A learning and Change Network in action

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Ask any student in Lorraine Field’s Year 2 class at Wakaraanga School about what happens if an egg is soaked in vinegar and they will fight to fill you in on every step of the process, why it happens and what it means. Lorraine has been advocating science in her classroom for years but now as a lead teacher in a science-focused Learning and Change Network (LCN), she, her students, and the school are intending to go “where no man (or woman!) has gone before” with their scientific exploration.

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Lorraine doesn’t have a science education background but she has always been passionate about the environment, and for as long as she can remember has found creepy crawlies and plant life fascinating. Lorraine was a natural choice, along with her colleague Katie Clay, to represent Wakaraanga School in the area-wide science cluster group and she has jumped in with both lab-shoes. This year, whilst running a unit on “kitchen chemistry,” Lorraine has lit a fire in her students that cannot be put out and this fire has continued through three terms. The kitchen chemistry unit took advantage of the student’s prior knowledge of and familiarity with kitchen products. Lorraine, a big fan of Steve Spangler, kick-started the journey using one of his experiments by asking the children what they thought would happen to an egg soaked in vinegar. She recorded their hypotheses and the children documented what happened to the egg and the shell, doing their own research to support their findings.

It was Lorraine’s next stage that allowed her Little Scientists to truly develop their investigative abilities. Lorraine explains: “It is really important to me that the children come up with their own things that they want to find out about, so we created a wonder wall where the children could write down their own ideas. They wanted to find out: would the bouncing egg work with other vinegars, would the eggs change colour if they added food colouring to the vinegar? The list was endless and is still very much a part of my weekly programme.” Luckily Wakaraanga School has its own chickens and an endless supply of eggs!

When experimenting with food colouring, the students discovered that even though the outside did change colour, the yolk remained yellow. They identified and discussed the protective layer. Why would it have this? What else is it stopping from getting to the yolk? Where else do you see this kind of defence? Did it apply to fruit? One girl soaked a lemon in milk for four days, hypothesising that you would get a milk flavoured lemon and lemon flavoured milk. Bravely Lorraine tested the milk and it did taste of lemon (amongst other things).

In the course of the unit the students gained an understanding of the chemistry required to be a great chef or wine maker (Heston Blumenthal eat your heart out). Effortlessly, the investigations also encompassed literacy tasks and numeracy questions such as “how long did the egg soak for? How much vinegar was needed? How high could the egg bounce? Plus the children practised the team work, self-management and persistence that are so important in science. Crucial to Wakaraanga’s science programme is that it is overt. Principal Brent Jenkins explains: “Our integrated curricula are probably to blame for dumbing down science and avoiding the explicit labelling of science or what aspect of an inquiry is science, and so that is one of the things we focus on.” This is in direct response to a survey conducted by the college in the LCN cluster. Their Year 9 and 10 students said that they knew nothing about science and had not studied science. However, when probed further, they did have a knowledge of science, they just did not realise it was science. This is one thing that the Bucklands Beach LCN is determined to change.

LCN, another acronym…

“A Learning and Change Network is a group of schools, kura and communities working together to grow capability to accelerate student achievement in a culturally intelligent way recognising the diversity of 21st century learning.” (Ministry of Education).

Tasked by the Ministry to look at supporting priority learners in science, the Bucklands Beach cluster includes five primary schools, two intermediates and two colleges. “We have known for some time that all schools, including ourselves, weren’t doing too well at science and we saw this as an opportunity to grow our own network in our own school, our own community and across the area”, details Brent. There is no funding attached to the LCN but there is access to support via the University of Auckland and to opportunities to learn from other LCNs.

The Bucklands Beach cluster began the process with a survey and this would be Brent’s recommendation to any school looking to develop their science programme. “Find out what the students think that they know about science, asking boys and girls separately. Boys seem to have a more upbeat view that they know a bit about science but worryingly the girls leaned more towards “we don’t know anything about science, it’s a boy thing”. Even boys and girls in the same class gave different answers, so it was entirely perception.”

Furthermore, survey the community. “We didn’t realise how many parents we had who were involved in science as a career. This includes water engineers, people dealing in air quality and lecturers at university. Some parents are doing scientific research related to developing products for the business world. And all are willing to come in and share, and of course are delighted at what the school has started.” The parental survey results were startling in their support for more emphasis on science. Lorraine explains”. Parents wanted to see more experiments and hands on activities. They wanted field trips, a more formalised structure or more time spent on science and more science projects for homework.”

Lastly, Brent advocates surveying your own staff. “Science is always mentioned in an integrated inquiry, but try to identify the amount of explicit teaching of science, and also ask about barriers”. Brent and Lorraine identify three barriers. Firstly, for many it is a perceived lack of resources which this school has countered by providing two fully stocked science trolleys, with two more planned.

Nothing can be removed from the science trolley to avoid creating another barrier, with equipment missing or broken. Instead Lorraine has developed additional bins with basic equipment to support a topic or inquiry that can be taken in lieu of the trolley.

Lorraine is also working with the company who developed the trolley to create bins to match each strand of the science curriculum. This means that the science trolley could be tailored for a team focusing on the material world or natural world.

Two other barriers are being addressed: time and teacher knowledge. At fortnightly meetings Lorraine, Katie and the whole staff share science ideas, integrating literacy and numeracy to counter arguments that there is no time for science due to the demands of other parts of the curricula. Teachers share example units with others and staff feedback on how it went and add their own ideas. Next year Lorraine and Katie will be supporting each team with their programme development and observing or taking classes to help each teacher integrate explicit science into their day to day classroom teaching.

To measure progress Brent describes how they “will report on science annually, as we do on literacy and numeracy, and see if we can improve the students’ perception and knowledge of science.” The school is now working through how to measure this progress, quantitatively and qualitatively. The LCN’s ultimate aim is to see scientific knowledge and passion for science flourish and the numbers studying science to Year 13 increase.

Over to the children

For Lorraine it is “all about giving the ownership back to children”. Children are naturally curious. What parent or teacher hasn’t struggled with the complexities of explaining how planes fly, how babies are made and what makes thunder, usually at the most inopportune time? Lorraine wants to nourish and not quash that curiosity, so time is made to take any questions seriously. Lorraine cites an example during news sharing, “One day a little girl showed the class a crystal that she had got from visiting Crystal Mountain in Auckland. This generated lots of questions…Where do you find them? What are they made from? Are they worth a lot of money? Another child shared their prior knowledge of an older sibling having grown some crystals. Then the children were asking if they could grow their own crystals and we have done just that, led by the children themselves.” Lorraine’s Year 2’s have done it in a way which shouts “this is science” from the roof tops but at the same time demonstrates admirably the practical use of science, not just the discipline of science. It is a hard middle

ground to reach, but the explanations and enthusiasm of these girls pictured leaves you with no doubt that Wakaraanga School will have some interesting data to share with schools across the country in the near future.

With thanks to Lorraine Field, Brent Jenkins and the Year 2 students at Wakaraanga School

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Jenny Barrett


enny is the CEO for Breathe Technology. Her enthusiasm for technology came when thrown in the deep end whilst teaching at a Taiwan high school. Jenny has since undertaken a Master’s of Education (Ed. Technology) and has supported classroom teachers to use educational technology in UK and NZ projects. www.breathetechnology.co.nz