Details, Details, Details…
Details, details, details…
The degree to which you can elaborate detail determines the level of confidence you’ll have in teaching curricula which begins in the real world
by Jim Martin
CLEARING Associate Editor
ust as the degree with which they elaborate the ecological details of the compost communities students study delineates the levels at which they are working, the degree to which you can elaborate detail determines the level of confidence you’ll have in teaching curricula which begins in the real world. A metaphor to illustrate this: Let’s say you live in a neighborhood like mine, in which every block has some homes with large trees in their yard or in the planting strip next to the street. A strong wind comes through and knocks a large tree limb onto a neighbor’s roof, damaging it. The neighbor immediately has the tree cut down, and every home owner in the neighborhood feels some degree of panic or anxiety about the trees near their own homes. What will they do? (more…)
hat is school? Everyone has a picture of what it is, and the majority will probably include kids sitting in desks, learning, taking tests, and doing homework. The things I just expect students to do – listen to the teacher, take good notes, ask questions, complete homework, memorize material for tests, pass tests with good scores – are part of teaching and learning, but not all of it; not the most important part. The most important part is our students’ involvement and investment in their education, and empowerment in their lives; these are what school actually is. This part of school isn’t taught in pre-service courses, even though it’s the source of developing their responsibility for learning, and determines the quality of what graduates at the end of high school. Students’ responsibility for directing their education is the part we don’t learn about because, I believe, the publishers’ pre-packaged products make it too easy to skip this vital part of learning for understanding. Teaching how to involve and invest students in their education and empower them as persons isn’t a passive set of knowledge, skills, and understandings. Rather, it is an active, dynamic process, not as easy to teach, at least within the current education paradigm. 
he last time we met, students had planted seeds in parts of a garden plot they chose. So, where do they go now? They’ve made their decisions about where to plant each of their seeds. As the seeds sprout and grow, are there opportunities for them to engage in self-directed inquiries? Can they ask questions, like, “What would happen if ___?” followed by a perturbation they choose to introduce. Some possibilities that come to mind are things like sun flecks (the moving patches of sunlight in forested areas), watering schedules, companion plants, fertilizers and vitamins, pruning, hours of sunlight (photoperiod). What effect do these perturbations have on plants’ optimal growth? Kids have great imaginations, and I’m sure some of their perturbations would be more interesting than those I’ve mentioned. Doing this kind of work suggests that we are seriously entering the Experimental dimension of science inquiry. This is where you lose a little control over what students think and do, but not over how they go about their work. 
oing out into the world beyond the classroom for science and other curricula can be confusing. I clearly remember the first time I took students out to make observations. In the classroom, we had lined up all the conifers together, deciduous species together, and animals in neat little boxes. It all made sense to me. Little did I know! When we went into the real world, there was no sense of order my students could perceive. I saw that my first job was to help organize what seemed to be disorder. We did a transect, and the observations they made along its length brought the underlying order in any ecosystem within reach. And the difference between the ecology in the publishers’ materials and in an actual ecosystem opened my eyes to why we need to begin our science studies with actual hands-on inquiry, both as a pragmatic necessity, and as being a closer fit to how our brain learns for understanding, than the lessons and activities in the published materials I was using. It’s also the way scientists work; inquire of nature to answer a question, communicate findings, and inquire some more.