Don’t Put Science in a Box

by Rebecca Thomas

Science; the magic of life.

I have taught for long enough to know when a curriculum document makes me excited about teaching and when it makes me reach for a highlighter and start wondering which boxes I am supposed to tick.

On first reading, the new Science Curriculum did the latter.

Perhaps most of my reaction comes from having taught in the UK. Reading through the primary years felt strangely familiar. The themes, concepts and sequencing reminded me strongly of the curriculum I once knew there.

There is no question that it is more specific than the 2007 New Zealand Curriculum. Teachers do deserve clarity. Children do deserve an entitlement to scientific knowledge regardless of which school they attend or whether their teacher happens to be a science enthusiast. I like seeing investigating, evaluating, communicating and applying identified clearly. I particularly like that investigation is broader than the tired old formula of every child writing a hypothesis and conducting a fair test. Children observe, model, classify, identify and seek patterns too.

But as I moved through those neat columns, year levels and knowledge statements, something began bothering me.

Where has the wonder gone?

Science wasn't always this tidy

The 2007 curriculum wasn't perfect.

To some, it could be frustratingly broad. Give the same achievement objective to ten teachers and you could probably end up with ten completely different interpretations of what should be taught. I understand that. In fact, I used to deliver STEAM PLD, and there were certainly gaps in teacher knowledge and confidence around some of the key scientific concepts. But I also saw what happened when teachers were given the time and professional learning to deepen that knowledge. Once they understood the science, and discovered the magic of weaving those concepts through rich, connected learning, they loved becoming designers of learning rather than deliverers of it. They became advocates for science, finding it in places they hadn't necessarily noticed before. The problem wasn't that teachers couldn't be trusted with a broad curriculum. The problem was that there was never enough funding, time or sustained focus on developing our kaiako as teachers of science.

In the 2007 curriculum there was something rather beautiful about the philosophy underpinning it. Nature of Science sat above everything else as the overarching and unifying strand. Children were learning what science was, how scientists worked, how knowledge changed in response to evidence, how ideas were communicated and how scientific understanding connected with decisions and actions in everyday life. Even its definition of science had life in it.

Science involved generating and testing ideas, gathering evidence, investigating, modelling, communicating and debating. It acknowledged logical thought and creative insight and recognised that different cultures and periods of history had contributed to scientific knowledge.

Science isn't a collection of facts about forces, rocks, plants and particles.

Science begins with: I wonder why that happened?

And sometimes the most exciting learning happens when nobody in the room knows the answer yet.

Start with the WHY

Imagine a school collaboratively planning science across Years 3–6.

They aren't doing that because we are too lazy to produce four different plans. They have a WHY. Planning truly is collaborative and discursive.

Planning together creates opportunities for tuakana–teina learning. Teachers share expertise and weave in their school values. Children talk between classrooms. They can bring an expert into kura and their visit makes sense for everybody. They can organise a field trip together. Reading and writing can weave around the learning. Siblings can go home talking about the same big idea at different levels and whānau become part of the conversation.

Most importantly, children see knowledge connecting.

So imagine they decide the big idea is:

Wai is our taonga.

Immediately, I can see it. They could follow our local waterways:

Where does our drinking water come from?

Where does the rain go?

Why does a puddle disappear?

What is actually inside apparently clean water?

What happens when pollutants enter an awa?

Why are some substances dissolved while others remain visible?

How do clouds form?

Why does temperature matter?

What happens when water changes state?

What lives in our freshwater ecosystems?

How are those organisms connected?

How might climate change affect this system?

And ultimately: What responsibility do we have to look after our wai?

There is the science curriculum.

Except there is a problem.

It doesn't sit obediently inside one box.

Real science refuses to stay in its lane. Understanding the journey of wai takes them wandering all over science.

They need evaporation and condensation, states of matter, mixtures, dissolving and filtration. They need temperature, weather and clouds, ecosystems. They need the atmosphere and hydrosphere, the human impact. They need measurement, observation, fair testing and pattern seeking embellished with data. They also need mātauranga and local knowledge. They need stories of this whenua and the people who have observed its rhythms for generations. And lastly but surely, somewhere in all of this, they need climate change.

How do we meaningfully teach children about wai without eventually helping them understand what happens when the climate changes? Climate change isn't another science topic to squeeze into another box. It is the connection between them: changes in temperature affect evaporation; a warming atmosphere affects how much water it can hold; changing weather patterns affect rainfall; drought affects freshwater availability; extreme rainfall affects flooding, erosion and water quality; changes in waterways affect ecosystems, biodiversity, agriculture and the communities that depend upon them.

Suddenly the physical and biological sciences are talking to each other.

As they should.

And this is one of my biggest concerns about the new curriculum. For something that will shape what our children learn about the natural world, climate change is remarkably difficult to find. The document talks about sustainability, ecosystems, human impacts and informed decision-making, but climate change does not emerge as the explicit, coherent conceptual thread I would expect for children growing up in 2026. The curriculum's purpose statement itself says children should understand how “people, ecosystems, and resources are connected”.

So why not make one of the greatest examples of that interconnectedness visible?

Perhaps that is another consequence of organising knowledge into boxes. Climate change refuses to belong to just one of them. Climate change is chemistry, physics,biology, Earth science and weather. It’s part of our oceans, ecosystems, energy use and human behaviour.

And here in Aotearoa, it is also about whenua, wai, whakapapa, kaitiakitanga and the futures our tamariki will inherit. You cannot understand climate change by staying obediently in one column of a curriculum grid.

And we might need knowledge that according to the curriculum belongs somewhere else. Good. That's what knowledge does. The new curriculum itself contains beautiful knowledge about Earth's water: the hydrosphere, water stores, water vapour and the movement of water from one store to another. My criticism isn't the knowledge. My concern is the architecture we have built around it.

When knowledge is divided into increasingly firm year levels, headings and sequences, the temptation is to believe that the organisation of the curriculum document represents the organisation of children's learning. It doesn't.

A Year 3 child may ask the question that takes us into Year 5 science.

A Year 6 child may need to return to an idea supposedly taught several years earlier.

One child might understand the system deeply but lack the vocabulary to explain it. Another might recite every scientific term beautifully without having the faintest idea how they connect.

Life isn't year-levelled.

Curiosity certainly isn't.

And then, quite literally, science arrived in a box

This is where the metaphor becomes slightly uncomfortable because we are actually putting science in boxes. In February, the Government confirmed House of Science as the supplier for a nationwide rollout of science and pūtaiao kits. The investment is $39.9 million.

Eventually there are expected to be 8,000 kits circulating through more than 2,000 primary and intermediate schools and kura, with full national coverage expected by early to mid-2027. The kits are explicitly designed to align with the new Science and Pūtaiao curriculum and come with induction training and ongoing guidance for teachers and kaiako. 

Look, I don't think science kits are a bad thing. Quite the opposite, please send me one. Send me thermometers, magnets, microscopes, wires, measuring cylinders and mysterious things that fizz. Give children equipment. Give schools that cannot afford extensive science resources exactly the same opportunities as schools that can. There is a genuine equity argument here.

The Government describes the investment as a way of making science more engaging and accessible and supporting teachers to deliver the new knowledge-rich curriculum.  Fantastic. Send me the science box. Just don't put my teaching inside it.

I've seen this movie before

We are told that Science has been released ahead of implementation so schools have time to prepare. The Minister's July announcement confirms Science was deliberately scheduled for release on 12 August because schools need to begin using it in 2027, giving schools additional preparation time. And I am pleased about that. But I am also wondering what preparation will mean.

After living through curriculum implementation where professional learning increasingly felt less like professional learning and more like a how-to guide for the resource we had just been given: Here is the book, the sequence, the lesson, the slide. Here is how you use it. We called that PLD. I'm not sure it is. It might be useful training. It might even be excellent product training. But learning how to operate a resource is not the same as learning how to teach.

And the science-kit announcement already promises induction training and ongoing guidance specifically for teachers using the kits. What about those who don’t?

Perhaps the wider science PLD will be magnificent. I genuinely hope it is. Perhaps we will spend time exploring children's scientific misconceptions and teachers will deepen their own disciplinary knowledge. Perhaps we'll explore how to provoke curiosity, build conceptual understanding, weave mātauranga Māori and science meaningfully, design rich investigations and connect apparently separate areas of scientific knowledge. Perhaps we'll learn how to take something happening outside our classroom window and recognise the extraordinary scientific possibilities hiding inside it.

I hope so.

Otherwise we need to stop calling a webinar explaining how to use the expensive shiny resource professional learning. Professional learning should develop the professional.

Teachers need to become bigger than the resource

Is our job increasingly to deliver curriculum?

Or are we still expected to design learning?

The irony is that the new curriculum itself still seems to understand this. It explicitly says: “It is teacher decision-making that establishes the direction of travel between knowledge and practices…” and says this is what “brings the teaching sequence alive.” It also tells us to enrich science through directly relevant local examples involving people, places, te ao Māori and the lives of students and their communities.

I love that.

But you cannot simultaneously ask teachers to bring the curriculum alive and then reduce their professional learning to instructions for delivering it. Pedagogical imagination needs feeding too.

After nearly three decades in classrooms, some of the best lessons I have ever taught have wandered:

A child asks something.

Another child disagrees.

Someone remembers something they saw at the beach.

We go outside.

We notice something.

The lesson bends.

Suddenly we need a bucket.

Someone races off for a ruler.

A child who barely wrote three sentences yesterday is desperately trying to record what has happened.

The timetable slips.

And experienced teachers know when to follow that moment and when to bring everyone back.

That's pedagogical judgement.

It isn't easily captured in a planning template.

I don't want to return uncritically to 2007. There are things the new curriculum fixes. The old curriculum could leave enormous gaps. A child's experience of science depended heavily upon the knowledge, confidence and interests of their teacher. .

Every child deserves science. Every child deserves to understand forces and matter and ecosystems and our extraordinary planet. Every child deserves the language that allows them to explain what they see. Every child deserves opportunities to investigate, evaluate evidence, communicate ideas and apply their knowledge. Knowledge is not the enemy of curiosity. But neither should knowledge become its cage.

What I want is a curriculum that tells me the important scientific ideas children should encounter and then trusts skilled teachers to weave those ideas together around phenomena worth wondering about.

Give us progression without demanding linearity; resources without scripts; professional learning rather than implementation training. Then help us to become better teachers of it.

Let me float around the grid

If my Years 3–6 team chooses Wai is our taonga, let us float around the curriculum grid.

Allow the Year 3 children notice and describe while the Year 4 children measure and investigate and the Year 5 children question and connect. Let Year 6 children challenge, analyse and apply. And don't panic when they cross the lines. Bring them together.

Let the nine-year-old explain something to the eleven-year-old.

Let the eleven-year-old discover that the seven-year-old has noticed something everybody else missed.

Invite kaumātua, whānau, scientists and people who care for our awa.

Read about it.

Write about it.

Measure it.

Map it.

Debate it.

Get muddy in it.

Wonder about it.

Then perhaps at the end, instead of asking whether every teacher faithfully covered the correct box for their year level, ask something much more difficult: Do these children understand wai differently now? Do they look at rain falling onto the roof, steam rising from a kettle, clouds gathering over the hills and an awa moving towards the moana and understand that none of these things exists independently? Can they explain some of the science? Can they ask better questions? Do they care enough to protect it? And perhaps most importantly: Do they want to know more?

We can create the most beautifully sequenced, internationally benchmarked, knowledge-rich science curriculum imaginable.  We can spend $39.9 million putting the equipment into boxes. We can measure implementation. We can tick every box. But if, somewhere along the way, we teach children all the answers and extinguish their desire to ask why, we will have missed the very thing that makes science magnificent.

Science was never meant to fit neatly inside a box.

And neither was teaching.