Dianne Christenson and Sarah Johns are outstanding educators who’ve both won the Prime Minister’s Science Teacher Award. At the national summit Science Education: Fit for Purpose they spoke from their day-to-day classroom experience about ways they’d found to render science education engaging, meaningful and relatable for learners.
“Curiosity is the key to building any student’s commitment to the learning. You can feel the shift when questions start to flow. Curiosity unlocks my learning and continues to shape my practice as much as what I’m trying to do with my learners. Curiosity is the key to unlocking learning potential for our tamariki and rangatahi, who are keen to seek out answers.”
Sarah Johns, Nelson Intermediate
“How do you foster curiosity? How do you celebrate innovation and how do you encourage your [learners] to take appropriate risks in their learning? What do I need to know? What do my kids need to know? How am I preparing them for the future?”
Dianne Christenson, Whareama School
With reference to the New Zealand Curriculum and the Teaching Council’s Our Code, Our Standards, the two showcased lesson plans that engage students with te taiao while building hands-on learning in the Nature of Science.
Prompting questions
- What are ways you develop curiosity in ākonga?
- Does curiosity feature in your life? How?
- How important do you think it is to provide opportunities for ākonga to just ask questions? To ponder or wonder about things? Even if the answers are not found.
Transcript
Dianne Christenson
Kia ora koutou.
Whakarongo ki te tangi a te manu
Tūī, tūi, tūītūiā
Kā tū te maunga o Waimimihā
Kā rere te awa o Whareama, te takiwa o Ngāti Hinepare
Ko Ngai Tūmapūhia-ā-rangi te hapū
Ko Tūmapūhia te marae
Ko Ngāti Kahungunu te iwi
Ko Tākitimu te waka
Ko Whareama te kura
Tihei mauri ora.
I greet you this morning with the pepeha of our kura, Whareama School. We’re a small rural school in the heart of the Eastern hills of the Wairarapa, and as I attempt to walk an authentic path as a teacher at Whareama, I’m having to learn about the maunga, the awa, the tūpuna, of this rohe.
From Tūmapūhia, our marae, we look east across Te Moana-nui-a-kiwa to the rising sun and at the moment to Matariki. It is a very beautiful place. And as a reasonably new teacher in the school, I need to put myself in the position of the learner that many of my students are in, to build that relationship.
Sarah Johns
Mōrena tātou.
Ko Sarah tōku ingoa
Nō Ingarangi ōku tīpuna
Kei te noho au ki Whakatū
Nō te kura Tuwaenga o Whakatū ahau.
Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.
I want to thank you heaps for creating space for us today to speak. I’ve been a science teacher for 25 years now and I remember starting as a 25-year-old in a classroom with 18-year-olds teaching biology, and was well out of my depth.
Without a word of a lie, though, I really love this profession. Don’t get me wrong, it is some days very tough and at the end of a term two I’m feeling the fatigue. But for me personally and professionally, it’s been full of challenge and reward.
This is a little bit of an illustration of some of the opportunities that have presented themselves to me as an educator, but also it’s contributed to who I am here today. And there’s a few people in the room that have been part of this journey as well. So I thank you for that.
So, the opening slide said ‘curiosity is key’. So, one of my biggest lessons I’ve learned is that curiosity is the key to building any students’ commitment to the learning, where they are motivated, make connections to the learning, and adopt a state of “I’m all in.” You can feel the shift when questions start to flow. Students theorise and begin to develop an understanding of what’s happening around them and at that point it’s my need to be responsive to this. I really enjoy the discursive nature of this type of classroom and I enjoy encouraging learners to think, make connections, be critical and go deeper and wider with the learning.
I’ve popped this slide in because as a teacher my touchstone is, of course, our New Zealand curriculum. The science curriculum has been a big part of my career in terms of shaping my teaching and learning. That sits on one shoulder. On the other shoulder sits this document. The values of our profession in terms of our codes and our standards embody highly effective methods and conditions for teaching that, if enacted, promote and empower all learners to know their worth, to develop their innate capabilities, skills, and a growing body of knowledge.
I’ve always had a drive to connect and build relationships with young people that are real, reliable and relational. Within the last 25 years of teaching, I now trust and understand that these conditions, along with carefully sequenced learning experiences, create rich learning environments that are humanising, and one which is safe for learners to take risks – a very necessary ingredient for our young people to learn.
In this slide I’ve written here, I plan and promote learning where ākonga engage an innate sense of wonder! So what I’d like to do now is just share a few experiences that I guess are just little nuggets of teaching and learning alongside Whaea Sarah. And I guess I use the analogy of, I use a lot of food analogies. It helps me to sort of get my ideas across.
I think of the teaching and learning experiences as a brown bread experience where it sustains learners and has a depth of learning and experiences that build knowledges and ways of thinking and connections to be made to develop decisions. And that brown bread experience will sustain them for a lot longer than a white bread experience, where they could be hungry within seconds, if it’s just based on the acquisition of knowledge.
I’ll admit to you when I am planning these days, sometimes I am – here’s another food analogy – preparing a meal for a 2-year-old. Like I’m grating the vegetables into meatballs to hide them. As a result, these students really do enjoy the meal. However, my responsibility is to then work back and unpack with the students what we’ve done together: make explicit links to what and how we’ve engaged with science related issues, the processes and the growing body of knowledge that we are developing, growing in order to make the informed decisions that we are developing.
In this photo, these students adopted a native tree at our local sanctuary. They had already explored the adaptations for seed dispersal and germination, its properties, and how it relates to the wider forest ecology. They are now collecting seeds for which they are growing seedlings in the various states of germination, in the fridge, in the greenhouse, and other areas around the school. As a result of this learning, they are really, really activated to develop a community-based native nursery.
Alongside this learning, we received our carbon footprint as a school. And I don’t know if many of the schools have had a look at theirs, but students and I sat down and we began to unpack the various illustrations of data that sat on this sheet. The information that we found out, we started to develop a lot of questions. Questions start to flow thick and fast, theorizing, and a few things which I really couldn’t answer.
We used the information to co-write a grant application using evidence of how a community native nursery could offset our carbon emissions. Except the kids said, “Do we just put the trees in the ground and that’s how we offset the emissions? What’s that got to do with …?”
And so then unpacking, What does it mean when you read a statement that you could plant 1,940 trees would offset your emissions? So there’s a lot of learning to be done in there, and that’s where the brown bread experience comes in.
So in their submission they had to illustrate a persuasive argument as to how or why this would benefit the community, including community collaborations, knowledge sharing, land stabilisation and increasing native corridors. This evidence-based persuasive writing and the estimated costs involved in the grant application were a rich experience for our learners.
This year we started the school by weaving together our programmes of learning to reflect the school’s values and the cultural narrative of Nelson Intermediate. Students were encouraged to explore significance of our landmarks, including Te Aorere Moana, which is a big part of our whānau houses.
We started the learning by connecting hands, heads and hearts to the water, discovering planktons, looking at the impact of humans on the surrounding area, and food webs. Students’ questions soon entered the room and this determined the trajectory of the lesson and the learning to go forward. Students were soon pushing to shape an appropriate design for an investigation they were keen to test their theories on. Designing plankton traps, classifying species and developing explanations for the data that they were collected was a big part of the work.
So often I don’t start with the answer in my classes, I start with the question. Steering student questions and mentoring discussions that encourage students to seek out their own answers, draw connections, bring in their prior knowledge, and allow them to build new knowledge together to test ideas, is actually really worth the effort. It surely beats a teacher-derived question that often has a yes or no answer, or what I’m seeing sometimes is just a shrug of the shoulders.
I also model what it is to be curious and am always learning alongside my students. So look at these beautiful kūmara. They are in the school’s māra kai. We harvested them last season. The season wasn’t so good. It’s a bit dry.
Last year students and I explored how the cultivation of land in Whakatū, approximately about 1,000 acres, was built up with ash, gravel, fine sands and silt, to raise soil temperatures in preparation for growing and harvesting kūmara. If we could harvest our kūmara, or plant our kūmara in September, October, we wouldn’t have to wait for November.
So the students were keen to explore this body of knowledge. We wanted to explore how changing the soil composition could influence the soil temperatures and the ability to act as a thermal mass. This therefore helped us to understand the properties and the practices of generations of Te Tau Ihu iwi who settled in Whakatū hundreds and hundreds of years ago. We grew the plants by propagating them, and in the meantime, we had thermometers, gathering data and developing our ideas before planting.
Opening my mind to acknowledge that solving problems using dual knowledge systems is absolutely necessary. This means for me to invest in making the most of the opportunities in my community. We need multiple ways of thinking, knowledge systems, and approaches to understand and respond to complex challenges, including climate change, food insecurity, biosecurity, health inequalities and inequities, poverty and much, much more.
Much of my personal and professional growth more recently has centered around better understanding, understanding both Indigenous knowledge and Western science and how they both have an authority, and my curiosity has led me to explore how this translates into how I teach science in my classroom.
And so if I come back to this document where I started [Our Code, Our Standards], you’ll see that there’s explicit expectations from educators in Aotearoa to understand the influence that they – I – have at shaping the futures of our tamariki and rangatahi. I’m very clear about my professional responsibility to ensure we demonstrate a commitment to tangata whenua and Te Tiriti o Waitangi; the partnerships that we have in this learning environment. I believe this can be achieved through remaining inquiring-minded and open to the learning.
Curiosity unlocks my learning and continues to shape my practice as much as what I’m trying to do with my learners. I’ve talked a lot about building curiosity for young people and allowing them to have a brown bread sandwich with their learning that will sustain them for long after they leave me.
Finding out who they are as young people in front of me – what their aspirations, interests and prior knowledge are; how they perceive themselves as learners – shapes my preparation. How do I create experiences and conditions that tap into those aspirations, that have relevance for them, that provide opportunities for them to strengthen their learning muscles and their dispositions, is my challenge.
Teaching through inquiry, or whatever model frames this for you, involves a constant cycle of me investigating student learning, thinking critically about the link between my action and the desired learning outcomes for them, is ongoing and informs my carefully sequenced practices that sit within the nimble nature of the learning that we’re doing.
I’ve got a couple of questions that I guess I’ll end with.
- When and how do you position yourself as a learner?
- How will curiosity find its way into your classroom next week?
And finally, I’m really grateful for all of the people that have travelled with me on this last 25 years of teaching. I didn’t think I could do it, and in the first three years I nearly folded because it really dismantled me and I had to put myself back together and move through this profession that’s sometimes really hard.
Curiosity is key. Curiosity unlocks my potential as a learner. It drives me to develop skills, knowledge, and to improve my teaching practice. Curiosity is the key to unlocking learning potential for our tamariki and rangatahi, who are keen to seek answers and who will be supported along the way to develop a range of learning competencies.
I would like to thank the Science Teaching Leadership Programme for their support and teach – in supporting my journey at a time when I needed support and clarity to develop our curriculum in our school and actually develop some belief in myself to lead a group of teachers towards that – their support was invaluable.
Any person who’s thinking about doing this programme, I would totally recommend it. The connections I’ve made with others that were learning with me at that time, I’m still very much in touch with them ten years on.
Nga mihi nui. Thank you so much for listening to that little portion of our presentation. I’m going to hand over to Di. Kia ora Di.
Dianne Christenson
Kia ora everyone. So last week I had a couple of the current STLP [Science Teaching Leadership Programme] teachers come and visit me at my kura. And I asked them, what do you want to hear next week? Because both Sarah and I were a little bit not quite sure what we’re going to do. And they said we want to hear your journey. So here’s part of my journey, guys.
For me I’ve been teaching a little while. And regular classroom teacher, things were going OK. But I wasn’t really 100% happy. I was team teaching with another woman at the time, we got on fabulously well, and I guess we both were feeling inquiring. We looked outside of our own school and our own classroom. We had a lot of disengaged learners and we just figured there was a way we could do things better.
So we came across Sugata Mitra, who won the TED prize for his school in the cloud. We watched the video, we started talking about it, and at one morning tea conversation our principal was sitting there and she was like, What are you going to do about it? And we were like, I don’t know. But he was going to be in Brisbane at a conference. So she had a sabbatical. So she sent us there. And we got to do a Master class with him. And probably the most impactful thing that has ever happened to me in my teaching is that she gave me permission to fail. And she said give it a try, see what happens if you fail, reflect on it and see what you – where you’ve gone wrong and how you can do better. That is so empowering and so freeing, and it’s a vision that I take with me into the classroom for my learners.
Next step we tried self-organised learning environments for a while. The first time way we tried it was I had three different groups of children for a session each day because of the way the school was split. After 10 weeks of that I was gone. I was exhausted, so that didn’t work. So we then changed it to, I’d have a group of students each term. They came from right across the school. They included some high achievers. They included some kids that were totally disengaged. And we worked with them to figure out what they thought the problems were in the school and how they thought we could deal with them.
So I think one of the first projects that I did was we built a garden shed because nobody was using the school garden because there was nowhere to store the equipment and it was placed all around the place and it was really annoying to go and find it if you wanted to go out into the garden. That project led to kids who were truants coming to school 7 o’clock in the morning, “Can we get into it? Can we get into it? Ah, that’s why you use measurement, because I’ve got to get the angles correct for joining up these pieces of lumber to build the shed.” It was really empowering.
That pushed me into the Science Teaching Leadership Programme. What that gave me was a group of new pedagogies, inspiration, and time. Time to think, time to plan, time to figure out this new way of teaching, not just for me but for my whole school. And it put me back into the role of a learner.
I think stepping back and opening yourself up to being a learner within your classroom is one of the most significant ways that you can appreciate both the barriers and the enablers that are there for the children that are sitting in that room with you, because they all have different ones. And if we can’t address them, it’s really difficult to make progress.
We may have seen this this morning: ka mua, ka muri.
So looking back through my journey on teaching science, how have I, or how am I, preparing my learners for their futures? The questions I asked myself:
- Have I situated the learning in a context where my kids are going to have some prior knowledge?
- Are they going to answer yes to the questions I’m asking them? Which are things like,
- Am I interested in this?
- Does this match what I see myself having a part of or being a part of in the future?
- Is it something I think I can handle?
- Do I believe in myself enough to step up, take a risk and give this project a try?
And I think those are really important questions for us as classroom teachers. So, is my learning going to be culturally and socially located to meet the needs of those kids that are in my class?
Koraunui School wasn’t my first school, but it was close to my first school. I went through and I looked at the strategic priorities that are in the Education Review Office report and in the documentation at Koraunui School, which are these ones that are up here on the board.
Teaching at that school was an absolute privilege. It was also a step into the unknown for me. I’m Pākehā, I grew up in in South Auckland, but you know, I was in a very protected environment myself and I didn’t have a lot of diversity in my life. So I moved to a school 80% Māori, and Pasifika students, bilingual unit. And I needed to step in to te ao Māori, both through learning language, and through attending wananga, to support me to build really strong relationships with my students. Because without those relationships I was going nowhere.
Doing that through a science lens really helped myself – but also the whole school – attain those strategic priorities.
So again, that question for all of you that are teachers in the room, even if you’re teaching adults, you know, how do you foster curiosity? How do you celebrate innovation and how do you encourage your kids, or your adults, to take appropriate risks in their learning?
A lot of the learning that we did at Koraunui School was situated around atua Māori. We developed knowledge-rich learning opportunities and conceptual understanding through multiple worldviews that situated learning in context where all the students could contribute prior knowledge.
The picture up here is our bioblitz bus. We got Curious Minds funding [from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment] to run a bioblitz. It was one of those insane projects that you say, “That sounds awesome!” and then you get to the reality of it and go, “Oh my God, hang on. I’ve got 400 kids coming. I’ve got eight schools involved and I’ve got about 80 scientists arriving for two or three days.”
But we had to go wide to engage everybody. It was STEAM. It was art. The bus we hired for the duration of the bioblitz, completely decorated by the kids. So we had the banners on the outside. The inside of the bus was filled with little kowhai flowers that the five year olds had made, with rata flowers, with posters of all the projects the kids had done in their prior learning about the species that at that time we knew about existed in Stokes Valley. But we were there to find more.
We spent the time going around Stokes Valley. The bus was available to the community and it was a hop on hop off, wave it down as you see it coming past, it’s going to stop. It’ll pick you up and you can go to any one of these activities that’s happening. It was amazing and it really celebrated not just for the children but for the whole community, a year’s worth of learning that had happened in our school. And everybody could see themselves in it and everybody could see that they were active participants in an amazing project.
Then I moved. Two and a half years ago: Whareama School. These are our strategic goals from my current school. A tiny little school, 50 students, three classrooms. It’s been a really interesting transition for me. Really small classes, really big opportunities to work in te taiao. Excellent support from whānau and local community.
But also some big challenges. Strongly farming community. When I first arrived it was like, “Oh, I’ve got a greenie living on the corner.” And challenging students, which is great. You know, I love it when students feel confident enough to say to me, “Are you telling me this?” or “Why are you telling me that, as farmers, we should do this?” and it’s not... I’m not telling you that. I’m asking us to find the evidence so we can look at what we do as a community. And decide if we’re doing the right thing or if we need to do some changes.
It’s been really empowering for me, but I think it’s also quite empowering for the students. The prior knowledge and experiences of these children is so far removed from that of the students at Koraunui as well, and that’s… our system is not equitable and it’s something that, as a community of educators, we need to address, and we need to change.
You know, we need kids in Stokes Valley to have the same opportunities as kids who live at Whareama and much of that comes down to funding.
OK, so how can I make science meaningful to my students? It’s building that relationship.
And I was lucky enough to be down in Christchurch a few weeks ago with quite a lot of the STLP people and Science Learning Hub and Lian Soh. And this one comment from him just has stuck with me. "Is this learning life worthy?" And that comes up to agency in the Anthropocene. That’s, what do I need to know? What do my kids need to know? How am I preparing them for the future?
So moving schools has helped me redefine my perceptions of a knowledge rich curriculum, and how science and social science overlap, and the importance of actually acknowledging and building into that overlap.
PISA. We’ve heard lots about it in the news late, lately. When we look at that as a teacher, what kinds of knowledge and content areas do we need to cover so that our students can approach those complex issues and, new word, polycrises, of the time?
I think contexts give real meaning to learning. They can help students move from personal to local to global issues, and they lay the foundations for systems thinking. And I think systems thinking is what kids in the future are going to need. I actually have hope of systems thinking and these kids that we’re moulding to take the reins of our country.
So science of learning tells us we’ve got to make connections between pieces of knowledge, and we have to revisit that knowledge many times so that we’re going to transfer it into our long term knowledge.
Experiences. Kids need experiences. For my teaching, I kind of go long. So I have a year long theme usually. And it’s changed a little bit, but last year all year we learned about flight. We did the physics of flight, we did natural flight, we looked at birds, we looked at insects, we started out with planes, we moved into rockets. That led us into learning about space.
Skills of science taught through science capabilities and the Western knowledge system, alongside mātauranga and an Indigenous system of knowledge, works well when you can, when you can showcase two-eyed seeing, I guess, or three-eyed seeing, depending on who is in your classroom.
Citizen science. It’s amazing. There are so many opportunities out there to contribute to online citizen science projects. Again, that helps widen the perspective for a child from a local opportunity to a national to a global.
Most of the citizen science projects that are online have really good educational resources and if you’re cheeky, as most teachers are, you actually e-mail in or dial in to whoever’s in charge of the project and ask them, “Hey, we’re doing this, we’re, we’re doing a study on Mars. I see you’ve got a project going. How would you feel about actually zooming in and talking to the kids?”
There’s been a few of us that have done a TLRI project on this. And those of us that have managed to actually get the scientists to either come into the classroom if it’s a New Zealand project, or zoom in from overseas, the kids – it’s real for the kids, and they step up and suddenly they want to be really authentic. They want their science to matter.
I really recommend that people just have a look at Zooniverse or Scistarter; Science Learning Hub has a really great page on online citizen science projects. It’s a fantastic way to add more into your science teaching.
Top of the list though, fun. These are kids. They need to have fun. But make that play purposeful. Make the learning enjoyable.
So beginning of the term, I ran a bubble festival at school. It was purposeful. That was guided by a lot of science learning and a lot of science opportunities and a lot of talk, you know, kids say, “Oh, why are we learning about bubbles? That’s for babies,” and it’s like “Actually, you know what? My husband works on bubbles in volcanoes. What about ice cores down in Antarctica? All those frozen bubbles.” And so building pictures with the kids.
We create shared experiences and we build strong foundations for kids to engage in learning.
But for me, having fun alongside my students, that’s my well-being. And as teachers, we need to look after our own well-being.
But then you get this, you get writing. It doesn’t always have to be scientific writing. We can do poetry. We can do letters to whoever we need to talk to about changing things that are happening in our community, but it inspires our writers in lots of different genres.
And it all results from engagement and curiosity. I have a project going at school currently which is kind of growing bigger and bigger, bigger, on katipō spiders. So katipō, we have at a beach maybe 15 kilometres from school, we have the largest number of recorded katipō spiders in the Greater Wellington region. They’re outstandingly beautiful. And so many people are scared of spiders. We’ve joined with Sustainable Wairarapa and we’re monitoring that katipō population.
Cyclone Gabrielle caused huge impacts in our area. And the katipō live in the back dune sequence at a beach area. There was enormous erosion with Cyclone Gabrielle and a storm that came a couple of weeks before Gabrielle. So the project’s gone from just monitoring a spider population to looking at, “Oh, why are we losing our dune sequences?”
We had six transects in Cyclone Gabrielle, four of them disappeared. Everything was just gone.
As a biodiversity project we monitor the population four times a year. At the moment we’ve just gone in and we’ve done a whole lot of measurement activities because we’re going to be putting new transects in. So we’re laying down the foundations, we’re laying the skills of what we have to do. We’re starting predator control because in a lot of our pitfall traps we’ll find mice, we’ve got hedgehogs there that we’ve gone through doing tracking tunnels, but we’ve also got a lot of endemic skinks, so we want to keep those going as well.
So now we’re looking at the causes of the erosion. We’re working with our local iwi and kaumatua, who come out with us, and trying to do that two eyed seeing. What’s the viewpoint from our kaumatua. What have they seen in the past? What are we seeing now? What can we all do about it? Do we want to do anything about it?
And as part of that, we’ve discovered that there is this funny little daytime moth that lives at Castle Point on one particular plant, autetanga. They think there’s only about fifty of those moths left. We only learned about this maybe a month ago. One of my girls lives on Castle Point Station and she was like, “I think I might have seen that plant, Whaea Di,” and I was like, “Oh, are you gonna go looking for it?” She went, “Yeah, OK, I’ll talk to mum.”
So on Mother’s Day, I get a text from her mum saying, “Right, we did the pig hunt this morning and now we’ve been out on the beach and here’s some photos. I think this is the plant that you’re looking for.” That’s authentic learning, and that’s a child who doubts herself all the time, and she’s making a huge contribution.
So our plan is we’ve now sourced fifty of these plants. We’re going to put those in in our little katipō spider sanctuary that we’re developing, and then hopefully eventually we’ll be able to translocate some of these moths down there.
If you’re in a classroom, use the groups that are there to help us, OK?
- Science Teaching Leadership Programme
- Science Learning Hub
- SAT STEP for those people that live in Christchurch
- NZASE
- Primary Science Educators
- Use your Connected journals
- Science Alive
- House of Science
- Use your local iwi and hapū if you can build a relationship with them.
And most of all, say yes to opportunities.They might be really scary. You might think, I don’t know why they’re choosing me, but sometimes step up and give it a go.
So thank you for the opportunity to speak today.
Ngā mihi nui kia koutou.
Acknowledgements
Dianne Christenson, Whareama School
Sarah Johns, Nelson Intermediate
Science Learning Hub Pokapū Akoranga Pūtaiao and Royal Society Te Apārangi