Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, November 11, 1994 TAG: 9411110054
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOEL TURNER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Must be a lab for high school or college students, you say. Guess again. Maybe middle school? Not quite.
It's a fifth-grade classroom at Oakland Elementary School in Roanoke. It's a hands-on learning environment, a place where children perform their own experiments.
By observing and doing, the students learn directly about the transformation of butterflies and other insects during their life cycles. They study magnets and devise ways to test them.
They take flowers apart to learn their parts and how they grow.
The students still have textbooks, but they are used mainly as reference materials.
"Rather than just reading something in a textbook, we do our own experiments and tests to see it directly," LeFever said.
Her teaching methods are designed to help foster more interest in science and math.
She is a participant in a program called Virginia Quality Education, or V-Quest for short, operated by the state Department of Education.
Funded with a grant from the National Science Foundation, the five-year project will train 1,200 elementary and middle school teachers in new instructional concepts and teaching techniques.
LeFever is one of six teachers In Roanoke who attended a two-week training session this summer to become a "lead teacher" in the V-Quest program. The lead teachers, in turn, work with other elementary and middle school teachers to improve math and science instruction.
Another Oakland teacher, Robi Sallee, also attended the training session and is working with other teachers. Sallee is a third-grade teacher.
Despite reforms in education in recent years, many math and science classes in elementary schools focus on drills and memorization.
Many children do not realize that scientists measure, experiment, analyze data and draw conclusions.
LeFever's teaching methods help the children make the conceptual link between math and science.
Carroll Smith, principal at Oakland, said LeFever brings subjects alive for the students and stimulates the children. "She's one of our best teachers." he said.
LeFever is not a traditional teacher who stands at the front of the classroom and lectures, Smith said. She organizes her classes so the students can discover truth and knowledge for themselves.
LeFever, who has been a teacher more than 20 years, said the V-Quest training confirmed some teaching approaches she has used for years and taught her some others.
"I've always wanted to do some things," she said, ``and this has been encouraging, to know they can be done.''
Smith said LeFever and Sallee have infected the whole school with their enthusiasm about the V-Quest project.
LeFever and Sallee also must attend monthly training sessions during the school year and a refresher course next summer.
LeFever requires her students to keep a log of their scientific experiments and tests. The students write reflections on what they have done and learned. This reinforces the findings and helps the children learn, she said.
Smith said the V-Quest techniques fit well with the discovery-oriented teaching and performance assessment method of grading at Oakland Elementary.
"We want the children to discover things for themselves rather than just reading it in a textbook," he said. "We assess students on performance, on how well they can perform skills."
Oakland has report cards like those at other schools, but it also uses the performance assessment system.
In addition to using the hands-on teaching method, LeFever organizes units of study around themes that cut across math, science and other subjects.
The theme of the latest study unit was "patterns" in science, math, music, poetry and other subjects. By focusing on patterns, the students learned the relationship among different subjects.
LeFever said her next unit of study will center on aviation and wars. She said the class will begin with Desert Storm and work backwards. She takes this approach so the students don't get bogged down in the Civil War.
When the Civil War comes up, LeFever said, it can take so much time that there is little left for the other conflicts.
Her hands-on approach also extends to reading, and she requires the students to keep a reading journal. It all fits into what she describes as the inquiry method of learning.
by CNB