The context and characters
I continue to process my thoughts about my trip to Santo Domingo de Onzole on the banks of the Onzole River in Esmereldas Province, Ecuador. This story is about Robi and his middle school life science students, particularly a boy named Ariel, but it’s also about the microscopes I brought down and about questions about studying, learning, and science. Alex, as always, is involved.
Robi was Patricia, the principal’s, wife. He was Dannys’ son—Dannys taught in another town but came to the PD sessions and to school that week. She and Patricia were vigorous and enthusiastic educational leaders and advocates. I’ll write about observing Patricia’s class and more about her and Dannys soon. Robi was a little different. He was a friendly guy, who sometimes seemed a little stressed, but generally seemed like the kind of guy a woman in town would want to raise kids with. He also owned a farm, which he went to after work, so he couldn’t attend the PD sessions. Robi taught life science to 7th and 8th graders. The first day, I didn’t get to observe his class, but I observed him Wednesday in two different classes and taught in his class on Thursday and Friday. Keep in mind that all of my interactions were mediated by Lucia’s and in some cases Carlos’ interpretation. As always, I trust them to check me on any inaccuracies, but I’m grateful to them both. This is as much their story as mine.
Evaluation day
The first day we observed Robi’s 7th and 8th grade classes. We started in the 8th grade. Lucia explained that Robi said today was an “evaluation” day and not a day of students’ learning. Robi called a kid to the front of the room, to stand by Robi in front of the class, and told the student to begin. The student began talking about the six domains of life, reciting what they were and general details of their characteristics, with the exception of distinguishing archaebacteria and bacteria. Biologists classify the groups into three domains, the archaebacteria, bacteria, and eukaryotes, creating a higher level classification than the five kingdoms that we learned as students. Actually Archaea’s characteristics and its evolutionary relationship with the other domains is interesting and you might like to read about it. Then another kid came to front of the room and basically said the same thing about the domains. At first I didn’t exactly know what was going on, but Lucia explained that the kids were repeating the same things. Some kids stumbled over it, but by and large they recited the material accurately and pretty much verbatim from the text. They seem to have studied what Robi wanted them to study. I guess this is “recitation”, but I’ve never really seen it before, except in the way some teachers in the US sometimes have students give group presentations of recall of text.
That was pretty much it. Robi seemed taciturn and even a little robotic in his approach. He didn’t smile much. There was little interaction. It was a test of recall, just not on paper. Robi gave a little summary at the end basically saying the same stuff the students had said. There was no power that day, so the horn was mercifully quiet at the end of the period, replaced by the twangy thump of a drum.
“To study is to the wick as to learn is to the candle”
Robi changed to his 7th grade class for the next period and we went with him. This class was different. Robi had asked the kids to bring in seeds. Some brought corn, others brought rice and beans, and some brought orange or tangerine seeds. Robi began a lecture, with questions for students, about the differences between monocots and dicots. He seemed more relaxed than in the other class. His personality was part of his teaching in this class. He explained, referring to the textbook, that monocots had one cotyledon, the first leaves to emerge from the seed, while dicots had two. He then asked students about the seeds they brought in. “Was corn a monocot or dicot?” “Monocot!”. Corn grows along the Onzole, but I didn’t see any in Santo Domingo “How about beans?” “Dicot!” “What about chocolate?” “Dicot!” Oranges and tangerines were also classified as dicots.
The kids seemed to know these plants; in some cases they were wrong, and in some cases Robi told them, but it was a more interactive and dynamic atmosphere than the previous class. Roni then moved on to talk about xylem and phloem and how different kinds of sap moved through them inside the plant. This seemed like it was supposed to be more of a direct lecture, where he talked and they listened.
At the end, Robi began talking about students studying. He told students that they had to study in order to learn. I had heard a lot of this same motivational type of speech from Aron in his Research Methods class. Robi emphasized, “Doubt and you will study. Study and you will learn.” I was really excited when I heard about doubt. It seems like a negative word, especially when talking about learning. But in Robi’s articulation, it is a call to motivate oneself. You don’t understand something? Study it and you will learn more.
Robi then went to the white board and drew a candle. “To Study is to the Wick as to Learn is to the Candle” he told them. The wick he, said, needed to be inflamed for the candle to work. Robi seemed to take this seriously. Shortly, the drum twanged and thumped again.
I liked Robi’s analogy, but I was wondering what learning meant to Robi and the students. Later I began to think about what studying meant and even what doubt meant to them, and to me. In what I saw in Robi’s class, it seemed to mean that students were able to recall the text that was the Ecuadoran curriculum. But why was it important for students to learn the difference between monocots and dicots? I’ve spend quite a while Googling to try to remember the details. Students seemed to know that coffee sprouted in two sprouts, but what did this knowledge of monocots and dicots do for them in general, or even in working with the cacao? It didn’t make much difference to me when I did genetics research on corn in my 20’s—I was separating corn embryos from the endosperm (which nurtures the embryo) in the kernel to prepare and isolate chromosome karyotypes. And why was it important to recall the domains of life? I ask myself these kinds of questions when thinking about our biology teaching in the States, particularly in the middle grades. I’ll return to this question about what learning might mean in the science classroom in Santo Domingo and beyond.
The next day: S: ¿Que sabes? / Q: ¿Qué quieres saber? /A: ¿Que has aprendido?
I planned for this trip based on my experience in Santa Avelina, working with Becky, Hans, Arthur, & Carmen (see my earlier post about Santa Avelina). We had brought some ideas about planning there, and we had been able to work with the teachers on planning their lessons using some simple planning heuristics and tools. Lucia and I brought some of these ideas to the professional development meetings. One of these was Wiggins & McTigue’s (2005) backwards planning, another was the well-known science planning tool “The 5E’s” developed by Roger Bybee and colleagues at the Biological Science Curriculum Study, and a third was the equally widely known “K/W/L” strategy (See chapter 9 in the link) (S/Q/A in Spanish). The professional development is another story, but the KWL seemed to catch on with the teachers in particular and I ended up using it in teaching Robi’s class.
We visited Robi’s 8th grade again the next day, and he asked me to teach a lesson using the microscopes. Since Robi, like Aron, was not able to come to the PD sessions, I decide to use an SQA strategy to model it for him and to see how it went with the kids. I began by asking kids what they know about plants and animals. I consider this to be a good starting question because we all know they’re different, but most of us haven’t thought about their most basic similarities and differences. If most people are lucky they remember something about plants having chlorophyll and that’s why they’re green, and something or other about a cell wall.
Plants and animals are both multicellular organisms. Most animals move from place to place, and most plants don’t. Plants make their own food and animals move around to eat food. That’s it basically. Starting from there can lead to a lot of greater exploration. But not understanding this can lead to ongoing confusion in the form of “my teacher said this…”. For example, when I was working on my teaching degree, one of my classmates (not a science teacher), taught a lesson on classification and asked students to classify different organisms as plants, animals, and insects. Doesn’t it kind of seem like insects aren’t animals? This is a common mistake. I wondered how the students in Santo Domingo would articulate their ideas about plants and animals to drive their own questions, considering that they have a lot of daily experience with both: cacao, bananas, plantains, oranges, flowers, fish, snakes, iguanas, insects, chickens, cows, cats, and dogs, and many more multicellular organisms overwhelm the Onzole. How might we use the microscopes to investigate these things?
I wrote an objective on the board: “Students will be able to describe differences between plants and animals.” Again, Robi had not been at the PD sessions, so a part of this was modeling the idea that a clear objective was important and might be useful to communicate to the students, (as long as one doesn’t thwart students’ exploration by telling too much). Lucia and I led a whole class discussion about the “Know” column and students wrote down what the class generated. One example of a students’ paper can be seen on the right.
In the right column we wrote that plants and animals are both living things and reproduce. Students vaguely stated that they are different. Some responses were unusual, like the pretty clear comment that plants have, or are, red, when one would expect they’d say green. This might make sense in Santo Domingo, where there is an abundance of red flowering plants, and the cacao bush has red pods. Students noted that plants do not move, although it’s written oddly on this paper. Unusual spelling and construction was uncommon and perplexes even my most literate Spanish-speaking friends and colleagues. This isn’t uncommon in the States either at this age, and as in the States, some papers were incompletely filled. I’m not sure if this matters for the overall participation of those who didn’t write much, but it does highlight some of the academic diversity in the class. Ariel commented that plants had vertebrae, and clarified that he meant a backbone. I noticed that Robi was recording the entire thing on his phone.
We moved on to what the students wanted to know (¿Qué quieres saber?). I was a little distracted by wondering whether the questions would lend themselves to any work with the microscope. As I usually do, I was scanning the Knows and Want to Knows as they came up to see how I could leverage something. Some of the students’ questions were vague, hard to explore, and hard to read on some papers. For example, in the second column in the sample, you can see “¿Porque sirue?” (sic), “How do they work?” Students also asked why plants can’t move and “¿Como se ve raiz?” (“How the root looks?”). This last one seemed like it had potential, and I thought Ariel’s statement about vertebrae might be interesting too. I didn’t direct students to one question in particular, but I had a feeling if they went out looking at plants and animals, they would learn something productive about their local flora and fauna just in the schoolyard.
We released the students with the microscopes after showing them how to use them. Students immediately went out and began looking around. They found plants, but most only looked at the leaves. They found ants, as Aron’s students did, and this led to some excitement. The details of the ants can be seen clearly with these scopes. I realized that this class had talked about vascular tissue, so I ran around town looking for some plants near water to see if I could find some clear examples of xylem. I even asked Carlos if we could get some celery. He asked Patricia but sadly, no. I did pull up a plant in which you could see the xylem, and I showed it to Robi and a few students under the microscope.
We gathered students back to the room and talked about what they now knew. Students noted that the ants have hair and that roots have “layers”—they meant that there are different parts at the top and the bottom of the root. These both would be productive for further classes if I had time. I asked the students about Ariel’s statement, “Do ants have a backbone?” Ariel was particularly engaged. He said they were hard on the outside, and he thought he didn’t really see a backbone in a close look at a dead ant. I introduced the idea that insects have their skeleton on the outside to support their body, unlike us and other vertebrates. The horn was back today unfortunately, jarring us on to the next class.
Ariel stood out like Alex did. He had an atypical background, which I read about in Carlos’ newsletter. Carlos writes:
Ariel arrived in Santo Domingo about a year and a half ago from a city in the south of Ecuador called Machala, not too far from the border with Peru. He had lived there all his life with his mother and his grand-mother after his father, originally from Santo Domingo, decided to leave and head back to the village.
I don’t know if this change, or other aspects of Ariel’s natural curiosity and intelligence led him to be so involved in the class, but he was also involved in the class I taught the next day and again displayed thoughtful ideas and reasoning.
¡Buena(s) tarde(s)!
I’ve learned that people in Santo Domingo drop their s’s at the end of words. People would greet you with “¡Buena!”. I expect this is unusual, and the Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Mexican people I’ve tried to say hello to in this form look at me funny before they respond with “¡Hola!”. That afternoon was quiet around the guesthouse. There tended to be a downtime in the afternoon, before the town erupted into cooking, soccer, bingo, and jump-rope. Alex and I were in the guesthouse and a few of the other visiting team members were around. Alex and I were looking through the microscopes. I had found some red onion and had been trying to get good images of cells in water and salt water as I would do at home, but it was a little challenging and even more so trying to help someone else see what I could see.
I thought Alex needed something more dramatic. There was a butterfly caught in the screen and a small tear at the top of the screen that I could fit my hand into. I tried to catch the butterfly and then tried to fish it out with my backscratcher. Alex saw what I was doing and came over to help. He stood on a chair and reached his smaller arm down to where he could almost touch the butterfly. There was a smaller rip in the bottom and (sorry Carlos), and Alex tore it a little wider and force the butterfly up so he could catch it by the wings and pull it out.
I struggled in Santo Domingo with wanting students to see things but not wanting to cavalierly kill animals. How could Alex see the butterfly? I ran through some scenarios in my mind. Maybe I could hold it while he looked? No it would move too much. Without saying a word to me, Alex took it to the table where he trapped its wings between two stacks of books. We began looking at the butterfly now through several lenses.
I can’t remember the wide ranging science conversation that resulted, but we looked closely at the wings and tried to watch its proboscis come out when we offered up a piece of papaya. I was astonished by Alex’s ingenuity in capturing and securing the butterfly. Alex loved science and math, but he especially loved biology. I felt a kinship. I imagine this is not uncommon for people working with Alex. He has an extraordinary ability to connect with people. Chadd, the director of T2T, had visited Santo Domingo before. When I mentioned Alex, Chadd remembered him well. “Wow! He must be a teenager by now!” Alex had been engaging outsiders for a while. Carlos said Alex was always at the guesthouse when Carlos was in town.
“But Profe! We have another hour!”
“¡Buena Dia!” I tried to say the next morning. I was back in Robi’s 8th grade class, but Robi wasn’t there. Lucia was busy with something else, so Carlos began interpreting for me, which I think he enjoyed. He has the same knack for teaching and intuition about scientific phenomenon as Lucia does. She came in after about 15 minutes.
On the spot, with Robi not there, I decided to do The Owls and The Snakes with the students. This is a real scientific question about an unusual ecological relationship that ecologists have studied. It matches with general expectations about what students should understand about the variety of ways that organisms interact, both as predator and prey and in various symbiotic relationships. We had done this with the teachers in the professional development (another story) and it was fun and productive, plus Carlos and Lucia both knew what I was doing. People who know me are groaning. I do this ALL THE TIME and I’ve written at least two articles and a book about it. I’ll explain it to others as we go.
Again I had written an objective. Even though I wasn’t modeling for Robi that day, I was still doing what I do and what I ask my student teachers to do. I want students to know what to expect in class each day. “Students will be able to explain an unusual ecological relationship.” I told the students I was going to tell them about a pattern that biologists had observed and we that we were going to try to explain it:
Some owls in the Eastern United States bring live blind snakes to their nests, but all other species they bring back are delivered dead. How can we explain the relationship between the owls and the snakes?
First, I had students do a “think-pair-share” where they talked with each other and came up with hypotheses. I told them that a hypothesis is a “proposed explanation”. How might we explain this, even before we had much data? I gave them just a few minutes and we started to construct a list. Most of the responses were those I usually hear when I do this with students (of a variety of ages), with other adults, and with student teachers and practicing teachers in professional development. Students suggested:
- The owls may use the snakes so that the babies can eat them when they hatch
- The owls are giving the snakes a place to live
- The snakes wrap themselves around the eggs to protect them
- (And maybe to warm them?)
- The snakes are for the babies to practice hunting when they hatch.
We spent some time talking about how we might reject one or another of these hypotheses. Students struggled a little with this part, but we ended up having a lively discussion about a number of things. How could snakes warm eggs if they were cold-blooded? Would they really be able to wrap themselves around the eggs if they were so small? The whole discussion seemed to have gone by quickly and taken up much of the forty-minute period. I was anticipating the blaring, discomforting horn.
I always expect that people will want to know the “right” answer. So before the horn, I pretended class was over. “Okay, that’s it! Great job, you guys came up with a lot of good possible explanations!” I said, and pretended to walk out. I thought they were going to ask me for the answer. Instead, students remained in their seats and seemed surprised, “But Profe! they cried, “We have another hour!” Lucia informed me that this was a double period. Obviously I didn’t understand the schedule (who did?). I regrouped and continued where I logically usually would. I was pleased that the students still seemed into it.
I told the students they would have some time now to work in small groups to come up with a way to study this phenomenon and reject or support one or more hypotheses. I gave them about 15 minutes and each group then presented their research ideas. I recorded all of the presentations. This post is getting a little long and I want to finish strong, so I won’t go into detail on these presentations, but but here’s a screenshot. I’ll send full videos to anyone who wants to see them.
Basically, the students came up with some reasonable observations that they could make to determine if the owls and snakes were behaving in ways consistent with various hypotheses. I gave other students an opportunity to ask questions or challenge the designs in the presentations and some did, particularly Ariel. Most of the groups didn’t propose anything experimental, but as my colleagues and I point out elsewhere, the particular details of an experimental “Scientific Method” is not necessarily an obvious way to proceed in this case. The authors did, but the students likely wouldn’t have known how to conduct an experiment in this case, especially if it didn’t seem obvious or necessary.
After the presentations students wanted to know the right answer. Who wouldn’t? I gave students pieces of evidence that the scientists had collected: The insects the snakes eat when they’re living in their regular habitat (they burrow underground and in ants’ nests) were also found in the owls nests; the baby birds grow faster and leave the nest sooner. In their paper, the scientists conclude that the owls benefit by the snakes keeping parasites from retarding the babies’ growth, but the snakes are neither benefited nor harmed because they get the same food they eat when they’re on the ground. This is referred to as a “commensalistic” relationship. I like students to question the author’s conclusions. That’s just good scientific practice, so I asked the students what they thought. One student noted that there wasn’t any data showing if the snakes lived better when they were in the nests than when they were on the ground. Maybe the snakes did benefit?
At the end of the class, before we could be interrupted by the standard assault on our ears, we asked the students to “take out a piece of paper” and write down at least one important thing that they had learned in class that day. As we’ll see in the conclusion, the interpretation of “piece of paper” took on special meaning in Santo Domingo.
“Today we learned the gift of companionship and to realize hypotheses”
The students took the request for a “piece of paper” quite literally. They tore pieces from their books, even taking tiny pieces from blank pages. Some reached over and tore off a piece of someone else’s piece. Some of the pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle as you can see in one of these pictures. That night, Lucia and I looked through them. As I generally suggest my student teachers do, I made piles of similar responses. I usually have one pile for students who seemed to understand what we were doing and gave me the responses that I generally anticipated. An example of this is Jabes who wrote, “The snakes that the owls carry to the nest are for the sake of the chicks to benefit from the snakes.” Jabes understood the ecological concept that one organism might benefit from its association with another. I usually have another pile for students who I might assess as either not being engaged in the lesson, not understanding the point, or not being able to express themselves well. Kristel’s response, “Because the snakes are venomous,” falls into this category.
The last category is something that’s left fairly open. It’s for ideas that I either don’t understand or find particularly unusual. I invite my student teachers to think about what this category might be for them, in the particular context of the question they ask. Additionally, one could use a different number of groupings. There’s no rules to analyzing students’ responses; it’s just important to try to interpret their meaning, as they intend it. I usually find that three groups gives me a good representation of the diversity of ideas and reasoning.
I placed Ariel’s response in the center of the second picture:
“Today we learned the gift of companionship and to realize hypotheses.”
Lucia and I were impressed with this and it confirmed our sense of Ariel’s relative sophistication. To me, this was a very important thing that one might learn from the activity and a higher-level objective that I aspire for students to realize. We didn’t just learn some “knowledge;” we learned how to do some science, and how to work together in doing so.
Conclusion: “To study is to the wick as to learn is to the candle”
Reflecting back to the views of studying and learning that I had heard from Aron and Robi, I want to promote our work in our class as a new way of interpreting Robi’s ideas. Based on what I saw in their teaching, I believe that Aron and Robi wanted students to “doubt” their existing knowledge of science concepts, to study those concepts, and to learn them, i.e., acquire the given information in the curriculum (the text).
I’m not quite sure why there’s such an emphasis on the acquisition of book knowledge in Santo Domingo. Few people go on to college and science at the higher level is not necessarily relevant to most of the residents. In part, it may be something new, stimulated by the Onzole River Project, which seeks to create opportunities for students through more rigorous education. There is some evidence that more students are pursuing higher education and are prepared to do so. I think there may also be considerable status in the community for people who do well in school earn a high school diploma. Carlos can always tell you more.
Returning to the terms “doubt,” “study,” and “learn,” I would argue that they also apply to our work in these last two class sessions. Students doubted what they knew in the animals and plants class by reviewing their current knowledge and asking new questions, expressing doubt in their current understanding. And although I asked the question and raised the doubt myself in The Owls and The Snakes, students “studied” the problem by constructing hypotheses about the relationship. In the plants and animals class, they studied the schoolyard and the plants and animals they found. And they learned too—in the plants and animals class they learned some things about insects and about root structure—conceptual knowledge that they might have been taught in a book, but did not know they didn’t understand well until they “studied” it. In The Owls and The Snakes, most of them learned the possibilities of ecological relationships and maybe some details about the diversity of organisms. If I could hope for a student to have learned something from my work in Santo Domingo it would be something that I can’t articulate as well as this:
“Today we learned the gift of companionship and to realize hypotheses.”
Darwin's Apostle 