Inquiry Training

The end of summer is here, or nearly here. The beginning of the end was the week long Science Inquiry training last week. Myself and five other teachers along with two administrators taught teachers in my old district a new viewpoint on science teaching. The teachers walked in thinking that they were going to get new activities and ideas for classroom lessons. We wanted to give them a new mindset.

It’s hard to ask people to really look carefully at what they do everyday. You can couch it in phrases that sound supportive or that sound as if  there is only a small change to be made, but in the end, the very dynamic of a training session implies that changes need to be made.  The bald truth is, we all walked into the training hoping to change the way that those teachers taught science, even if we didn’t believe that they are bad or neglectful teachers.

By asking teachers to change the way that they approach content and materials in a classroom, we asked them to relearn how to teach. Most teachers approach a lesson by either pulling it from the state approved textbook or by teaching the content in a way that someone they know and respect has taught it in the past.

I said, many times over, the phrase “subtle shifts”, “deepen your existing efforts” and things like “we’re not asking you to throw your existing lessons in the trash and start over”. I looked out at the assembled teachers and watched their faces while we said it.  Some participants believed it, and looked relieved; some participants really felt overwhelmed and as if they could never do it; and some looked as if nothing I could talk about would be more interesting than their plans for lunch.

The women that ran the training with me were so very good, both in the way that they handled specific participants and in the way that they addressed the changes that were taking place in the participants.  By the end of the week, we had many teachers who were ready to look at lesson design and underlying concepts in their grade level.

Today, I started a week long training, as a participant, on English Language Learners and the regular classroom.  This training is going to ask us to examine our lesson design and our classroom culture as well.  Participants in this training seem to have the same glazed over eyes or panicked facial expressions as the participants in my training did. This group, though, has another more insidious expression: anger.

It would be very easy to get distracted at this point and try to examine the anger, where it comes from and to be righteously indignant about it. These teachers are angry that they are going to have to examine their teaching and classrooms because of “those” kids. That’s important and bears examination, but not here and not today.

Today, I want to ask why the teachers in my science training weren’t angry.  Yes the anger that comes from racist or semi-racist thinking is unsupportable, but some of the anger comes from teachers believing they are already doing everything they need to do to be good teachers. Where was that same conviction in the science teachers?

There is so much focus in teacher prep programs on language arts and literature that teachers feel secure and feel empowered to be angry when challenged in the way that they teach. Science and math? Not so much. Until that attitude changes and elementary teacher prep programs address the need for their pre-service teachers to feel comfortable in those subjects, I fear that I will continue to confront apathy and anger.  I fear as well that our students will continue to fall behind in math and science.

As the week goes on, I will be curious to see if the anger continues to simmer or if it cools down. Either way, it should be interesting to compare the two weeks.