Or, can we slow down enough to use inquiry to build effective conceptual learnings?
Education is not a Race to the Top. I have to state that up front. In a Race to the Top are we allowed the time it takes to contemplate what we are learning? Time to dig into the record to find the information which satisfies our needs to know? Time to make the conceptual connections between what we are currently learning, and what we have learned before? Time to become involved and invested in our educations? Time to become empowered as persons?
I do not believe that education is a race at all. Rather, it is a journey, a journey which wanders through who we are, who we were, and where we might go; all the while, developing the capacity to engage in autonomous learning, discovering how our brain and body work together to learn, becoming practiced in learning how to work with others to discover how we, our world, and our Universe work. Not a random journey, but one generated by interest and the need to discover and comprehend facts. Mental sprinting does not generate that world.
How can a wandering journey lead to empowered students?
Let me describe a simple activity to illustrate this. Simple, but demanding quality time; as with most of experience, things which are simple in concept are more often complex in execution. For a long time, my teaching has developed around the idea that our brain is organized to learn, and does so when we allow it. Allowing it means planting a thought in the student’s mind (read brain), then structuring the learning environment so the student, in pursuing this thought, raises a question and engages your curriculum in answering it. Means knowing that students’ brains will be effective in directing their learning.
As a matter of fact, everything students learn is the product of human brains that were thinking. Human (and all mammalian) brains are autonomous learners; especially when they need to know. Questions and thoughts, when they are pursued, generate needs to know. Together, these simple things and processes make brains learn. They learn how to learn. As the term goes along, students assume more and more of the load. The difficult part for us is learning to accept that this is true. Especially when our publishers present such compelling books, activities, and supplements in which students’ brains are directed to find particular answers to particular questions within them.
Here is my example of planting a question or thought in a student’s mind, then using it to deliver curriculum. In this example, students engage an activity in which they observe paramecium under the microscope. When they first observe them, they see majestic, sailing cells, moving through the medium like dancers in a ballroom; ships in a sea, traveling slowly, but always with some inherent purpose. While they travel, food vacuoles move slowly, contractile vacuole pulses, cilia beat, as this living ship navigates its waters. Most of the lab activities written to observe and know paramecia quash this exciting perception of these fascinating creatures. (Likewise for most other phenomena they address.)
During an activity where students rotate through a set of learning stations to introduce themselves to cells, they are asked to observe a sample from a bowl of cloudy water for paramecium. At the paramecium station, I ask my students to just look at them, and to know that they’re very old as a species. The next day, as we review their observations at the stations they visited, when they get to paramecium, I ask, “Did you notice anything interesting at the paramecium station?” Students relate some specifics they observed, with “dots” inside, moving things, as the most frequent observation of interest. I ask, “Do you think you can find out what they are doing?” They want to try, so we begin.
Each group chooses their most interesting observation to follow up on with an inquiry they design themselves. When they choose a thing like the moving “dots,” and ask about them, I suggest I might know a trick to make them easier to observe. Eventually, they will ask about the trick and I’ll mention that some scientists boil yeast in congo red, which changes color depending on the pH. They haven’t studied digestion yet, but will, so I add that food coming in has a low pH compared with digested food, and we’ll study that later in the year. They’re happy with that and ask if I have any congo red and yeast.
Another group decided to study the cilia that cover paramecia and appear to help them move. They were having trouble making their observations because the paramecia moved too fast. I said that some scientists used a solution that slowed the cells down, and they asked if I knew how to get some. I said that there might be some in the prep room, and that I’d look. My bottle of Protoslo was waiting there, and I gave it to them and showed them how to use it. Then off they went.
When the investigations have been completed, groups analyze and interpret their data, make inferences from the results, and report out to the class in a seminar. (When we started our investigation, I had informed the class that they should check what other groups were finding out because they were responsible for knowing all about paramecia. I reminded them of this when we started the seminar.) These are always lively, and groups always want to go into the lab to nail down one more thing when they are finished. Which we do.
How does all this help students get into the books to prepare for tests?
Then we do the inevitable seat work, but it is accomplished in a collegial atmosphere, and conducted along with the follow-up to the seminar they wanted to do. I tell them to list all of their discoveries; their group’s and the other groups’. I’ve observed that they know more, better, than I could ever teach them via direct teaching. Then, I test them. First with my test, which is mostly essay, and which they do their usual work on. The next day, they get the publisher’s test. Not long after the test begins, comments start coming in: “This is easy.” “This is boring.” “This barely covers the basics.” These students own their learnings. Their locus of control for their education resides within their person.
How do you view this way of teaching so you can try it? The whole thing is driven by a question the student raises. This act generates an incipient concept, a bootstrap I can use to make sure that facts are discovered to clarify the concept. These elusive facts which clarify students’ thoughts about the concepts and processes they are engaging are what I call, “needs to know.” What happens in your brain when you need to know something: a forgotten ingredient in a recipe, how much you spent on auto maintenance last year, where is Qatar? Your inner self is mobilized, and you find the facts. And they clarify. From time to time, they raise further questions. Likewise with students. Their “Need to Know” generates a search for relevant facts.
There is a difference between immersing students in the facts as they give form to the concept and medium, and committing facts to rote memory in the presence or absence of the medium. The difference between hypothetico-deductive and verification activities. The great majority of publishers’ activities are verification inquiries, with students simply verifying what they have been told they will find. Where is the brain’s role in this? Verification is clerk’s work; self-directed inquiry is brain’s work.
To do this kind of teaching, teachers must be comfortable with the concepts and processes embedded in their curricula, and with allowing their students to think. This is not easy at first. Teachers perceive that control has moved from themselves to the students; enough to make many have second thoughts. Clean structure in the learning environment and faith in the students’ integrity will make it work. And building their capacity for actively participating in effective work groups.
Asking and answering inquiry questions in an effective work group provides a nearly perfect environment for all students to learn any content for understanding. Note that I am not claiming the same for memorizing content particulars for tests. The main criterion of the teaching I support is that the student’s brain has to be an active participant in developing the concepts and engaging curricular particulars. It’s difficult to become comfortable with this way of teaching at first; at least, it was for me. I did, not sure how, make myself check where my students were relative to other students in their understandings. To see how they were doing, I followed up by talking with their teachers in the next grade when I could, to compare their outcomes on publishers’ tests compared with other classes. I focused on my bottom 25th percentile, who usually did well.
Memorizing material to pass tests does not personally empower most people. Learning for understanding does. These two approaches to learning aren’t necessarily incompatible. In the United States, we don’t seem to understand what the two approaches mean, and tend to emphasize the former over the latter. Learning for understanding is a student-centered process. It takes time to let our teacher-centered part of us relax and let the students follow their questions. And to elucidate the successive approximations of students who are involved and invested in their learnings; approximations which mark the road they are on: Students who own what they know and will know. ❏
Jim Martin is a retired but still very active science educator who writes a regular blog on science and learning for CLEARING. You can them at www.clearingmagazine.org.