asked to identify
causes and patterns. As a result, the teachers
are using evidence based on their investigation
to arrive at an explanation. The ‘aha!’ moment,
he says, is when “teachers can see how a shift in
their instruction makes a world of difference.”
Osborne also encourages a shift in the way
STEM teachers engage with their students. He
advocates teaching argumentation in science
as a way for students to understand scientific
concepts. “The history of science is the history
of vision and argument,” he says, noting long-
standing debates about the workings of the
Solar System and the cause of disease. This is
not an easy assignment for teachers, he admits:
“It’s a relatively complex skill.”
McLaren says it takes time for teachers to
learn these skills, and he was no exception.
In 2001, he won the Milken Educator Award,
which is given each year to exemplary early-
to mid-career teachers in each state. Even
so, looking back on his teaching career, and
considering how the Next Generation Science
Standards shift the focus away from teachers
and towards students, he says: “I want to write a letter of apology