High-School Biology Today and Tomorrow (1989) / Chapter Skim
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Part VI: Accomplishing Curricular Changes - Institutional Barriers
Part VI: Accomplishing Curricular Changes - Institutional Barriers
Pages 243-288
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PART VI Accomplishing Curricular Changes Institutional Barriers
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He led the team that developed the yellow version of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) biology text in the 1960s; is a director of the Science as a Way of Knowing project of the American Society of Zoologists; and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Some are surely among the most wonderful, dedicated, and competent members of society. At the same time, many are poorly trained in the sciences, and many high-school biology classes are taught by former majors in home economics or physical education.
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A generation ago, NSF did gallant and effective work in science education, but then
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Most important, science education must begin with young children, and they must be partners with teachers who will help them uncover nature and not stifle that sense of wonder and joy in living things that is every child's birthright. The science taught must be organized to accomplish the most with a minimum of repetition.
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I suggest that such leadership must come from a highly respected, nongovernment organization that will support reform of the teaching of science at all levels: seeking to increase the fraction of the curriculum devoted to science, improving the teaching force, demanding adequate resources from local and national governments, seeing that fine textbooks are available, encouraging the colleges and universities to take seriously the education of all students (including those seeking a career in teaching) , and providing models for appropriate science for the various grades.
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Such an activity would have to involve real teachers and close working relations with state and local school districts, publishers, and the institutions that prepare students for careers in teaching. Will society, and especially the educational establishment, buy this?
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This would be a radical reform and realistically would require implementation over a period of years. Thus, an interim solution would seem to require two sorts of high-school programs.
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First, schools as a group must be viewed as social institutions that interact with and are influenced by an array of other social institutions. Schools are not free to operate independently of these external social agencies and institutions, which look to the schools to foster a variety of desired personal and social outcomes in pupils.
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The factors discussed represent a view of the American educational scene that points out the difficulty of effecting real educational change without a substantial commitment of resources and a substantial amount of patience. EXTERNAL BARRIERS TO SCHOOL CHANGE Change efforts arise when a crisis is perceived to exist in a social agency; reform is not spontaneous, but responds to a perceived need.
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The perceptions of the policy-makers regarding the underlying causes of the problem narrow, in turn, the nature and locus of reform efforts. Once a problem is identified and school-based change is perceived to be needed, the nature of the proposed change mandate will be forged within the realities of the present status of schools as a social institution.
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This growth is a measure of the increasing importance of the schools as social initiation agencies an the apparent inability or unwillingness of other social institutions to take responsibility for fostering the desired outcomes. The American public desires that its schools be responsible for a large set of personal and social goals and activities that once were considered the province of other institutions.
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In many instances, policy-making is being given over to less expert, more politically motivated groups that are as concerned with how decisions will play in Peoria as they are with how much real educational change will be produced. Individuals who wish to bring about change in the schools must recognize and contend with this movement toward administrative centralization and standardization.
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With very few exceptions, the state has been interested in and preoccupied with providing an education that is suitable "on average" for all school pupils. Developing individual pupils to their maximum level of attainment has not been a usual priority of the state in formulating educational policy (Green, 1980~; hence, the focus in recent reforms has been on minimally acceptable levels of funding, standards, and attainment.
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The reforms tend to ignore the complexity of school and educational improvement by offering simplistic, one-variable solutions and bromides. The rhetoric and the symbolism of reform conspire to produce two potential barriers to school change: the grandiose claims reflected in the language of reform lead to raised and often unrealistic expectations of what schools can and should accomplish, particularly since recent reforms place scant emphasis on the schools' working in conjunction with other institutions, such as the family; and the political and symbolic appeal of the reforms often serves to assuage public concern or conscience about the need for further reform.
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Logic and rational planning are all too often upset when they confront the exigencies of the real world, and George Bernard Shaw was correct when he pointed out that one of the common errors made by social reformers was the idea that change could be achieved by "brute sanity." INTERNAL BARRIERS TO SCHOOL CHANGE The preceding context colors substantially the reforms that emerge for implementation in schools. The reality of the school as a social institution that takes its lead from other social institutions is that change is most likely to occur where there is widespread public awareness and concern; where basic, minimal expectations can be stated; and where interest groups can find a common, usually very general ground for proposed change.
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The main focus of the following discussion is on the current level of our instructional expectations and the degree to which our mastery of the intricacies of the instructional process are sufficient to meet these new expectations. It is necessary first to note briefly some other important internal barriers to school change (Airasian, 1983; Fullan, 1982; Lieberman, 1982~: · There is the reality of the inherent nature of all bureaucracy to resist innovations that change the resource-allocation mix or accustomed authority relationships.
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· Finally, there is the reality of limits to the amount of meaningful change that schools can accomplish without the support, reinforcement, and encouragement of families and other social institutions. A major additional barrier to instructionally related educational change is the lack of a well-developed science of instruction that will permit teachers to attain the many and varied instructional ends that society wishes to have schools foster in pupils.
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Thus, the two defining properties of higher-level processes are that they involve problems that require more than rote learning and are new to the learner. Researchers who have studied higher-level mental operations like critical thinking, problem-solving, and reasoning have obtained results that are not encouraging for reformers who wish to reorient instruction to produce such outcomes in pupils.
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At present, processes like reasoning, critical thinking, problem-solving, and the like are beyond our capabilities to instruct in a manner that can ensure that most pupils will master them. The moral here is that we cannot assume that, because we can state the desired outcomes that we wish pupils to attain from instruction, it necessarily follows that the science of instruction is sufficiently well developed and articulated to enable us to be successful in fostering them in pupils.
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Meaningful change will come about when we set our aims reasonably in the light of existing barriers; when we can be patient about the pace at which change will occur; when we stop relying on the school, independently of other social Institutions, to solve problems that are not fundamentally school-based; and when reformers are better versed in the realities of schools and classrooms. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The Insights and suggestions of Dr.
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1982. The Meaning of Educational Change.
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State policies have both helped and unintentionally hindered educational reform. Although recent reforms have raised standards of educational quality, they have also set in place some regulations that hamper the systemwide change that is now needed to improve student learning.
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that highlights the impacts of recent state reforms on science education in school districts and schools. · Third, a new reform agenda for state policy will be discussed that suggests a new way of doing business.
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IMPACT OF RECENT REFORMS In general, recent reforms have had positive impacts on curriculum and instruction in many school districts. For districts with limited resources, state curriculum frameworks have provided guidance for either implementing science curricula where none existed or revising existing curricula in the light of current trends in science education.
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Encouragement of districts to emphasize science, without the result of "teaching to the test." In school districts studied, ECS found that certain local conditions facilitated the implementation of these policies. These were: · A district's or school's strong desire to do well on the state assessment, because of "accountability pressure." District leadership and a commitment to teaching science.
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Before thinking about new policy tools for systemwide change, it is important to understand the nature of the policy process. THE NATURE OF THE POLICY PROCESS Elmore and McLaughlin (1988)
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Each level of the system must depend on others for knowledge and skill that it does not have. THE NEVV REFORM AGENDA The new reform agenda builds on what we have learned about people's roles in the system, policy implementation, and a new vision of system-wide change.
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New roles include helping schools and districts to build greater capacities; developing new forms of assistance that directly help teachers, schools, and school districts; requiring less monitoring and regulation while providing greater measures of school and system accountability; and providing financial incentives to encourage systemwide change. · Experimentation and risk-taking in schools need to be supported through incentive or planning grants to school districts and schools and through waivers from existing regulations that get in the way of innovation.
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Below is a description of an ECS project that is attempting to bring many of these ideas together in an effort to rethink the educational system in five states. DEVELOPING NEVV POLICY ENVIRONMENTS A new project at ECS, Re:Learning, is a collaboration among ECS, the Coalition of Essential Schools at Brown University, and schools and policy-makers in five states.
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An in-state school coordinator will assist each participating school with restructuring and serve as a continuing "critical friend." The coordinator will also organize workshops, bring teachers from different schools with common concerns together, troubleshoot with district and state officials, and represent the group to the public and to the media. Coordinators will most often be located at universities to help to build the link to higher education and bring Re:Learning concepts into the education of teachers and administrators.
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The cadre will generate and help to guide systemwide changes and strategies. On the state policy level, ECS will assist the steering committee (which is expected to include the governor and chief state school officer, the state
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The national component of Re:Learning will support the state-bystate and school-by-school changes. A major force in moving state action forward is creating a national debate and discussion on changes needed in the educational system so that the "best of learning for all students" is the driving force for change.
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1988. The Impact of State Policies on Improving Science Curriculum.
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High schools throughout the United States are remarkably uniform in organization and In their approach to teaching biology. Here and there, some creative administrators and gifted teachers manage to offer a real science experience to their students, but for the most part, biology is rote learning and cookbook laboratory experiments.
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All these factors lessen the ability of the teacher to give quality instruction. Teacher Schedule In most school districts, the maximal number of students a teacher may have in a class is 30; therefore, he or she may be responsible for a total of 150 students.
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College-bound students eager to learn biology in detail? It may be surprising to hear that there is a good chance that more.students who took freshman science will, 8 years later, have spent time behind bars than will have a bachelor's degree in either biology, chemistry, physics, earth science, or science education (Leyden, 1984~.
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Interestingly enough, the one science certification that is interdisciplinary is general science, the course that is lowest in the hierarchical scale and is usually taken by the non-college-bound. Sex Roles Sixty-three percent of biology teachers are male (Champagne and Hornig, 1987, p.
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With the exception of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) series (whose latest editions look more and more like the traditional ones, with fewer and fewer open-inquiry laboratory experiments)
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A colleague gave a 1-day in-service session to biology teachers in his city during which he introduced an original 2-week unit that he had written, exploring land use and decision-making. The teachers were interested in the new approach, but monetary constraints were such that there was no time available for them to practice together and work through the unit.
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National Association of Biology Teachers meetings include workshops that are led by teachers and are therefore rich in practical ideas. Yet districts still require only coursework for incremental wage increases.
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PRESERVICE EDUCATION If the teaching in university biology classes has been less than inspired, it behooves teacher-education programs to develop teacher methods that are student-centered, are interactive, and serve as catalysts for student thinking and problem-solving. Unfortunately, teacher candidates are often taught by professors who are decades away from actual classroom teaching and who lack first-hand knowledge of the current school populace.
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They want a leader with vision and the ability to excite the staff to work toward shared goals. Alas, most are pedantic and have little knowledge of good science education and so exert little or no direction.
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They feel confused by the reports that suggest that they must teach more and the data that show that American students understand less science Education Week, September 28, 1988~. Does the aging teacher population have a desire for renewal?
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In thinking about changing the curriculum, we must ask not only what it Is that we want our students to know, but also how it should best be taught. Change necessitates restructuring the day and the teachers' schedules, modifying certification requirements, developing creative administrators, improving curriculum models, rethinking teacher education, and building In time so that teachers can have a true dialogue.
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