US Department of Education Innovation Grant to Exploratorium for its Unusual Marriage of Inquiry Science and English Language Development in Sonoma Valley Unified School District
One of 49 grantees selected from nearly 1700 Applicants Nationwide

The U.S. Department of Education recently announced that 49 districts, schools, and nonprofits beat out close to 1,700 other applicants in the competition for $650 million in grants from the Investing in Innovation, or i3, fund. In the San Francisco Bay Area, that resulted in $3 million for an unusual marriage of the Exploratorium’s brand of inquiry science and English language development, enabling the extension of a very successful pilot program of the Exploratorium and the Sonoma Valley Unified School District from one elementary school to all the elementary schools in the entire district, working with 90% of all elementary teachers over the next five years.

The major innovation of this project involves finding ways of integrating science and language development so that the value-added benefit science brings to language development outweighs the time it takes away from doing language development exclusively.

Young student scientists, for example, investigate what foods snails prefer to eat, starting with their own hypotheses. Not surprisingly, they prefer some of their very own favorites — spicy Cheetohs, pasta, bananas, right out of lunch. They then test their ideas, measure food in containers, observe, take notes, gather evidence, make discoveries–all before presenting their results. After determining the snails’ top choice–pasta, in this case– based on bite marks and other evidence, the budding experimentalists write up their results and communicate them to a curious class. Other investigations involve magnets, light, sound and earth science. Language proficiency almost becomes a by-product of something much more fun.

This is an unusual pairing of inquiry-based science and English language development, that has been underway in Sonoma County, California, since February 2008. A program of the Exploratorium’s Institute for Inquiry and Sonoma Valley Unified School district’s El Verano elementary school, it involves all the teachers at El Verano in collaboration with the Exploratorium. The program is made possible the Vadasz Family Foundation and the Sonoma Valley Education Fund, and is funded through August, 2012.

Many schools nationwide share this issue of finding enough time to focus on language development for English language learners, while also having enough time for science and other subjects. According to Fred Stein of the Exploratorium’s Institute for Inquiry, who is working on shaping this project with the school, “In Sonoma, the whole school is participating; teaching staff are very knowledgeable about language development. Thus, there is a lot of promise that this project will find practical and effective approaches useful in other districts and projects far beyond Sonoma County.

The thinking skills of science, such as questioning, predicting and interpreting, are also skills used in decoding and using spoken and written language. By giving students engaging science experiences, students will be motivated to speak, listen, read and write about them, acquiring language in the process. Because science involves concrete materials to interact with, students can communicate with each other even if they don’t know the English terms for the materials and phenomena. The materials provide a concrete way to introduce vocabulary.

“It’s ideal, “ says Lynn Rankin, who heads up the Exploratorium’s Institute for Inquiry, dedicated to bringing science to the elementary level, and oversees the teacher training. “ We are able to develop activities for the teachers as well as hold monthly workshops to support them and see how things are working in the classroom. The growth and comparison scores of the students, which have been measured, were striking on both the science tests and English language tests.”

The i3 competition sought to reward districts, consortia of schools, and nonprofit organizations that proposed the most-innovative proposals focused on improving teacher effectiveness, low-performing schools, standards and assessments, and data systems. The $650 million pot of money is a relatively small piece of some $100 billion in education aid funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed by Congress last year.