When teacher Jodi
Green's fourth-grade students at North Laurel Elementary School in
Sussex County recite the Pledge of Allegiance, it's to a chorus - the
peeping of 30 new chicks and ducklings.
"We might as well
turn this into a chicken house," quipped Dylan Schockley, a 9-year-old
trying his best to be blasé about the babies, which on a recent
morning were hatching.
Peck by peck,
sometimes for hours, chicks worked free of their shells to be greeted
by awestruck children who hung a birth announcement on the classroom
door.
How chicks came
to be hatching in a downstate classroom is the story of how Delaware,
from its back country roads to its toughest urban classrooms, hatched
a world-class science education program.
"The curriculum
standards that were established ... are considered to be one of the
top three sets of science curriculum standards in the nation," said
Joseph Miller, a member of the National Science Board, which oversees
the National Academy of Sciences.
A former chief
technology officer at DuPont, Miller was co-chairman of Delaware's
Science Framework Commission. The group of teachers, college
instructors, scientists and business leaders was so determined to
improve science education in the state that, at one point, it had the
provost of MIT and other top scientists reviewing proposed
grade-school standards.
For the Laurel
youngsters to hatch chicks, it took 21 days in an incubator. For
Delaware to grow science standards and a curriculum, it has taken more
than a decade of labor. The framework commission was formed in 1992.
Today, the work
and the determination are paying off. State test scores in science are
steadily rising across all racial and income groups. Invaluable
lessons have been learned about school reform. And classrooms are
alive with wonder.
"We got to have
chicks and plant flowers," said Miya Newcomb, another Laurel
fourth-grader. "And we got to build a dam and build houses and we made
lights for the houses."
Hands-on
learning
Fourth-graders
build dams and stream tables to investigate the rate at which forces
change the earth. They electrify homemade doll houses to demonstrate
they understand energy and its effects.
Fifth-graders
study crayfish to understand the relationship of structure to
function. And second-graders - if they aren't studying the
relationship of fulcrum to beam on the playground seesaw - are busy
meeting state standards in earth science by identifying soil
components.
"If they do a
smear of the soil and see it comes out orange, they know it has clay
in it," explained Kathy Lynch, a North Laurel teacher. "It's amazing
what they learn."
Lynch said when
she began teaching 12 years ago, science was essentially tacked onto
other subjects such as math or reading. "And teachers had to go out
and get the materials," she said.
"Oh, it was
awful," Green said. "If you wanted to do an experiment, you had to
hunt down the material and by the time you found it all, you were too
tired to do anything."
Today, tons of
science teaching materials - each piece chosen for a specific grade
level and a specific curriculum - are packed in large, brightly
colored plastic crates and shipped to the state's K-8 teachers from a
vast warehouse in Smyrna called the John W. Collette Education Resource Center.
"It's been a
lifesaver for teachers," said Green, lifting the lid of a crate filled
with everything from batteries to seeds, materials that form the core
of Delaware's hands-on or kit-based approach to science education.
Book reading in
science doesn't inspire children to go on in the subject, said Joyce
Evans, a physicist turned learning specialist and program director at
the National Science Foundation, which gave Delaware $6.5 million to
build a science curriculum.
"One of the
things Delaware did was engage children in learning science," Evans
said. It's called an inquiry approach."
The aim is to
induct children into the scientific community, to teach them to
investigate, to seek answers to questions and record their findings,
which is why thousands of caterpillar larvae are sent into second
grades across the state each year so little scientists can study the
life cycle of butterflies.
"Children are
inherently curious," Evans said. "Now the secret to that is to
organize the learning environment. There has to be ... an effective
learning environment ... so it's not just activity for activity's
sake."
The organization
chores are left to the resource center run by the Delaware Science
Coalition, whose members are the state, its school districts and the
Delaware Foundation for Science and Mathematics Education, a nonprofit
group of local corporations that largely provides money to develop and
test new curriculum ideas. Each time a curriculum idea is piloted,
students are tested and the results assessed to determine its
effectiveness.
The plastic
science crates have come to be known as Smithsonian kits because the
state named its science program for the museum in Washington, D.C. But
the name is the only connection. Delaware's science standards and
curriculum are home-grown.
Keeping
commitment
Their development
started with then-Gov. Mike Castle wanting to reform education, said
Rachel Wood, who was a Delmar High School science teacher. Wood
co-chaired the framework commission with Miller and today oversees the
resource center and teacher training.
