Liesl Chatman

This is a terrific book not only for girls and science but for boys and most importantly for teachers and teacher librarians. Here a group of science teachers build a strong teaching model and then through dozens of stories, they reflect on the principles of the model they have created. Thus, the book is a giant professional learning community conversation that becomes a very realistic example of teachers reflecting and reflecting often about what is really going on in the teaching and learning of science by their students. No, the teacher librarian is not included as usual; neither is any other specialist in the school; however, if these voices were inserted into the conversations of an actual school, the conversation would be exponentially more powerful. The model these authors create is a powerful but simple one and fit very well into the broadened concerns of the AASL Learning Standards, 21st Century Learning Skills, and the NEtS Standards. Essentially, the model has three parts: Student Goals, Teaching Goals, and Science Goals. Student Goals consist of: confidence to explore, familiarity with tools, persistence through confusion, resilience to failure, and defending a position (one can see the correlations to the AASL standards here). Teaching goals include: encourage student voices, maintain high expectations, delegate responsibility, make equity explicit, reflect to improve practice. Science goals include: wonder about the natural world; do science to learn science; think critically, logically, and skeptically; use evidence to predict, explain, and model; build a community of scientists. One could create a simple model like this for any discipline at any grade level upon which to reflect as a community of professionals. For teacher librarians, this book demonstrates how the conversation evolves and demonstrates how we could fit in with powerful concerns of our own if we would just reach out and push ourselves into that conversation. A must read.… (more)