Interviewee: Dr. Kenneth Elliott, Researcher
Date: May 27th, 2016
Q: WHAT IS YOUR ROLE IN THE CHANTIER SEVEN PROJECT?
A: Well I guess I had kind of an oversight role in that I helped get a lot of people together. My experience had been with the school board, as a school board director, so I knew a lot of the people that might be interested in participating in this kind of examination of some really serious science education issues. And I recently completed a doctorate at McGill, and kind of got interested in the whole research into science education set of issues.
Q: HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN INVOLVED IN THE PROJECT?
A: Since it's inception. When was that? 2013.
Q: WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED FROM BEING INVOLVED IN THE PROJECT?
A: It's been very, very interesting making more concrete the difficulties that teachers have with getting to understand what their students know, before they get into the teaching of a particular subject or topic. It's sort of a basic principle of what's known as constructivism, which is students constructing their own knowledge and understanding. One of the key principles of it is understanding students' prior knowledge, and I think this project really tackles the issue of prior knowledge, prior conceptual understanding of scientific principles, and tackling the prior understanding issue really concretely. We're giving them a tool to really understand what their students' thinking is before teaching a particular subject.
Q: YOU SAID MAKING MORE CONCRETE THE DIFFICULTIES TEACHERS HAVE IN UNDERSTANDING THEIR STUDENTS' PRIOR KNOWLEDGE. COULD YOU GIVE ME A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE?
A: For example, a typical one would be understanding photosynthesis. So holding up a piece of wood and saying, "how come this wood has all this material in it? Where did it get it?" Something like that. And the students would typically respond, "well it came up through the roots, from the ground." So you devise a question which would ask something like that, and you give a bunch of answers. One of the answers would be sort of a photosynthesis type response. You know, the whole photosynthesis operation, the carbon dioxide through the leaves and blah, blah, blah. But you'd also offer a coming up from the roots. What we're trying to find is things that kids typically think. So we can't necessarily make that up. We might be able to through our own experience of teaching kids, but we need to really examine what the literature says. And there's lots out there that talks about student misconceptions, or as they put it, alternate conceptions. So we try to build in for each of the concepts that we're tackling, we try to build in what we know about what kids typically think about it, so that the teacher then can quickly give this question to their kids. Now whether the teacher says, "okay, here's a question, what do you think? A, B, C, D. Raise your hands." That could be one way. Or, what we've developed is an online tool where they can quickly all put their answers in and the software will crunch the numbers and the teacher will know immediately, "okay, fifteen of you think it comes up from the roots, ten of you think that it comes from the carbon dioxide, three of you think that it's part of the water." Whatever, you know? Fertilizer or whatever.
Q: YEAH. JUST TO MAKE SURE I UNDERSTAND, YOU FOUND THAT TEACHERS HAVE A DIFFICULTY IN NECESSARILY UNDERSTANDING STUDENTS' ALTERNATE CONCEPTIONS, AND YOU FOUND THROUGH THIS PROJECT THAT ENGAGING IN THIS TYPE OF INQUIRY IS AN EFFECTIVE MEANS OF GAUGING THAT PRIOR KNOLWEDGE?
A: Yeah, I'd say so. I think what I observed was, it was dawning on teachers as they struggle with... We had them look at all the various questions we had gleaned from various sources online, and the teachers went through those very thoroughly, and for each one of these questions, they were looking at what the conceptual understandings and misunderstandings involved in these questions were. So what I saw was them kind of developing it, "oh yeah, we've got to develop ways to divert them from here over to here." It was kind of, I think, a developmental process on the part of the teachers. It was for me too actually. Because typically I think that even though we know good teachers in all subjects try to figure out what their kids know before they teach. They'll ask all kinds of questions, "what do you know about the development of the railroad?" If they're not, they're very naive in thinking that they can just teach from scratch. So a good teacher is doing that all the time, but I think this gives a method of doing it, and a real direction. They don't have to waste their time thinking up what the kids might think, they can figure that out by the data they get from this diagnostic instrument.
Q: IN OTHER WORDS, INQUIRY WAS ALWAYS INTEGRAL BUT THIS TOOL PROVIDES KIND OF A FRAMEWORK FOR TEACHERS TO ENGAGE IN THAT INQUIRY?
A: That's right, yeah. There is one thing that I should add though, that the research that's being done over at UQAM, and in many other places, will tell you that misconceptions are very tenacious. So you can't just say, "oh no, it's not that, it's this." That's not going to work. You have to understand that the kids have these misconceptions, they've picked up these alternate conceptions somewhere. Maybe from at home, maybe just by their own intuitive observations, but they've got them, and they're not going to disappear like that. So the job of the teacher now is to develop activities that are going to be very convincing, and unfortunately, they're not always going to work. Part of the job here is that you're going to pre-test and you're going to post-test. And to many teachers' dismay, they post-test, and they find that they still think the same thing. So that's the challenge.
Q: YEAH, CERTAINLY. ALRIGHT. MY NEXT QUESTION IS, IN YOUR VIEW, WHAT IS THE NEXT STEP FOR UNIVERSITY PARTNERS TO SUPPORT TEACHERS IN THEIR PRACTICE?
A: Well I guess if university is where teachers are - pre-service teachers - are learning the trade, I guess part of the instruction should be this conceptual understanding bit; that you've got to work on conceptual understanding and misunderstanding. You've got to take the bull by the horns on that, rather than assume you can just teach a lesson from scratch. You know, "turn to page thirty-five and let's do this lesson on photosynthesis." You've got to have a better background understanding of what your children are already thinking about it.
Q: WHAT ARE SOME OF THE ISSUES TEACHERS FACE WHILE TEACHING SCIENCE?
A: Well, I think... This takes me back to one of my problems with science teaching and learning. This will get me to the answer to that, but when kids are really young - say, elementary school, primary school - the world is a fascinating place. Any little science activities that teachers do, the kids are bright-eyed, and they're anxious to take apart those leaves, or whatever the activity happens to be. But then it seems to me, what I don't understand, what I've never understood, is why something which seems to me so intrinsically fascinating, namely the world around us...how is it that by the time they get to senior high school, very few people want to take science? They don't like it, they get defeated by it in so many cases, and the number of people that graduate with a good science background from high school seems to be diminishing. So I think that's the big challenge. And the challenge is to keep kids interested, successful, engaged. Science has to talk to them. Science has to be part of their real life, not just some theoretical, distant concept that they really can't identify with as meaning something to them. So I think that's the biggest challenge, is to make science meaningful, personally, to students. They have to take it as something, "this means something to me personally," rather than just an obstacle to getting a high school diploma. And then, okay, how do you do that? That's the next question. And how do you make it significant for them? And how do you present these concepts in a way that's going to ensure more success. I think this project is part of that whole process. I don't think it's the answer, but it's one of those pieces that I think has to fit better into the puzzle.
Q: THANK YOU. NOW HAVING GONE THROUGH ALL THE QUESTIONS, IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU'D LIKE TO ADD? ANYTHING YOU WANT TO SAY BEFORE WE CONCLUDE THE INTERVIEW?
A: I think that with all the digressions that I've made, I've included most of the things I think of. What else do I think when I talk to other people about it? I'm a great believer in teachers and their devotion to... I'm talking about science teachers. Teaching science is a tough job. It takes a lot of dedication to really bring it alive, and to make it meaningful. I've met a lot of science teachers over the years, and especially in the last few years, that are very dedicated to trying to make science teaching more meaningful and more successful. I think if they buy into a tool like this or a process like this, it doesn't have to be our tool, but the process of being really aware of students' conceptions and pre-conceptions, and how powerful they are, and how difficult they are to modify, I think then we're maybe getting somewhere. If we can get people to understand this better, and not only to get them to understand it better, but then provide them with the tools to make it a little easier.
Q: GREAT. WELL THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR TIME.