Ursula Burns - a scientific experiment in the making

President Obama has selected Xerox Chief Executive Ursula Burns to help U.S. students improve upon mathematics, science, engineering, and technology skills. She will need to change the way the education business operates.

Here are a couple of suggestions related to science.

When it comes to science, as with most everything else, young children are naturally curious. But schools must overcome at least two hurdles if they hope to harness this curiosity and turn it into learning.

First, too much of science is read “about” in school rather than performed. Pictures in books are too often used to replace experiments and activity. We then require the students to write about what they observed (and supposedly learned), and as a result they learn to hate science.

Recently I substituted for a day in a middle school science classroom. The students were expected to speculate what a drop of food coloring would do when placed in a glass of cold water which was gradually being warmed. The experiment was meant to demonstrate the movement of warm to cold.

But the students had no idea as to what would happen. The book assumed the teacher would then perform the experiment, but I had not been provided any supplies for this and it was evident the teacher had no intention of performing the experiment.

The end result was never described in the book in any detail, and without actually witnessing the experiment myself, even I had difficulty explaining what the students should have seen!

The follow-up questions, which they were expected to write responses to, related to why such and such happened and why such and such did not happen.

There was no “Aha! Now I understand!” moment for the students. This was a total waste of time, even though I did my best to explain what I imagined might have occurred.

Reading about something provides one opportunity to learn, but experiencing an activity or experiment is in a completely different realm, and we should not substitute one for the other.

Second, if children are to learn about scientific principles, then elementary and middle school students must be provided science labs in which they can perform experiments, just as in high school and college.

As an elementary school teacher I had every intention of taking down the science module box from the top of the classroom coat closet. Sometimes I did.

But even then, with the tight schedule I had, when I came to school early and tried to set up the test tubes and clips and straws and rubber bands and whatever else we needed for that activity, invariably I had to go scrounging for missing equipment.

This usually meant that the experiment had to be performed in a limited fashion, without everyone being able to have “hands-on” for learning.

This is no way to teach science. How many elementary and middle school teachers can find the time and materials, especially with all of the pressure presently put upon boosting reading and mathematics scores, to actually perform the experiments described in their science books?

A few…..but not most. In the name of high reading test scores, our children’s education gets left behind.

We need a science lab in every school. With it should come an aide whose sole job it is to make certain all supplies are in-house and available to the teachers and their classrooms as they visit, or as they borrow them for the day to perform experiments in the classrooms.

I have no doubt that teachers will rise to the occasion and find ways to manage scientific study and investigation if they are provided the appropriate preparation and supplies.

Just providing every classroom with a very expensive box labeled “Science” is not the answer. We must do as high schools and colleges discovered long ago. We must help our children discover, through amply supplied and maintained science labs, how to perform scientific investigations.

The result will be that these students will come to realize that each day, each place in which we spend our time, wherever it might be, is a place of observation, discovery, and learning.

Science is happening all around us every moment. Ms. Burns' assignment, and the experiment in which she plays the role of a variable, is to help us realize that as a society, and as teachers, we must provide our children with the means to become aware of this.

The teaching of science, not just in word but in action, will give our students the experience required to step out beyond the school science lab, and come to recognize and appreciate the science going on about them every moment of every day in this ongoing experiment known as life on Earth.

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