Just as there are more ways than one to skin a cat, there are many approaches to help students understand science, besides inquiry. There is more than one way to learn; there is more than one way to teach.

Students will come to your classroom with different learning styles, and more importantly you will develop a teaching style that should not only be congruent with contemporary research on teaching, but equally based on your personality, experience, values and goals. We will explore a spectrum of approaches in Chapters 8 and 9 to help you develop a repertoire of methods and strategies. Here very briefly are a few of these methods.

Direct/Interactive Teaching

Think for a moment about the roles and interactions among students and teachers in most secondary science classrooms. You probably can envision the teacher working directly with the whole class, perhaps presenting a brief lecture, and then engaging the students by asking questions. The students might also be observed doing seat work, sometimes on their own, at other times with a partner or a small group. Homework is assigned near the end of the class period, and students might get a head start on the assignment before class ends. Various models, sometimes refered to as direct/interactive instruction, have emerged over the past few years based on the relationship between observing teacher behavior and relating these behaviors to student learning. A large number of studies have supported a general pattern of key instructional behaviors as shown below.

Daily Review of Homework	Teachers review the key concepts and skills associated with homework; go over the homework; ask key questions to check for student understanding.
Development	Teachers focus on prerequisite skills and concepts; introduce new ideas, concepts using an interactive approach including examples, concrete materials, process explanations, questioning strategies; check student understanding by using a highly interactive process utilizing questions, and designing a controlled practice activity for individual or group participation; teacher also use a lot of repetition.
Guided Practice	Teachers provided specific time during the lesson for uninterrupted successful practice; teachers use a sustained pace with a lot of momentum; students know that their work will be checked by the end of the period; teacher circulates about the room, checking student work, and asking questions, as needed
Independent Practice	Teachers assigned on a regular basis a homework assignment that was not lengthy, and could be successfuly completed by the students
Special Reviews	Effective teachers conducted reviews once a week, preferably at the beginning of week. Focus was on the skills and concepts developed during the previous week; monthly reviews were conducted to review important skills and concepts.

Cooperative Learning

Cooperative learning is an approach to teaching in which groups of students work together to solve problems and complete learning assignments. Cooperative learning is a deliberate attempt to influence the culture of the classroom by encouraging cooperative actions among students. Cooperative learning is a strategy easily integrated with an inquiry approach to teaching. Furthermore, science teachers have typically had students work in at least pairs, if not larger small groups during lab. Cooperative learning strategies have been shown to be effective in enhancing problem solving and high level thinking goals. I will explore a variety of cooperative learning models in Chapter 6 that are easily put into practice.

Conceptual Change Teaching and Other Constructivist Approaches

A growing number of science education practitioners and researchers have developed an approach to science teaching that focuses on the problem of conceptual change. According to these science educators, students come to the science class with naive conceptions or misconceptions about science concepts and phenomena. Further these science educators suggest that concepts students hold are constructed; they are neither discovered or received directly from another person. In order to help students overcome their naive theories these educators suggest that teaching be organized into a series of stages of learning called the learning cycle. In most learning cycles, the first stage helps students detect and articulate their naive conceptions through exploratory activities, stage two focuses on comparing naive and "scientific views" in order to develp alternative conceptions, and the third stage provides experiences to encourage students to apply the concepts to new situations.

We will explore other approaches to science teaching. For now, however inquiry, direct instruction, cooperative learning, and conceptual-change teaching should get you started.