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Background & Rationale Why An Emphasis on Modeling Professional Practice? Perhaps the most compelling and far-reaching discoveries made by many SYEFEST leaders was the importance and challenge of modeling professional practice in our work. This realization starts with an obvious one - that many, if not most, teachers will instruct their students in similar ways to what they experience as learners. If they are taught via short, hands-on activities, they are likely to teach that way; if they learned via lecture, then that technique might be more natural for them. But there is more to it than this, more dimensions than simply transferring activities from one context to another. Other considerations are also involved, such as the behaviors and attitudes teachers experience when they interact with their own instructors or leaders. Was the leader actively interested in the subject, was she a curious and critical thinker, did he focus on deep understanding or touch on many ideas quickly, did the leaders respect each other and appreciate the expertise each brought to the program? Thus, if you want teachers to learn (e.g., important ideas in ecology) or change (e.g., develop a new approach to teaching ecology) and not just to adopt a new activity, then you must teach the way you want them to teach. And this involves modeling at several levels:
In the Strategies section, we provide some concrete suggestions on how to be a positive and effective model in these different ways. Clearly, a crucial first step is to decide not only how you want to be a good model, but what you view as "good." This decision is based on deciding what standards for professional practice you wish to model? It is not surprising that these standards will bear a striking resemblance to the list of attributes you hope to nurture, develop, and support in your teacher participants. Thus, it is essential to spell these standards out and make them specific to your own practice.
What Is Involved in Modeling Professional Practice? In modeling professional practice as you lead your SYE Institute, you will find yourself grappling with some very critical tensions that face any teacher in creating a supportive and stimulating environment for learning. One of the most effective forms of modeling, in fact, is to share with your participants how you've thought about and sought to address these same tensions they face every day. These tensions include: Creating a safe and supportive atmosphere while pushing learners to and beyond the edge of learning. This is especially hard in science, where all understanding is socially constructed and where authority is socially defined. Thus, a group that hasn't chosen to open its knowledge-generating process to outside scientific authority can construct wrong interpretations of the world. It also comes up in terms of what kinds of assessment activities are included in a professional development program for teachers that doesn't involve grades and credit. For example, if you opt to leave assessment out of your SYE Institute completely, you are modeling instruction that does not focus on standards and does not provide feedback to the student or the leader. Using shortcuts effectively. Consider the question, "If your ideal practice for teachers working with their students is for them to craft a two week unit on a single topic, why aren't you modeling precisely that in your two week summer institute?" Surely, we hope that our teachers will be able to do and plan more with their students than precisely what they experience in the SYE Institute. But how much more, and how can we help them do this? Even more specifically, can we model this in our work with them, too? Teaching fewer topics in depth while satisfying diverse learners (teachers) with diverse needs. When we are enthusiastic about our subject and anxious for our students to learn, we have a tendency to try to cover too much, too quickly. Witness the statistic that the average high school biology text has more bolded words (important concepts) than students are expected to learn in the average high school foreign language class. Add to this the fact that you will be working with 10-15 teachers, each with their own personal interests and curricular needs and constraints. And yet we know from an abundance of research and practical experience in education that students - be they kindergartners or sixth grade teachers - learn best when fewer topics are explored in greater depth and from a diversity of angles or perspectives. How you resolve this tension in crafting your workshop will provide an extremely important model for your teachers in their work with kids. Addressing the conceptual and skills challenges specific to the subject matter while also addressing the teaching and learning challenges at hand. Teachers face this challenge all the time. They need to know about the subject at hand, and also about how their students learn. As is pointed out in many places in this Handbook, SYEFEST addressed this tension at the leadership level by working with teams comprised of a master teacher and a practicing ecologist as a co-leaders. Teachers, themselves, and many potential leaders of SYE Institutes, don't have this option. How can they effectively model respect and attention to both arenas in their work? This challenge involves striking a blend of the "interactive" and "expert" models of teacher professional development (Sprinthall et al., 1996) and can be achieved by forming communities of mutual respect based on the Lead Scientists' and Lead Teachers' different areas of expertise and experience. By seeing the Lead Teacher and Lead Scientist interact on equal ground, teachers can identify with the expertise that educators brought to the partnership. Maintaining a unified flow, atmosphere, and style while still taking advantage of a diversity of resource people. Again, teachers face this challenge all the time. The problems of multi-leader courses are legion, as are the difficulties of finding outside people whose teaching philosophy and approach coincide and yours, and to get them to actually do it the way you would like. When delving into topics in which they don't feel sufficiently well versed, all teachers look for outside "experts." You might choose to do this in your SYE Institute, too. Certainly, it is helpful for teachers to learn about specific resource people they can call on later. But how you make use of these people during your Institute can be as important as a model for bringing in outside people as it can be for the actual contact made.
What Is The Value of a Teacher/Scientist Team in Modeling Professional Practice? The first strategy described on the next page is to use a team leadership model in which a professional scientist and a practicing teacher are equal players throughout the planning and implementation of an Institute. We've included this strategy in Chapter 1 because:
In the leadership teams, the lead scientist's primary role is to stimulate and model scientific thinking and questioning. Through her or his example, gentle prodding and support, teachers are encouraged to develop their own ideas for schoolyard inquiries. The scientist continually reinforces the idea that the process of inquiring leads to the development of knowledge, and helps validate the importance of outdoor inquiry-based teaching. By interacting with a scientist, teachers' views of the nature of scientific knowledge grow from perceiving science as a rigid set of procedures and facts (Kennedy, 1991), to understanding that science is a discipline with uncertainties and room for human innovation and debate. One of the Lead Scientists articulated this goal in a discussion with teachers as follows: "Part of science is knowing and another part is questioning when we don't know things. It's like solving a mystery, collecting quality evidence. How we deal with the uncertainty is critical because knowledge is relative, and many questions can't be answered. Kids need to know this, to experience this, and be comfortable with this."
The Lead Teacher's role is to be a model for enthusiastic schoolyard inquiry. She or he helps teachers connect their experiences to the experiences of children and the realities of schools, and makes sure that the workshops are attuned to the needs and strengths of students and teachers. Having a local teacher co-lead the workshops also makes it possible to establish a connection to school districts' ongoing professional development plans. For example, the Oxford, GA SYEFEST site had been running natural history workshops for teachers for several years before adopting the leadership team model in 1996. Lead Ecologist Eloise Carter reflects:
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Teaching ideas or teaching applications, teaching inside or teaching outside. These are related tradeoffs or tensions. You want learning about ideas and the ability to apply ideas to the real world outside the classroom walls. You want learning about systems beyond the neighborhood, but about the neighborhood, too. The challenge comes in deciding how to mesh what can otherwise be conflicting goals.
We expected that teachers would gain greater insight into teaching schoolyard ecology by engaging in a knowledge construction process as a community along with scientists. Our intent was for each lead scientist to act as a true partner in knowledge development with workshop participants, rather than as a visiting specialist with a fount of knowledge. Yet the scientists did not downplay their expertise, especially given that many teachers were eager to tap their extensive knowledge. Indeed, their knowledge of local natural history and ecology was crucial to the success of the workshops.