Lillian C. McDermott
4
History
3/15/10
Geballe), who would ask me to substitute for a faculty member.
Under such conditions,
the nepotism restriction could be suspended.
By Winter 1968 I was teaching part-time at
both universities.
At about this time, Arnold Arons left Amherst College to join the
faculty in the UW Physics Department.
Arnold wanted to develop a course to prepare
prospective elementary school teachers to teach physical science.
He had never taught
such a course before, but he had ideas on how it should be done.
By this time, good “hands-on” instructional materials were becoming available.
3
Several well-known physicists and other scientists were involved in their development.
They believed that use of the new curricula would generate enthusiasm and spark interest
in science.
Teachers could be trained in short workshops and continue learning along with
their students.
Arnold was convinced that teachers needed more intensive preparation.
By Autumn 1969 Arnold was teaching a new year-long physical science course for
preservice elementary school teachers.
4
Pat Autry (later Pat Heller at U. of Minnesota)
was an assistant instructor.
When hard economic times hit the Seattle area during the
aerospace recession (known locally as the “Boeing bust”), part-time faculty lost their jobs.
The tenured and tenure-track faculty did not. I soon was without a teaching position. A
billboard near the airport asked the last person leaving Seattle to “turn out the lights.”
Not
having a job was not my main concern because the children were still quite young.
I was
more worried that, if I did not keep active in physics, I would not be able to return to the
field.
I went to see Arnold and offered to work without salary if he would let me help
him.
I guess the offer was too good to refuse because my proposal was accepted.
Without
Mark’s enthusiastic support, this arrangement would not have been possible.
I taught in Arnold’s class as a volunteer and noted that he did not lecture.
5
Instead,
he engaged individual students in Socratic-style dialogues and listened to them carefully.
After determining where they were intellectually, he would ask a series of questions to
guide them to where they should be.
When I tried to do the same, I soon realized (to my
3
Among the NSF-funded elementary school curricula were
ESS (Elementary Science Study)
and
SCIS (Science Curriculum Improvement Study).
ESS
was developed at EDC (Education
Development Center, Newton, MA) and
SCIS
at U. of California, under leadership by R. Karplus.
4
The text initially used was
IPS Group of Education Development Center, Inc.
[U. Haber-Schaim
et
al
.]
College Introductory Physical Science
(Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969).
5
Besides myself, there was additional help from Jim Minstrell (then a high school physics teacher
(now at FACET Innovations) and Yehuda Shadmi (a visitor from Haifa University in Israel).
Lillian C. McDermott
5
History
3/15/10
chagrin) that the one who learns most from explanations by a teacher is the teacher, not
the student.
This perception set the tone for the type of
guided inquiry
that characterizes
instruction by our group today.
Unlike open-ended inquiry, which is often how we begin
instruction on a new topic, guided inquiry (as we interpret this term) is intended to help
students arrive at an understanding of a concept that physicists consider correct.
In 1970 I helped Arnold write a proposal to the National Science Foundation
(NSF) for a series of eight-week summer programs for inservice elementary school
teachers.
Along with our preservice courses, these would provide an environment for the
design of inquiry-oriented instruction.
Leonie K. Piternick (from the Biology Instructional
Program) and John P. Smith (from Science Education) were also included in the proposal.
When it was funded with Arnold as the Principal Investigator (PI), I became a grant-
supported, part-time Lecturer in Physics.
Arnold began to write
The Various Language.
6
Our first NSF summer program took place in 1971.
It provided instruction in
physical science and biology, guidance in the design of science lessons, and opportunities
to teach young volunteers.
(Among them were Melanie and Connie, who fondly recall
learning science in a way very different from their experience in elementary school.)
During the following academic year, I began developing a course for preservice
(prospective) high school teachers but open to other students as well.
The official
prerequisite was one year or more of standard physics courses, but I also admitted students
who had done well in the course for preservice elementary school teachers.
These
students had already adapted to learning by inquiry and resisted the tendency of their
classmates to treat physics as a collection of facts to be memorized and formulas to be
manipulated.
The combination of student populations worked well.
The course also
included a practice-teaching component (practicum), in which the preservice teachers
could teach a series of science lessons to elementary school students. I described the
combined physics course and practicum in an NSF report, which Arnold urged me to
submit as two papers to the
American Journal of Physics.
7
These were followed by
6
A. Arons,
The Various Language
(Oxford University Press, NY, 1977), a beautifully written book that
was later used in our courses for teachers.
(The title is from
Thanatopsis
by William Cullen Bryant.)
7
L.C. McDermott, “Combined physics course for future elementary and secondary school teachers,”
Am.
J. Phys.
42
(8), 668 (1974) and L.C. McDermott, “Practice-teaching program in physics for future
elementary school teachers,”
ibid.
42
(9), 737 (1974).
