Ana26 Pre-Con Podcast: Preparing Students for the "Wicked Problems" of the Future

This episode of NSTA Voices is part of the NSTA Anaheim Pre-Conference Series.

In this episode, NSTA President-elect Donna Governor discusses the urgent shift needed to move science education into a "future-ready" era. Drawing from a career that spans 40 years - ranging from the days of five-inch floppy disks to the age of AI—Donna explains why science must be more than a 20-minute-a-day afterthought or a reading comprehension exercise. She explores the concept of "wicked problems" - complex, global challenges like climate change and energy - that require students to move beyond academic silos and embrace transdisciplinary systems thinking. Tune in to hear how educators can support student-centered inquiry and iteration to ensure the next generation is truly prepared for the world they will inherit.

Transcript

Andrew 0:00

Patrice, we've got a great show today. We're not only talking about where we are now for science, but we're talking about where we are headed. In the words of Wayne Gretzky, we're not skating to where the puck is. We need to skate to where the puck is going. So this is a forward-facing podcast episode. And we have with us a guest that has so many titles that I'm just going to say their name and then let them talk about themselves.

Patrice 0:24

So we're a very accomplished human, then.

Andrew 0:27

Yes. Yes. We have with us Donna Governor. Welcome to NSDA Voices, Donna. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. Would you mind sharing who is Donna Governor with our audience so that they have a good idea of who we're talking to on the show?

Donna 0:42

I am a classroom teacher by nature and by heart and by history. I've been teaching for this is year 42 for me. The first 32 were in the classroom. I started off as a kindergarten teacher, ended up teaching all the way through elementary school and spent 15 years in elementary school. I ended up then moving to middle school, teaching four years in an integrated curriculum, a magnet school. I'd spent another 10 teaching in gifted science classroom, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade middle school. And then I spent three years teaching high school, Earth, and environmental and AP environmental science. So my teaching background runs the whole gamut. I spent the last 10 years working with pre-service and in-service teachers in my role as a professor of science education at the University of North Georgia. I've also written a couple books and gotten a couple of awards, the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science Teaching. And let me see, I was president of the Georgia Science Teachers Association a few years back. That's who I am. And now you're president-elect of NSTA. Now I'm president-elective NSTA, which is a great honor to be able to serve the organization in this way. NSTA has been a real important part of my path as an educator. My first conference was in 1988 when I was teaching kindergarten. And I fell in love with all the science activities that I could take back to my students in the classroom. And so by the mid-90s, I was attending NSTA conferences regularly, loved getting my monthly journal, which um, you know, which I had all sorts of teaching ideas. And I still use some of the ideas from the monthly journal in my classrooms, but now at the university level, as I prepare future teachers. So been active with NSTA as a district director starting in 2013, and then was the pre-service division director starting in 2020. And last year I decided to throw my hat into this ring, and here I am, president-elect now. Exciting.

Andrew 2:39

Donna, when you said 1988 as your first conference, it made me think, wow, what did the world look like in 1988 compared to what it looks like now? Even things that we talked about, things that were thought about, or even priorities, or how we lived our lives. And so much has changed in that almost 40 years since your first conference. I'm wondering from your perspective and your experience in education, what are some of the changes that you've seen that have taken place during that time?

Donna 3:08

Goodness. Education doesn't look anything really like what it did 40 years ago. Instead of teaching reading, I taught them writing. So encoding, in order to learn letters and sounds and words, it's if you look at Bloom's taxonomy, it's much higher, right? Encoding is the application. So we taught them through something called writing workshop every day. And I was teaching kindergarten. So, you know, literacy is a big part of that, and reading and writing skills, basic skills. And so we did a lot of that, and of course, a lot of language experience where we would have experiences, many of them science-based. And then we would read and write about that. We would read stories aloud. We would have them do their writing workshop and do the dictation and the writing about those experiences. So there was a lot of science involved even then. Computers were very, very new. I knew that I had a TI 99 with the funnest little games that you would plug a cartridge in. I did my master's thesis in 1988 using a Commodore with a basic word processing program and a five-inch floppy. And we thought that was awesome. It was such an upgrade from the, you know, the electric typewriter. So, anyway, so I can almost guarantee there are listeners who don't even know what a floppy disk is. No, they don't know what the three-inch floppies are. These were five-inch ones. Oh, they actually, yeah. This is yeah. Curriculum was a lot looser. A lot of my expertise over the years, and what got me to where I got me was being in that environment where there was a whole lot of creativity encouraged, right? You got creative. There wasn't, you weren't handed a script. You didn't have creative curriculum at your fingertips. You had to invent it. You went to the teacher supply store to pick up books that might have teaching ideas. It wasn't a matter of doing a search for a lesson plan, or in today's case, getting AI to write a creative lesson plan for you. You had to do that creativity on your own in order to try to get kids engaged with learning. And you pulled from every resource you had. NSTA was critically important because it was where I went to get ideas for bringing back new ideas. So, how has it changed? It's changed in some ways that are very good because I love the fact that we have a lot of ability to network and to have a lot larger resources. The world's changed a lot because technology does so much for us that I think we're losing that creative edge. And that thing that that creativity that propels us and the problem solving that propels us to be better at what we can do in the realm of education.

Andrew 5:48

Donna, the one thing I heard you say as the president of the letter for NSDA that I hadn't thought of before was that throughout all these changes, throughout the different times that we've lived in, NSDA has been right there at the cusp of progress, encouraging and empowering educators, not only to be the best they can be right now in this moment, but also to be able to look forward and say, where do I want to be? Where do we want to be as a society, as educators? So that's a very important spot to continually place yourself so that you continue to have relevance. And you've been going to this for years. So now you can see that relevance and also really help usher in a new part and a new era.

Donna 6:33

NSTA is exceptionally good at that. That is one of the things that's allowed me to be at the forefront of everything is that NSTA has kept me current. There are things like sense making, which has become really big, and we're starting to talk about how to do sense making in education, which requires transdisciplinary thinking, which requires systems-level thinking, which requires this advanced problem solving, right? So things like sense making based on phenomena, it's just now ending up where the classroom teachers are hearing these vocabulary, but NSTA has been all over it for decades, right? So staying current and staying ahead of the curve is what NSTA allows you to do because they're there. They're there on the forefront. They're working with the people who do this, or we are because of my role in the organization. I'm officially retiring from the teaching part of my world in July. I would love teaching, but I think that this opportunity with NSTA is just taking that into another realm. It's a whole nother sphere. Yeah. Sphere of influence is magnified now. My mission is larger than one classroom or right now one university. It's how can I, with science education at a larger scale, because it's critically important to our country, our nation, our society, to be able to understand science and how it works and how important it is and how much it permeates every part of our lives in our world. You know, medicine, travel, energy, agriculture, environment, agriculture, everything comes comes back to science. And we need a scientifically liberate society. It's important that science education is elevated a little bit.

Patrice 8:18

And not just an afterthought.

Donna 8:20

Not just an afterthought.

Patrice 8:21

That's kind of where I'm seeing at the elementary level. Kids who don't have access to science in elementary school are just going to need to be caught up in middle school. And that's just now creating a domino effect of not being able to get kids as literate as we would like them to be in the long run.

Donna 8:36

One of the things that people are really short-sighted on is a lot of things have gone into things like X number of minutes on reading and X number of minutes on math, right? Because those are the tested subjects. And there's this fundamental misunderstanding of what science is. And they think, oh, well, you can just, you know, memorize it. You can read science and to learn it. And you can't. If you are reading about science, what you're teaching is reading comprehension. You are not teaching science. You have to do science to learn science, right? It's more of ways of thinking and problem solving and observing and learning from the natural world. And that's what science is. But one of the things that goes back with the reading is there's a lot of stuff going in today and a lot of emphasis going into the science of reading, right? And if you look at Scarborough's reading rope, which is really taught to a lot of pre-service teachers and in-service teachers about how reading works, and there's this whole thing about phonics, but there's also this thing about reading comprehension. Reading comprehension has two very critical things. One is vocabulary and one is background knowledge. And both of those you build by doing science. So we need more of that and understanding of even the importance of teaching science if you want kids to be good readers. I think we're on the cusp of being able to get that point across. And what we do about it is going to be something different. But everything comes in phases and cycles, you know. Since we've had this paradigm that we've had in our schools, and it's been all about the reading and math, and it's like, yeah, that's important, but we're not giving kids any context for it.

Patrice 10:12

They isolated the research to the skills needed and not the entire package. That's how I felt about it.

Donna 10:20

It's not systems level thinking, and that's one of the things that Future Ready is about, is about teaching our kids to do systems thinking, but we're not doing systems problem solving in education right now. We're, like you said, we're isolating certain skills, but those skills out of context are meaningless.

Patrice 10:37

So can you tell me a little bit more about the future ready? Because I'm very curious now that we've had this conversation.

Donna 10:43

So this is interesting because I was asked to do this talk for the Georgia Science Supervisors Association a couple of weeks ago, and their whole theme was future ready science leadership. And it ties into future ready science teaching. And so I had to get up to speed a little bit on this too. And what I found is this is really this whole future ready thing really has to do with a broader umbrella, right? It's a it's a great little catchphrase, but it really deals with teaching our students to be ready for not what teaching looks like in the future, but what our students are going to face as they leave the school system and they start working in the world of the future, the world that we're giving them. And the world that we're giving them has so many different issues that really need to be addressed. Things like there's a lot of global challenges, there's environmental challenges, there's energy challenges, there's the pace at which technology is changing our world is incredibly fast. And so all of these challenges our kids are going to have to face that when they get out of school to be future ready, to be able to deal with those things, they need skill sets that maybe they're not getting right now. And these skill sets come from what kids need to be successful for their future. And so what we should be doing in the schools is teaching the students in a way that is student-based. It is inquiry-based, student-centered. It needs to be driven by technology because that's the world they're going to live in. They need to become problem solvers. They need to be able to become problem solvers at a different level than we've seen in the past, right? Because their real world problems that they're going to have to solve are much more complex and the solutions are complex. It will take transdisciplinary thinking. You know, we teach them in silos of English, math, science, social studies, but with the problems that they're expected to solve are transdisciplinary. You know, you can't just solve for science. You need to be able to research, you need to be able to do the computation. You need to know if the computation something does for you is right. Um that's a big one. I can talk more. I need I need to talk more about that later. They need they need to be able to understand how we got here. And that's that's the history of things, right? They need to know how the science works in society and with political systems and governments and community systems and all of that stuff. So the problems our kids are going to be expected to solve are really complex. Call them wicked problems, right? Wicked problems are really cool. It's a phrase that was coined about 50 years ago. And it really looks at problems that are complex like this, that require transdisciplinary thinking, they require collaboration, they require systems-level thinking. Yeah. And that's, you know, this systems-level thing are what these wicked problems are, or what future-ready kids you need, right? These are real-world applications they need to be solving. And again, that importance on cross-disciplinary thinking. And this topic really resonated with me because of the four years I spent teaching in an integrated middle school, where we didn't have silent subjects. Everything was problem-based and scenario-based and looking at what do kids need to prepare for this problem solving that they're going to have to do. Everything was based around what we called simulations. And those simulations were things like, oh, let's do a mock United Nations assembly, or let's plan that colonization of another world 300 years in the future. Where are we going to go? How are we going to get there? What government are we going to set up? What do we need to take? How are we going to do this mathematically? How are we going to get there? And then what do we do once we're there? So all of this was based around that. And some of my favorite units to teach actually dealt with the history of science. I taught a science in the Middle Ages. It was like a favorite thing to teach because you can teach things like alchemy and astrology, which are pseudoscience. They are not science, but they have a basis in science. So you can say, okay, this is what they thought. This is why they thought it. And this is why it doesn't work. This is why it does not work. And how did we get there? And how were discoveries made in the context of society and what was going on at the time, both politically and religiously and socially, and how those how those discoveries evolved. And that thinking is just it was incredibly fun to get into that. And taking kids and doing, you know, one of my favorite activities during that unit was a mock trial of Galileo. So that's amazing. Yeah. So what how would you have convicted? Would you have convicted them? If so, would you have done it? And why and why not? And so that type of future ready really and looking at what it takes to be future ready and teaching kids how to solve problems in a cross-disciplinary way that involves systems thinking and that are complex and don't have single solutions is important. And that's what future ready means. It means teaching kids through iteration, through looking at things through different lenses and looking at being able to draw on these problems that are in nature going to be science-based issues. What do we do about the environment? What do we do about energy? One way or another, energy is a critical issue. And there's a lot more to it than, oh, we just need to do A, B, or C.

unknown 16:18

Right.

Donna 16:18

Put up a windmill. We'll be fine. There's a level of problem solving that our kids need to be able to be prepared to do. And that's what Future Ready Science teaching is all about. That's amazing. Thank you.

Andrew 16:29

You've got this nugget where it sounds like we're learning from our experience, we're listening to, I think listening all around. What do we need now? What are we not providing our students with that might be needed in the workforce or to solve these problems or a different level of critical thinking? And so we're pulling it all together and saying this is more of a direction that we need to go in.

Donna 16:50

I think if we're going to talk about future ready, we talk about what kids need, I think what's got to happen is how do we get there? What do the teachers need to make that happen? Because doing it in a world where science gets 20 minutes a day or is limited to reading from a textbook is a problem. They're not going to get future ready when they get 20, some kids 20 minutes a week, or like you even said, in elementary school, they might not be getting any science. Or science is only, let's read the textbook. It's not going to get kids where they need to be. So what do they need to get there? What do the teachers need to get there? And the teachers need an incredible amount of support. They need in some cases, newer teachers who've been testing paradigm teachers, who've been raised as teachers in this world of accountability and high-stakes testing for reading and math. Really, a lot of those, especially in the elementary, don't have an understanding of what they need to do to support kids to learn in this way. There's not time for that inquiry-based learning. There's not time to let kids iterate. There's not time to let kids learn for failure. And so our teachers need a lot of instructional support. They need professional learning support. They need time. They need to be allowed to be flexible and allow for that problem solving and inquiry-based learning. It takes time, but the payoffs are tremendous.

Patrice 18:21

And I think we also need to help them understand that it's okay not to have the answer. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And it's okay for teachers to actually learn with their students.

Andrew 18:32

I have a question for you, Madam President Elect. We are going to see you in Anaheim for the conference. What are you most looking forward to about this conference as compared to all the other conferences for NSTA that you've been to?

Donna 18:46

What am I looking most forward to? There's a lot of things I'm looking forward to. Since I'm now in the presidential chain, there's different responsibilities. And I've been attending these conferences for 30 years regularly. And my role in these conferences has changed over time. So I've started off as going to sessions or being a session presenter and really being able to feel like I walked away from every single conference with something I could take back to my classroom to make me a better teacher. And that was always the big thing for me, finding that there were ways that I could grow and learn and get excited about new things or find new paths to explore that would make me a better teacher. And the energy at one of these conferences always excites me because it is a place of learning for teachers. And teachers sometimes are so much in the business of teaching, we forget that we have a passion for learning. And so being in that environment where there's always this excitement energy about learning new things and hearing new speakers, that has always been consistently the thing that I go back from. It's where I recharge my teaching batteries every year. But doing it in a different role, I think is very, very exciting for me because I'm able to see some different things. I'm not going to be just looking for how I can grow and change, but how I can help others grow and change in their teaching. And so that for me, because of this role, is allowing me to go to that next stage. So for me, I think that's probably the most exciting thing about this conference.

Andrew 20:21

That's awesome. What I love about what you just said is there's something there for everybody. Wherever you are in your science education journey, there's something there for you. And we encourage all of our listeners to stop by, find us. There will be an NSTA Voices booth. We'll be recording there live to stop by and see us. And Donna Governor will be there with our security details, signing all those and getting selfies. So make sure you stop by, wave at us, and meet Donna's Secret Service security detail.

Donna 20:53

You know, I don't think that Secret Service details in the budget, but Donna, thank you for coming on the show and for all of our listeners.

Andrew 21:02

Thank you for tuning in and listening. We encourage you to share this podcast with others and to follow us so you can stay up to date on all the latest podcasts for NSDA voices.

Donna 21:12

Thank you. And I really appreciate you uh allowing me to come in and share my passion. It was wonderful.