EdFix Episode 2: The State of STEM Education - Arguing from Evidence

TRANSCRIPT

JONATHON GROOMS:
Arguing from evidence is something that I encourage a lot with teachers and through research.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I am Michael Feuer. This is EdFix, your source for insights about the practice and promise of education.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
It's great to be here today with our guest, Dr. Jonathon Grooms. Dr. Grooms is an expert on issues related to science and mathematics education and we're going to hear a lot about the importance of science and math or, what we call STEM education, in terms of the bigger picture of education policy in the US. Let me start, Jonathon. Thank you. Welcome to EdFix. Great to see you.

JONATHON GROOMS:
Thanks for having me, Michael. Appreciate it.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Why don't we just start with a quick version of what you're currently working on?

JONATHON GROOMS:
What I'm focusing on nowadays is engaging students in authentic science experiences and how do we get teachers to support their students in that engagement. We want students to do the things that scientists do as a part of their learning experience, so we need to figure out how best to make that happen in the classroom.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
We hear a lot about American science and the capacity of American science in a rapidly changing world of technology and in a world where other countries have more than caught up. What's your general sense of how well we're doing?

JONATHON GROOMS:
I think we're moving in the right direction. I think that's the easiest bow that you can put on it. We have work to do for sure, but I think our efforts, focusing on how students with data and generate arguments and getting them to think about the broader practice of science, is moving us in the right direction of making sure that our students, as they graduate and enter the real world, that they're ready to contribute and help and make sense of this whole STEM explosion that's going on.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
You taught at the elementary and secondary level?

JONATHON GROOMS:
My teaching experience is fairly unique, I would think, compared to most educators. I was fortunate enough, after undergrad, to start running a science outreach program for a university, so I actually went into classrooms K through 12. Any given day, I could be at any grade level doing science investigations with students and teachers in their classroom.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
We hear a lot about this in the jargon of education policy and research these days, that kids are natural scientists.

JONATHON GROOMS:
I think that's true. There's this innate curiosity that students have. They want to try and figure things out and learn about the world around them. It's important to us as educators that we have to make sure that we continue to foster that so that it comes fairly naturally in the younger grades, the younger students. And for a variety of reasons, it tends to wain as the students progress through middle and high school. I think that's where we come as educators and making sure we're providing those experiences that really keep the students hooked in and wanting to learn and continue to grow their science thinking about the world.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
And this idea that all children can learn and that all people can learn and that all kids can become scientist, I have a feeling that that bumps into, at least on the part of some people, different theories about the distribution of talent and who can really become a great scientist. Where are we on our thinking about those issues?

JONATHON GROOMS:
That's true and there's an unfortunate opportunity gap that's been fairly persistent in science education for different groups that are typically underrepresented in STEM fields. They don't historically get the kind of educational experiences and opportunities that we're pushing for now. So, this idea of equitable opportunities and instruction and that sort of thing, it's obviously not new. But there's definitely a renewed reinvigorated push in that direction to make sure that we're providing these ambitious learning experiences for everyone regardless of where they're coming from or their background.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Say a little bit about your own background. What drew you into this field?

JONATHON GROOMS:
Sure. Given my context, I don't think it's very surprising that I ended up in education. I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. Dad was a high school teacher. Mom was 30 years in school food service. Both of my older sisters are elementary teachers. So, it makes sense that I ended up a little bit where I am. Science was just always what I was interested in. I was good at it. I was one of those students you give me something and I chew on it and figure it out.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So, you were the kind of kid who always won the science fair?

JONATHON GROOMS:
Maybe not always won the science fair, but I was at least there as opposed to maybe some of my friends. So, that got me into college with the idea that I'm going to school to be a science teacher. That was my plan all along. Once I got out, I got into the outreach program, realized I'm not doing things the best that I could, so that got me back into grad school at Florida State University and had some great mentors down there. Dr. Vic Sampson and Sherry Sutherland, they were fantastic and brought me through and helped me understand how I can improve as an educator. And then, went from there, getting into the research and now here at GW.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Here's another one of these attempts at doing some, if not myth-busting, some myth adjustment.

JONATHON GROOMS:
All right.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Is it your experience when you walk into an American, let's say, elementary school classroom, are you seeing classrooms that look the same to you as the kind you were in as a kid?

JONATHON GROOMS:
No. There are differences for sure. There's group work. There's science that was happening. I reflect in elementary school. I don't really remember much of a science experience until a little bit later in fifth grade, there's a particular teacher, Mrs. Hills, that I remember and science was her thing. But before that-

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Where is Mrs. Hills today? Is she going hear to this?

JONATHON GROOMS:
I hope so. I hope so. Mrs. Rhonda Hills, you're awesome. It was a great experience. So yeah, it's different I would say. Science is happening. Not as much as we'd like it to. But I do think the classrooms are different.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Even more specifically, tell us about one of the places where you're currently really engaged. You don't have to name names.

JONATHON GROOMS:
We have quite a few partners across the district.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
It's the District of Columbia.

JONATHON GROOMS:
District of Columbia, right.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Our nation's capital.

JONATHON GROOMS:
All of our undergrads particular are out in the district in our partner schools. They're super eager to have us there. They're constantly reaching out, wanting our students to come and work in their classrooms to work with their elementary-aged students to give them these inquiry experiences, these hands-on activities, that they know are valuable for their students.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
DC is a complicated place. We've got all kinds of issues of inclusion, diversity, inequality, history of segregation. What are you finding when it comes to the STEM agenda in these kinds of places.

JONATHON GROOMS:
It's something that they want to promote obviously. And we're out in large minority populations, schools, students again, that are coming from a high-need background, underrepresented in STEM fields. And as we mentioned earlier, these students, they're curious. They want to learn this stuff and participate in these engaging STEM opportunities, so there's the emphasis there for them to get it. We're definitely encouraged by that.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I must say, that is encouraging because, without getting into any sort of sensitive political statements here, the general sense is that, right now, the appetite for science in the nation's capital isn't exactly at it's highest point. And it's nice to hear that the kids, in spite of all that, are still interested in the natural world and understanding the difference between opinions and facts and data and all of that.

JONATHON GROOMS:
The renewed push of having students engage in generating scientific arguments, thinking about data and evidence, is definitely something we need. It's not only important for them to understand science. But once they're out of the classroom, they need those skills and habits of mind, ways of thinking, that they can apply to issues that they run into at the societal level. They may not have to have a science way of explaining everything. But at least know and understand when it's important to use evidence-based decision making and bringing in the science as it's needed to help wrestle with some of these issues we face.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Is it fair to say that the improvement of science education requires, to some extent, a science of education?

JONATHON GROOMS:
Absolutely. It's not a matter of simply putting the information out there and letting the students absorb it. I think we've moved well past that line of thinking within the field, within education in general. So, it's really about thinking of how can we have students engage in these ideas and put things together for themselves in productive ways with the help of the educator.

JONATHON GROOMS:
And it's not this idea of having students construct their own ideas. Again, it's not new. But it's something that we have to keep pushing toward and keep figuring out how we can do it in better ways for different groups of students. Even as we move from classroom to classroom, school to school, the same lesson and activities is not going to be equally effective for a variety of reasons, more than we could get into. But we have to be mindful of that and we can't start to figure that out without doing this research and poking in various situation and seeing what comes of it.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
50 years ago, 40 years ago, I'm sure there were theories of teaching and learning which, today, are no longer as much accepted and respected.

JONATHON GROOMS:
I think one of the big things that we're trying to encourage, the thing about how do we get this out there to practitioners, is this idea that students have such a wealth of knowledge and ideas that they're coming into the classroom with. And perhaps for a long long while, we didn't maybe acknowledge that as explicitly as we could have or should have. So, there's definitely this effort to make sure that we're taking what students are coming in with and helping them to build upon that rather than just starting where we, as the teacher or the educator, think is the best place to start. So, remaining flexible and nimble in terms of the way that we present information, the way that we help students relate to the things that we want them to learn and making sure that we actually moving in directions that they want to head in terms of how they're thinking about topics as opposed to us having a predetermined path of how we're going to get from A to B within a school year within a lesson.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
If you think back 100 years ago or more, the basic idea was that people were born either with or without it and we were going to take the ones who had it and turn them into the great scientists and mathematicians and engineers. The ones who didn't have it, maybe we'd find something else interesting for them to do. All of that has evolved in part because of, I suppose, ideology but more so because of science.

JONATHON GROOMS:
Yeah, absolutely. This notion of with it or without it has changed. We all have these basic skills, abilities and ways of thinking and understanding about ideas. Those are the things that we want to foster and build on whereas maybe previously, you already had to have the idea, you had to have the end result to be recognized as "having it". Whereas now, the having it is more the ways that students think about information. And if we can foster their thinking, then the content, the specific factoids that maybe we want them to have, they'll follow. They'll figure those things out.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Undoubtedly, some of that is a function of where they grew up, how they're growing up, what kinds of influences they have a home. I suppose one of the big arguments in education policy generally today is the extent to which schools can be held responsible for compensating for all of the other things in society that put kids at disadvantage.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
You're working, for example, I think in Baltimore City which isn't exactly known as one of the most affluent communities in the United States. What's going on there?

JONATHON GROOMS:
I have a project with Baltimore City schools and partnership with the Cary Institute. We're working there to revise some of the things they're doing in their chemistry courses, to bring together chemistry and earth science to tricky areas to merge together. But we're trying to fill some of their practical needs to have students think about and wrestle with those two content areas. And it's challenging. That's a maybe over-simplistic way of saying it.

JONATHON GROOMS:
But there's definitely need in that community, in terms of thinking about the way that they engage students in learning science. As you mention, there's a lot of things going on in their lives that don't happen between the morning bell and the afternoon bell and figuring out ways to bring that productively into the classroom and tap into those experiences and provide science-learning experiences that are relevant to their context and their lived experiences is something that we're working on. We're trying to tap into that and make it useful.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Knowing how to be a chemist doesn't mean you're a good chemistry teacher. Being a good teacher without knowing any chemistry is going to make for other kinds of headaches. How are we finding the right balance here?

JONATHON GROOMS:
Right. You're accurate to poke on that. It's one thing to know the content of a particular course and even some of the general pedagogical ways that you can share information and engage students. I don't know. Unless you're in tune with where the students are coming from and the needs that they have, those other skills that you're bringing to the table as a teacher are less valuable.

JONATHON GROOMS:
So it's a tricky proposition because you don't want, in a teacher/prep situation, you don't want to promote stereotypical ways of thinking about a potential group of students that you may interact with later on. But I think it's one of the nice things about having so many partner schools here in DC, is that we can actually send our undergrads and grad students out to schools that are likely very different than the ones that they attended and interact with different groups of students, different populations and circumstances. Learn from the teachers that are successful at tapping into those connections and figure it out in that sort of way rather than me go into a classroom of undergrads and saying okay, this is going to work. This is your go-to move to engage these students because that's not accurate. It's disingenuous to try and think about it that way.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So learning is, to some extent, experiential and comparing future educators is in, at least the way we're doing, the way you're doing it and partly what's in our program here, is to emphasize the experiential side of becoming an educator. And there was something that you just said which triggered a reminder for me that many of our students who come to GW to become future teachers, they're going to go work in communities that plausibly are really quite different from the ones they, themselves, grew up in. So is that partly what you're finding, is this ability for us to go into these schools as a way to engage people with their future clientele so to speak?

JONATHON GROOMS:
Yeah. Absolutely. A former professor back at Florida State used the analogy fairly often lamenting some of the things we do in teacher programs about teaching somebody how to swim by standing on the bank. That's something that we've done a lot. You can describe what needs to be done and explain it and talk about it. But unless you actually get in there and start doing it, you're not really going to develop and understand it in the way that you need to to be successful.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I love that image of standing by the side of the pond or whatever and thinking that you can teach people how to swim just by lecturing them about right arm, left arm. And yet, even within rather more traditional settings, we're doing teacher preparation such as the Graduate School of Education. We are developing some innovations, both with respect to the content and the pacing.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
For example, I know you're very heavily involved in, what we call here at GW, TEACH. There is a basic theoretical idea there which is that undergraduates, some of them want to consider careers in teaching and we can make that possible in a somewhat accelerated intensified way.

JONATHON GROOMS:
Right. Yes, definitely proud of the program. It's a fairly new endeavor here at GW, so we're excited to be pushing the boundaries in that sort of way. We're able, following a model of UTeach that's been widely successful for a little over 20 years now.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
UTeach was invented at the University of Texas.

JONATHON GROOMS:
University of Texas. Absolutely.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So you've got that name UTeach. UTeach. Got it.

JONATHON GROOMS:
And that's a common theme in the various replication sites, putting your own twist on that. With GWTeach, we're recruiting these highly talented STEM majors, allowing them to complete their STEM major within four years that they would typically do. And then, finding creative ways to splice in education course work for them to think about how to marry these STEM content ideas that they're learning with some more of the pedagogical side of things, some of the more theoretical things related to education, so that within the four years, they're getting that STEM degree as well as being ready to become a teacher if that's what they choose to pursue.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
And now, of course, we've got something called STEAM. Is this another example of the American charming idea that you can have at all? Or is this one of those tensions that's going to actually dilute the great work going on in STEM and, for that matter, the great work going on in arts education?

JONATHON GROOMS:
I appreciate the STEAM, the bringing in of the arts. I think that there is room for everyone. I think it's important to really think about the articulation so that we don't necessarily have this tension in either direction, but more the pushing and pulling in the same direction. We want to try and move together.

JONATHON GROOMS:
I think of some of the science practices that I focus on. This idea of arguing from evidence is something that I encourage a lot with teachers and through research. When you take a step back and look at some of the things that we're asking our students to do in an English classroom or a social studies classroom or an Art class where they're painting or creating some sort of a product or artifact, we're asking them to do similar things. You can't talk about the role of a character in a book without having some evidence from actions that the character actually did in the book. You can't analyze a historical event without having the different contextual factors at play and trying to decide if one was more influential than another, so you're arguing in those contexts.

JONATHON GROOMS:
I think there are a lot of complimentary things going on in these different subject areas and the extent that we can tap into them is going to be useful for students across all of those areas.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Quick question on the business of boys and girls learning STEM. How are we doing on that?

JONATHON GROOMS:
We're still struggling. If you were to plot some lines, there's still a gap there. It's closing. Maybe not as quickly as we like. But I think that goes back to some things that we talked about earlier. This notion of having it or not having it. And we're trying to push back against that. There's no reason that any student, male/female, can't engage in science, learn science and STEM and be super successful at it, so I think there's still a bit of a mindset that needs to change there, but we're moving definitely in the right direction. Programs here at GW are fantastic and highly rated in terms of the women that they're bringing into their program and retaining in the engineering programs and things. So, we're pushing back against that notion. I think we're pushing back pretty hard and having some success.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Well, Jonathon, this has been wonderfully stimulating for me. I want to thank you for being with me on EdFix and I want to congratulate you on the work that you've done so far and look forward to continuing evidence of great things coming ahead.

JONATHON GROOMS:
Excellent. Well thanks for having me, Michael. I appreciate the conversation. It's been great.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
If you enjoyed today's conversation, download and be sure to review EdFix on iTunes. For more information about this podcast, our guests, future episodes, we have a website, go.gwu.edu/edfix. This is Michael Feuer and thank you for another wonderful episode with my guest Jonathon Grooms.

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