GE’s hands-on education push

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- So this is what science class is supposed to be like.

A goggle-clad Dakota McKinley and three other classmates huddled around a large table, taking turns blowing into plastic straws in small beakers filled with lime- water.

If everything worked as it should, the carbon dioxide emitted when the would-be scientists exhaled would break the limewater -- a mixture of water and calcium hydroxide -- into two components: water and chalk.

McKinley puffed her cheeks, blew, and hunched over the beaker, watching and waiting for the solution to turn a cloudy white.

The 13-year-old, now a seventh-grader at Noe Middle School here, used to struggle in science class, lost in the complexities of the periodic table and the life cycle of the caterpillar.

But thanks to new hands-on science kits now in every elementary and middle school in Louisville, she finally gets it.

"You can experience it yourself instead of just watching the teacher" or reading a textbook, McKinley said and smiled. "You see how things work."

The kits -- essentially large heavy-duty plastic bins filled with everything necessary to conduct science experiments -- are the most visible way in which a five-year, $25 million College Bound grant from the GE Foundation is helping transform classrooms in Louisville's Jefferson County Public School District.

A similar revolution is beginning nearly 450 miles away in the Erie School District, where administrators and teachers are examining how to put their own $15 million College Bound grant to use.

The grant, aimed at boosting math and science achievement and increasing college enrollment rates, has put more calculators and microscopes in Louisville classrooms and helped train more teachers.

It has helped that district introduce a uniform science curriculum at each of its 89 elementary and 24 middle schools, replacing a fractured and sometimes chaotic system in which different texts and lesson plans were used at different schools.

And, beyond the dollars, it has given the district access to the resources and brainpower of a global giant in GE.

The future, in a box

The future of education in the Jefferson County Public School District begins in a 70,000-square-foot warehouse in south-central Louisville.

It's here, in a vast shell of a building that used to house district office and classroom materials, where six district employees assemble, store and refurbish the hands-on science kits that are a centerpiece of the Louisville grant.

Inside, imposing 12-foot-tall, green metal shelving units are stacked high with an eclectic jumble of supplies: shampoo, baking powder, cotton swabs, scissors, toothpicks, plastic wrap, string, brown paper bags, even toilet paper.

When packaged together in traceable, bar-coded bins for units on Earth history or insects or plants, even random household items become the stuff of science.

One corner of the warehouse is reserved for the wood pallets that hold crates filled with packaged vermiculite, small pebbles, silt and gravel. The sixth-grade Earth history unit alone requires eight different types of sand. Students in every grade except second and eighth also use live insects, animals and microbes -- think chameleons, protozoa, Madagascar hissing cockroaches -- that are shipped directly to the schools.

Dennis Wiseman, a former teacher who now works at the warehouse as a liaison between the kit vendors, the schools and the district's curriculum office, knows where every plastic ball and measuring spoon can be found. He navigates the rows with the same rote memory that students use to recall the date of Columbus' voyage.

The impact of the hands-on kits is nothing short of "amazing," Wiseman said.

"This is the best way to teach science," he said. "This is the way I taught science. My class looked like a miniature zoo. Many teachers will tell you that the kids who are marginal students, when it comes to science, they're excited to do well. They're interested."

The district so far has spent about $9 million of its grant on the kits and another $3 million on the same kind of "inquiry-based" curriculum for middle school math that relies on collaboration, critical thinking, and independent problem solving.

Before the grant, the district had only about half the science kits it needed, so kits were rotated among the elementary schools -- a system that made for a lot of confusion. A student moving from one school to another inside the district, as 300 students do each day, might find that his old teacher had covered that subject or that he was already far behind.

Without the grant, instruction at many of the elementary schools and all of the middle schools would still be textbook-based, district science specialist Lee Ann Nickerson said.

"Textbooks and chalkboards aren't working," Nickerson said. "Now we finally have a curriculum that allows kids to get excited about learning science."

A new kind of classroom

At Farnsley Middle School, a 15-minute drive from where McKinley was experimenting with limewater, sixth-grader Gabriel Buehner was peering through a small glass lens at rock samples that represent the type of rocks found in the Grand Canyon.

After scribbling down a few observations about the stone's color and texture, he adjusted his goggles, grabbed a bottle of weak hydrochloric acid, and squeezed one drop onto the rock.

Buehner's eyes grew large as the acid started to fizz, a reaction to the calcite in the limestone.

"That one really bubbled," the 11-year-old said and smiled.

Science is interesting and easier to comprehend when you can use your hands, Buehner said.

His partner, 13-year-old Brandon Maynard, had a more succinct review of learning by doing: "It's funner."

Back at Noe, students in Steve Weber's seventh-grade math class learn about linear equations by recording their walking speeds and distances on graphs.

Earlier in the year, they learned how to gather and analyze data by studying the color of M&Ms.

Verdict: No discernable pattern, but the candy was yummy.

"We're not always taking notes and we get to work independently," Kristen Hale, 12, said of the hands-on approach to math afforded by the grant. "We're actually solving problems and seeing how things work. It's an easier way to learn because we're actually doing."

Weber has seen countless light bulb moments, those sudden flashes of understanding that tell him his students are truly getting it, and he credits the hands-on curriculum. Grades have gone up and students are more engaged in math than ever before, he said.

"Parents have told me that students who used to struggle with math are now enjoying themselves," Weber said. "They don't mind it now."

Feedback like that has convinced Weber that the "inquiry-based" approach is the right approach, but district administrators admit the transition hasn't been easy for all of the district's 5,700 teachers.

"It's overwhelming," Kim Goff, the district's project manager for the grant, said of the hands-on curriculum. "It doesn't matter if you're a new teacher or a 25-year vet, you're going to struggle. This grant isn't about buying new books. It's about changing (how we teach)."

Teachers who have spent their careers relying on the textbook-and-chalkboard approach face a steep learning curve -- and a lot of work, Noe Principal Kathleen Sayre said.

"In the past our teachers might have done one (science) experiment a week," Sayre said. "Now it's one almost every day. It's exhausting. It's not like just handing out a worksheet and saying, 'Do these five questions.' You've got to know what's going on and be involved. Some teachers are better at it than others."

Success story?

Anecdotally, math and science teachers say the grant has been a success: Grades are going up, class participation is going up, students are more engaged and interested.

But administrators are still a couple of years from having enough hard data to study any trends in math and science scores or in college enrollment.

"What I saw in my previous district was that it took time" to see real, measurable results, said district Superintendent Sheldon Berman, who instituted the same inquiry-based math and science curriculum now seen in Louisville classrooms while leading the Hudson School District in Hudson, Mass., from 1993 to 2007.

District administrators in Hudson developed their own version of the TIMS test, an international test on math and science, to judge student performance year-to-year, Berman said.

"Over time we saw absolutely profound results as students came up through the system. ... Consistently, year after year, not only were we improving but we were scoring above the top countries in the world," Berman said.

For now, though, Nickerson, the district's science specialist, is happy to focus on her Happy Wall.

It's there, in letters tacked and taped to one wall in her office in the district administration building, that she finds all the proof she needs that the grant is working.

"One of the things we did this year in science that I lov