back to list of Papers
back to list of Papers
by Richard Greenberg
University of Arizona
January 31, 1997
For presentation at the NISE 2nd Annual Forum
Washington, DC
February 24, 1997
As a developer of science-education programs, I have found myself deeply concerned with structuring programs so that their innovations can actually find their way to being used widely by students and teachers in the real world of schools. In order to achieve that goal, it became clear to me early on that consideration of curriculum cannot be separated from issues of teaching and learning: For practical implementation the critical link is teacher education. While, for understandable organizational reasons, the program for this conference separates "curriculum" from the topic of "teaching and learning", the distinction seems potentially counterproductive. The need to address all of these issues in an integrated manner is especially critical in the context of systemic change.
Because this panel is assigned the subject of curriculum, I would like to explore an issue that has been driven home to me during curriculum materials development as part of the Image Processing for Teaching (IPT) project. The specific issue is a dilemma faced in the course of any curriculum innovation, and its resolution illustrates the importance of intimately integrating all components of reform if we are to have successful systemic implementation. Later, I will also offer a cautionary note on how a rigid or bureaucratic implementation could subvert the process, unless administrators are vigilant in defending the spirit and intent of reform in science education
The use of digital image processing allows a great leap ahead of many classroom experiences, offering the potential for activities using a professional research tool and real, complex image data. As such it is a technology that can achieve the objective of many curricular innovations: authentic scientific experiences. In the early experimental stages of IPT (beginning in 1990), several teachers with personal subject "hobbies" developed wonderful research-based activities that worked beautifully in their own classrooms, but were too specialized to be widely used by other teachers. It became clear to us that our materials must support curriculum objectives widely recognized and shared among teachers, while at the same time allowing open-ended exploration, discovery, and analysis.
This poses a dilemma that must be faced by any curriculum developers who attempt to incorporate real investigation: You want the activities to be innovative, but you also need to ensure that a substantial number of teachers will recognize such activities as helping them meet their own objectives, and not imposing an arbitrary burden. For traditional teaching objectives, the marketplace has tended to drive curriculum materials toward the lowest common denominator.
The new National Science Education Standards, combined with systemic reform, are providing a solution to this dilemma. These standards are motivating teachers to adopt new and desirable objectives. This trend is especially true where systemic change is under way, educating teachers to the advantages and supporting implementation of change. Increasingly, we find that teachers are searching for ways to bring real scientific exploration and discovery into their classrooms. This change is making it possible for developers to provide curriculum materials that encourage the most meaningful learning, while simultaneously addressing widespread demand.
None of this change would be possible without teacher education as a key part of systemic reform: First, teacher education in the context of systemic reform has alerted teachers to the new purpose and approaches of science education reform within their systems. Without such teacher education, the demand for new curriculum support would not be created. Innovations would be local, small-scale, and ephemeral. Second, the specific curriculum innovations that are provided to meet that new demand require teacher education. For example, the IPT project began as a Teacher Enhancement project well before we began serious development of curriculum materials. Thousands of teachers have now learned what digital image processing is, how to do it, and how students can use it for learning. That broad base has been essential for its success. Thus, by providing both general and curriculum-specific teacher education, systemic reform can facilitate the development and implementation of new, enlightened curriculum, and in turn that curriculum is providing an essential part of meaningful reform.
However, I want to raise a concern about ways that organizational structure, which is necessary to coordinate systemic change, can nevertheless subvert the goals of science education reform. We have seen here how the need to structure a conference program begins to separate curriculum from teaching and learning. Here it is not a problem, because the participants are sophisticated enough to avoid being pigeonholed. But imagine what would happen if similar separation occurred in the structure of a systemic initiative. Policy makers and program planners must be careful to design systems to prevent such fragmentation. Even so, operational managers will need to be continually vigilant to ensure that bureaucratic and political tendencies do not separate the components of reform, all of which must be intertwined for systemic change to be beneficial.
Another natural bureaucratic tendency to avoid is applying standards in an overly rigid manner. In general, enlightened developers of curriculum materials do address topics explicitly within the Content Standards. The practical reason, again, is that we want innovative teachers to recognize our materials as supporting their goals, and to guide all teachers toward meeting the National Standards. However, the Content Standards are deliberately general because they are intended to provide a guiding philosophy; The Standards explicitly state that these guides are not meant to be proscriptive. This approach means that curriculum can be quite diverse, in order to meet the needs of diverse students in diverse contexts, while still meeting the National Standards.
One major theme of the Standards (again reflecting much of the thinking in science education reform, and also confirmed by TIMSS) is that curricula should not try to cover too broad a range of topics, but the topics should be explored in depth. This means that developers can prepare materials with the expectation that the materials will not define curricula themselves. Instead, developers need to provide an array of activities that support a clearly articulated conceptual framework aligned with the Standards. From such an array, teachers can select activities appropriate to their specific context, thus limiting the topical scope while increasing depth of understanding of concepts and processes.
Thus curricula that meet the National Standards may vary widely from school to school, or even classroom to classroom, within any system, and such variation is desirable if it addresses students' diverse needs. We need to encourage such diversity, while at the same time making the fundamental philosophical and pedagogical approaches of science-education reform ubiquitous.
Intellectually, there is no real conflict between the objectives of implementing reform systemically, while promoting internal diversity. However, the challenge in implementing systemic change is to design and monitor administrative and bureaucratic structures that will not pervert those goals. These systems need to be designed to promote diversity, rather than uniformity. Where it is done well, systemic reform with appropriate teacher education can promote the best kinds of curricula, the most meaningful teaching and learning, and the diversity essential to meeting the needs of all students.