The third-grade teacher grabbed Lynda Paznokas, pulled her face-to-face and said: “Don’t you ever stop doing this!”
The Department of Teaching and Learning’s annual science field day prompts the same kind of enthusiasm from the Washington State University students who participate as part of their science education methods class. The students plan, lead and analyze the day of outdoor lessons—getting the kind of hands-on experience they need to be successful teachers.
Happiest of all about the field day are the hundreds of Pullman-area third graders who get to peer through binoculars, look for animal footprints, and net insects in a stream at Whitman County’s Klemgard Park. Their thank-you notes convey their excitement: “My favorite part was making the bird’s nest …. My favorite part was going up the hill hiking… I found a real live snail! … My favorite part was everything!”
Paznokas, an associate professor and associate dean in the College of Education, launched the field day five years ago. “I was increasingly alarmed by the number of outdoor education programs that were being eliminated by budget cuts,” she said. “I wanted our pre-service teachers to be excited about outdoor ed. This is something that’s really important to me, personally.”
The field day project was launched with a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Bureau of Land Management, which was used to purchase such equipment as dip nets, binoculars and other equipment. The Boeing Company provides ongoing financial support.
The event takes place each spring in Klemgard Park, which is tucked into the rolling Palouse hills. The park has picnic shelters, a stream, a forest trail—in short, it’s the perfect place for lessons about soil, plants, water and animals. In 2007, 63 student teachers and with 240 third graders spread out across the terrain in sixteen different groups.
Organizing the event—from coordinating the date with schools to finding pipe cleaners for a science crafts project—is a big job. This year, it fell to adjunct faculty member Jim Williamson, a retired public school teacher who took over the WSU science methods course from Paznokas.
Most students in the science methods class are juniors. Williamson offered them advice on the lessons plans and displays that the students created for the day, and graded their assessments of how well those plans worked. He encouraged them to incorporate math and literacy lessons into the elementary science curriculum, and vice-versa.
“I told them that, with the current state of the environment, and the coming of global warming, environmental education is one of the most important topics you can teach,” he said.
As the field day approached, the students were often nervous about what might go wrong. Williamson’s response: “Nothing takes the place of being prepared.”
One thing Williamson does to prepare the students is to get them accustomed to handling creepy-crawly things. He’s well-known for the tanks full of crawdads he keeps in the science education classroom. That training may have paid off for student Shawn Foltz, whose field-day experience included calming a group of screaming kids after one of them spotted a garter snake.
Foltz learned that day how important it was to allow the kids to burn off energy and explore between lessons; how much kids like dissecting lima beans; and that one group of students will behave radically different from another—one quiet, the other rambunctious.
WSU student Holly Lyman decided, based on her field day experience, that the outdoor setting affected students’ attention span when it came to classifying plants and writing ideas in their science notebooks. “If were to do it all over again,” she reported, “I would not require them to do so much writing.” She also learned how best to keep those notebooks from flying away on a windy day.
Like her classmates, Mallory Fulton spent many hours finding age-appropriate lesson plans, reading them, and gathering the materials to carry them out. Among her take-home knowledge from the field day: “That lessons, or games, look much easier on paper, and that carrying them out perfectly is hard to do.”
From the WSU students’ perspective, the day is a chance for some independence. They aren’t in another teacher’s classroom, under someone else’s wing. These third graders are theirs for the day. They discover, sometimes to their astonishment, that the kids are as eager to learn as they are to teach.
“For most of these students, it was an extremely strong confidence-building activity,” said Williamson, who was pleased by what he heard and saw at Klemgard Park. “I told them, `After 30 years of teaching, I can tell when someone is struggling. And when I looked out at you, I saw teachers.’ ”
For more information, contact Julie Titone, director of communications, College of Education, 509-335-6850, or jtitone@wsu.edu.
