(Vol. 3, No. 1 - Spring 1999)


Janet Seibert:
High Standards 'High-Jinks'
Make Learning Science a Ball

Hands-on, performance based science helps eighth graders get ready for high school, says Noe's Janet Seibert, whose students never know how they're going to learn something -- only that it will be interesting!



By Anne C. Lewis

It's almost the end of the school year, and Janet Seibert's eighth-grade science students, just a few weeks from moving on to senior high, are playing with small toys in her classroom. They are bouncing different kinds of balls, dropping other objects onto desks, pushing and pulling tops, and having great fun comparing their toys' performance with others.

Seibert's lively crew may appear to have a serious case of end-of-school high-jinks, but she is actually preparing them for the physics content standards they will encounter in ninth grade. This is her way of introducing them to Newton's laws of physics and such concepts as momentum, gravity, friction, motion and acceleration.

All year long, Seibert's students at Noe Middle School have never known exactly how they were going to learn something. But they could count on it being interesting. And they absolutely always knew what standards they were studying. Whether it was measuring energy from different wattage light bulbs, calculating how weight and wingspread affect the distance traveled by paper airplanes, or determining the nutrients in samples of Ohio River water Seibert collected on the way to school, her students could link the projects to science concepts. At the beginning of a unit, everything was laid out clearly. They had the standards; the rubrics and scoring guides (how they had to perform to earn certain grades); the steps in the scientific process; the materials required; and the deadlines.

This is largely because their teacher, like a piece of litmus paper, absorbs whatever affects her work in the classroom. An experienced teacher who moved from parochial to public schools four years ago, Seibert says she came into Noe Middle School with a good foundation in science knowledge, but it is her nature "to get involved" and keep learning.

At her old school, for example, Seibert found she was the only teacher familiar with Kentucky's "Transformations" document -- the state's first attempt to spell out standards for public schools in different subject areas. She was quick to appropriate the information for her own use.

So Seibert came to Noe prepared to be a learner. She quickly became a "cadre" teacher -- joining a districtwide team of middle grades teachers selected to learn the details of Jefferson County's new academic standards system and help teachers in her school create standards-based lessons. She's also among a group of teachers piloting units created by the Science and Education for Public Understanding Program (SEPUP), a project of the Lawrence Hall of Science at Berkeley, California.

Seibert also participates in the district's Comprehensive Program for Minority Student Achievement, funded by the National Science Foundation to encourage minorities to prepare for science and math careers. She is "most thrilled" with being a mentor for beginning teachers. The assignment means she spends 20 hours of observation and model-teaching in a new teacher's classroom each year and devotes 50 hours to coaching and advising outside the classroom.

Seibert's own research on national and state standards gives her a perspective that she weaves into everyday teaching. She prefers the national science standards and recognizes their heavy influence on the development of standards at the state and district levels. She understands the sources of science concepts in the SEPUP curriculum and calculates that if they are taught appropriately, they will match the district's content and performance standards.

Students hear "the language of standards"

Seibert's students hear the language of standards all the time. At one point this year, she read portions of the national science standards for their grade level to her eighth-graders, then asked: "Have we done any of these?" They checked off many. they had designed a scientific experiment, used appropriate tools to gather and analyze data, developed descriptive models using evidence; and made connections between evidence and information.

In her pleasantly messy classroom, content standards are posted prominently. Performance standards are attached to student work everywhere. Students usually work in groups with hands-on experiments in every unit. Seibert limits her lecturing, preferring for students to discover information on their own. She moves around the room constantly to every group of students, always pushing them further, never telling them they are wrong. Instead, she will say: "You might want to consider this," or "Ask me any question," or "Remember what problem we are trying to investigate."

"Challenge Your Mind" questions on the bulletin board offer students random ideas to explore for extra credit. They might investigate, for example, how detergent helps remove grease from clothes, or how the strong scent of a flower benefits a plant or determine which season produces the most thunderstorms and why. When the school board voted against a later start time for secondary students because of opposition from parents, she urged her students to write letters to the newspaper based on their own research in the scientific literature. "You have the scientific evidence," she said. "Teens need sleep and are more alert later in the day."

The experience with SEPUP especially excites Seibert, who genuinely likes to work with colleagues. The five teachers in the pilot project bring student work to meetings, grade it, "and argue over it," she says. They fax results to each other frequently, comparing notes on which of the five scoring guides that are part of the project is best for an assignment (see an example of one scoring guide on p. X).

Students learn a lot from the SEPUP units, Seibert says, because they grade each other's work according to the scoring guides. Combined with the professional development offered by Noe on meeting standards and developing performance tasks, Seibert has learned "a tremendous lot about science education" since she came to the school. She adds, however, that "I've learned you also have to take the initiative."

Preparing students for high school science

As an eighth-grade teacher, Seibert finds herself in a challenging situation. Because the state has moved its science assessment from eighth to seventh grade, students are rushed through science content in the sixth and seventh grades. This extreme focus on science facts reduces the amount of time younger middle schoolers can spend doing scientific investigations and learning through "hands-on" experiences. While some students coming into the middle grades "had great science preparation, others never even used a microscope," she explains. "If teachers are so scared about covering all the content," she wonders, "are children really learning science?"

In an effort to help make up for these differences in the opportunity to learn scientific methods and procedures -- and to make sure her students are ready for high school science -- Seibert leans heavily on teaching and learning strategies that require student to apply the facts they have learned to solve problems and develop "scientific thinking."

Although Noe houses a districtwide gifted program, Seibert prefers "blended" or heterogeneous classes to classes that are heavily tracked by ability or achievement levels. Frankly, she says, it is just more interesting to her to have students with many different abilities in her classes -- and she believes they all learn more as a result. If Seibert does wind up with an advanced class, she uses their responses to the material to inform her teaching in other classes.

There's another thing students learn in Seibert's classroom: Here is a teacher who refuses to ignore or give up on any of them. She is "Mom" to many of her students because she listens to their personal stories, gives them encouragement, prefers to hand out incompletes with deadlines rather than fail students, and never berates a student in class even though she is frustrated at the lack of will among some students. "They know a lot more than they are willing to share," she says.

Seibert believes standards-based teaching is significantly changing student learning. As a result of standards, "they see other students' best work, and they want to do the same," she says. "Students also can organize their thoughts better and are more skilled at writing them down."

Ever the learner, Seibert found a new interest this year. One of her students is deaf and is assisted by an interpreter, but her teacher watches the girl's face and guesses what she is asking or saying. After working with the deaf student for a few months, Janet Seibert -- as usual -- took action. She decided she would learn sign language herself. As she says, "sometimes you just have to take the initiative."



-----------------------------------------
Janet Seibert's standards-based teaching strategies are featured in Anne C. Lewis' new book, Figuring It Out: Standards-Based Reforms in Urban Middle Grades. (Fall 1999). Lewis writes about education for many national publications and is a regular columnist for KAPPAN, the U.S.'s most widely read education magazine.

To see illustrated examples of Seibert's standards, rubrics, and performance tasks -- and a sample of student work -- download the latest issue of Changing Schools in Louisville .