Science

Science is my passion. Teaching science is my passion.

Because of that, I have faced my first frustration of the school year, and it is one I face very often.

My school and school network has a big emphasis on professional development and the constant work of improving. Not only does this help us, obviously, improve, but it also allows us to model this effort for our students.

So, we start every school year off with two weeks of professional development. We have sessions almost every Friday afternoon in the school year. We meet, we work, we collaborate, we improve.

As a science teacher, I find it frustrating that there are very few opportunities for professional development in my school network. A few times a year, we have content-specific professional development (PD) sessions. The ELA teachers meet to talk about teaching reading strategies, or teaching lessons on writing, or about diving into novels and non-fiction writings. The math teachers talk about problem solving strategies, or developing foundation skills. And then, they put all of the history and science teachers in a room together to talk about, well, usually reading and writing skills.

Don’t get me wrong – reading and writing are two of the most important skills as a scientist. In order to prepare our students for high school, college, and career science, we need to give them the tools they need to pick up any textbook, newspaper, or journal article and understanding the meaning of the text and implications of the authors’ biases.

Great. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I can complain about PD this week. It is ALL science/history combined, learning about reading and writing skills. There are a lot of important skills science teachers need, and teaching reading and writing are only two of those. We need more practice teaching students to design experiments, carry out these experiments safely and efficiently, invest students in pursuing science careers, complete engineering tasks, and so many more. Given that this may be the only, or one of few, time(s) that all of the North Star science teachers are together, there may be more high-leverage ways they could be using our time.

Even these PDs, while useful, could be done so much more intentionally. We value intentionality, in our classrooms and outside. We are so limited in time and resources for our students that we need to make the most of everything, There is so much lack of intentionality in our schedule this week and in the sessions we have. Even within the sessions, the applications to science feel like throw-away attempts at making everyone feel “included”. Even some of the science texts we are looking at are less-than-stellar, and are not texts I would use in my classroom for this purpose.

Plus, ELA and math teachers get to miss school sometimes for PD and it’s not fair! I want to miss school sometimes. And learn to be a better science teacher, of course.

I have done everything I can to change this. I have brought this up with my principal/instructional leader/principal lead of science (each subject has a principal lead, but science is the one led by someone with no content background at all – he’s an English teacher). I have made these suggestions, and even offered to write and lead these PD sessions. I have been told that there is no time for that this week because of the “schedule shifting around.” Hmmm. Skeptical.

This morning, we had the first science-specific PD I think I’ve ever had at North Star, and it was awesome! It really pushed us to do our work better and more comprehensively, with a specific focus on how we can incorporate engineering tasks and skills into our classroom. We had a great time, and it really challenged us. Too bad it’s the only one we have on the schedule. We’ll see.

I can’t really worry about it, because I’ve done what I can reasonably do to help. I also can’t just “not care”, because I have to work to hard to not care. So, I’ll settle for an in-between, slightly subversive contentedness, while taking every opportunity to make it better. I will sneak improvements into my science teaching when nobody is looking. I will ask my peers for feedback. And when a colleague asks me, during our “Planning Writing Mini-Lessons” science/history PD session, “How does this apply to our science classrooms?”, I can answer in a way that makes us all learn a little more: How will you use this in your classroom? Don’t know? Figure it out.

And then we’ll figure it out.