Lessons for teaching in the environment and community – 10

by editor | Feb 1, 2012 | Environmental Literacy, Questioning strategies

“Lessons for Teaching in the Environment and Community” is a regular series that explores how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula.

Part 10: Assimilation

When the world outside becomes the world inside

by Jim Martin, CLEARING guest writer

tarting in the world outside our skin, our personal tegumental boundary, I have claimed, is the best way to learn. By ‘learn,’ I mean integrate new material into old understandings so that they become a part of you. Part of you because they begin their synaptic lives with you by adding protein to the synapses they innervate, piles of stones along a new path, so they can find their way again. Becoming protein within you, they are you, a part of yourself that will travel with you wherever you go.

An enchanting thought, that, one that all teachers could give to their students in every class they teach. Learning for understanding, carried through each person’s life. I would think that thought would drive education, but it doesn’t. Even so, I’d like to talk about it for a bit.

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What happens when we engage some concrete piece of the world outside our bodies with the intent to learn? Or, at least the teacher expects us to learn. Let’s say we’re on a streambank, collecting, identifying, and counting the macroinvertebrates (macros) we have netted in the stream. You empty the net into a tub of stream water, then use a pipet to suck one particular macro from the milieu, place it into one of the depressions of an ice cube tray, and use your macro identification book to attach a name to it. These activities are all coordinated by your brain, the organ system which will do the learning and, hopefully, the eventual remembering.

While you are hovering over the basin, pipet in hand, your parietal lobes begin to pay attention to what is happening where the skin of your hand ends, and the rest of the world begins. That’s one of their jobs. Another thing they do is to alert other parts of your brain about what you are doing. The Gnostic area (in the parietal lobes) integrates sensory interpretations with memories from most of the brain to formulate a common thought and devise a single response to the incoming information. Cells in your parietal lobes are stimulated and in turn stimulate neurons connected to parts of the midbrain associated with attention, instinctive and procedural skills, and episodic (past experience) memory.  Other neurons are stimulated in the frontal lobes, where working memory is organized and where stored memories advise and guide current behaviors, in the temporal lobes with their stores of general knowledge memories, and in the hippocampus, which has the capacity to turn experiences into long-term memories.

So, what does this mean? When we use our hands to net macros, use a pipet to transfer a particular one to an ice cube tray depression, then grab a book and try to identify it, the parietal lobes turn on our wonderful autonomous learning machine. It automatically focuses us on the subject of our actions, brings all relevant knowledge and concepts to bear on it, and sets up a working memory room for us to work in until we’re ready to incorporate the gist of this new experience into knowledge, concepts, and skills already stored in our brain.

As the Learning Machine continues its work, it does so by firing impulses across synapses, connections between nerve cells involved in this activity we’re involved in. A neat thing about cells is that they build more parts when one is used. So, each of the nerve cells which fire during this learning add to the size of a synapse each time it is used. This increases to the probability of firing when stimulated again. Later, when one of these neurons is stimulated, others will more than likely be stimulated too, and you’ll remember significant pieces of the objects and related concepts that you worked with originally; in this case, a visual image of the macro, its name, and relevant facts you discovered about it. If you build from hands-on activities, in May or June you can remind students what they did in October, and they’ll bring the concepts and relevant facts out spontaneously. That’s because the knowledge and concepts are in the brain proteins that are part of them.

And to make this even simpler: What I’ve described is the process of assimilation, starting with concrete objects to develop new understandings which are incorporated, integrated, into previously held concepts and thus more likely to be remembered. This idea has been around a long time, a part of the psychology of learning, but is not used by most educators. Instead, we ask students to place new learnings in working memory until they have passed the test. Once the job is finished, working memory flushes itself out. Then we wonder why they can’t remember enough to pass the SAT.

Once you’ve started in the real world with concrete objects, then you can milk this opportunity by tying these learnings to new material the class learns from books, and other standard sources. If you’re clever, you’ll find that you can stretch this a long way. Start with concrete experiences, move to the abstract. This is one of the reasons that community and environment based education works so well. It is based on the way the human brain works. Since the brain is the organ of learning, we ought to know something about how it works.

When you take your students into the community and natural areas, plan your curriculum with assimilation in mind. Talk with the people you work with in these places. They can help you find what you need to get started, the curricular starting places that are embedded in the places where they work. While your students are working, observe them for evidence of the pieces of assimilation. You’ll find that, once you get a handle on it, your teaching will begin to move in an interesting direction.

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This is the tenth installment of “Teaching in the Environment,” a new, regular feature by CLEARING “master teacher” Jim Martin that explores how environmental educators can help classroom teachers get away from the pressure to teach to the standardized tests,  and how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula. See the other installments here.

Lessons for teaching in the environment and community – 7

by editor | Dec 31, 2011 | Environmental Literacy, Questioning strategies

“Lessons for Teaching in the Environment and Community” is a regular series that explores how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula.

Part 7: From Hand to Mind

Concrete experiences generate learning for understanding

by Jim Martin, CLEARING guest writer

ver the past few blogs, we’ve walked through a science inquiry done in a natural area. First, we noticed something there, then asked a question about it, and used the question to develop an investigation. We did the investigation, collecting data that we hoped would answer our question.

We’ve analyzed and interpreted our data, and now we need to communicate it. Most science standards and benchmarks overlook this piece of science inquiry, but scientists don’t. This is the place where you really nail down what you’ve learned. Something we often don’t do in American education

Communicating findings is an important piece of science inquiry. Preparing for this phase gives you a chance to look back on what you’ve done; where you started, what you did, how that affected your thinking, what new questions emerged from your work. A check to see if you understand, and, hopefully, appreciate what you’ve done. You know what one part of the world is, and what it does. I’m sure you’ll never pass that place, or one like it, and not think about what’s there and what it’s doing.

A good way to start the communication process is to make a poster with four sections. The first section states your question and provides background information about it, and why you want to find out. The second section lists the steps you took to answer your question. It should be clear enough that another person could follow your directions. (I used to have my students swap directions, try to follow them, and make recommendations for edits, point out pieces that were particularly well done, etc. What emerged was interesting for all of us.) The third section contains the record and analysis of your observations. The fourth section is a statement of your findings (your interpretation based on analysis of the data) and any next steps you would like to take.

When you’ve done this, and if you’re feeling particularly brave, post it where your students and/or colleagues can see it. Get them interested. You’ll find that they are curious about what you’ve done. Some of them may wish to do an inquiry themselves. How would you respond to that? You might find yourself working with a colleague to do a similar inquiry, or integrate yours into an interdisciplinary project.

If you’ve been following this inquiry, you know that it isn’t easy to find time and determination to actually go out yourself and attempt to do this work. We all have important things to do, are pressed for time, and don’t have a clear idea how to incorporate new work into an already full schedule. These are all understandable reasons for not trying this way of doing science inquiry. But they’re not effective reasons. One of the causes of the current dilemmas in education is that we rely on publishers’ curricula and mandates from the bureaucracy of education to organize our teaching, our delivery of one of the most important developmental pieces of each of our students’ lives, their education.

When you engage a science inquiry on your own, something most teachers have never done, you gain a perspective you can only achieve in this way. You can’t learn about it; you have to learn it by doing it. You put something into your head that no one can take away; that changes your view of science as something that is cluttered with disparate facts and processes that you have to somehow teach, and your students have to try to memorize long enough to pass the test on. You begin to see clearly that science isn’t just an extremely large compendium of facts and concepts, science made, but also an invigorating, exciting way to learn, science in the making. If you actually do an inquiry, you’ll know first-hand that it drives you into the books to find information – the seemingly disparate facts that we try, and largely fail to teach our students. You control whether you take the steps to gain this view of teaching. There is very little in your environment compelling you to do it.

So, what has this long exercise been about? Using the world outside your classroom to involve and invest your students in their educations, to develop their capacity for assimilating new learnings into conceptual schemata which are already there in their brains.

The important piece in the inquiry we’re working on is first going into the community to do work, then returning to the classroom after the outdoor work to follow up. It’s easy to let the second piece go, especially if you’ve never done work in the community with your students. Your students use these real-world experiences to establish concrete referents in the community; following up in the classroom allows them to use these referents to develop coherent symbolic concepts, that are part of the curriculum you deliver. There is a continuum from the community to the classroom, just like a road connects the country with the city, making a continuum of travel, and experience, from one to the other and back again.

Many teachers who venture out into the real world miss that opportunity. They allow the environmental educators they work with do the work, then return to the classroom and pick up on section 18.b.3 in their textbook. You can always tell environmental educators what your students are doing, and what you would like to do, and they’ll nearly always be able to work with you. The idea behind environmental education is to instill knowledge about environments into people’s world views. Doing inquiry in environments guarantees that new learnings will be assimilated, become part of the person, along with her concomitant views. As long as you follow up on them in the classroom.

This is a win-win situation. Most environmental educators rely on people (read school buses) to come to their sites, and most teachers rely on effective student learners to bolster their records for the number of students passing standards tests. Here’s the connection: If you turn your field trips into student-driven inquiry activities, then their brains, which are built to learn best in the real world, will begin the job of preparing them to pass tests.

When human beings use their hands, their brains become very active. Especially when they use their hands to learn something new. The parietal lobes keep track of where we end and the rest of the world begins. This place is our skin. When we see and touch things in the real world, outside our skin, and know we’re there to learn, the parietal notifies other parts of the brain that are involved in this new learning. Concepts and knowledge already in memory are opened up, storage is set up for the new learnings, and these activities generate ‘needs to know.’ The needs to know drive them into the books and internet. That’s power.

Reflect on your experience if you did the casual observation in a natural area; do you recall your mind opening up? Recognizing what living things were there? What their names were? What information you already knew about them? Did you want to find out more? This is all set up for you when you start learnings in the real world. Then you use your teacherly skills to use this auspicious beginning to engage your students in real learning that will stay with them for a long, long time. Because it will become assimilated into concepts and understandings which are already there, in their brains. You can’t ask for better.

When students engage in self-directed inquiry in natural places, they become involved and invested in the work. Especially those students who aren’t seen as being ‘academic.’ Becoming invested in the work – a natural function of the brain in the real world – students want to know about what they are experiencing. This leads them to search for clarifying and amplifying information on their own. In the end, they learn for understanding, not just so they can pass tests. And they do pass the tests, especially those in the bottom 25th percentile.

Teachers whose students do this know it’s true. For the rest of us, it takes courage to free ourselves enough to give it a try, to start something like this, but we can do it. Start in your own school yard. Who lives there? Simple question; it can be answered at many levels. You’ll find that the main difference in grade-level approaches to answering this question are just in the vocabulary, complexity of sentences and paragraphs used, and the nature of details contained within the concepts. The main facts elicited will be very similar. Take ten minutes to ask this question in your school yard. Hard to squeeze in ten extra minutes, but worth the effort.

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This is the seventh installment of “Teaching in the Environment,” a new, regular feature by CLEARING “master teacher” Jim Martin that explores how environmental educators can help classroom teachers get away from the pressure to teach to the standardized tests,  and how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula. See the other installments here.