The Fine Line

It's a new school year and I've made a resolution to ask for and listen to my students' perspective more often.  Listening is easy.  Bending your teaching to fit the desires of a fourteen year old is a little more difficult - especially when one of the first requests flies in the face of one of the key underpinnings of your educational philosophy.

One student's advice started like this: Maybe you could give us a step by step procedure to do labs, so we don't have to talk about it for so long. 

In my head, my years of training in experiential, constructivist, democratic education came to my defense: Good science and good education take time.  If my students want to learn what real science is like we have to wade through these ideas, so we can design labs rather than used canned labs, whether they be written by me, or the textbook companies.

The student goes on: A lot of us try to listen, but after the first time we hear the instructions we shut down and we're just trying to seem like we're listening.


Now the voice in my head sounds less like a defense, and more like defensiveness: Well if you just listened the first time, then I wouldn't have to explain how to do it again.



The student: It's just that, if you gave us those instructions, we could be more independent, and rely less on you to tell us what to do...

Voice: We have just lost cabin pressure...


While my brain tried to defend my actions, this kid was telling me exactly what I needed to hear: that the method I was using to offer them freedom and choice was having the exact opposite effect.  But what should I do?  Throw out all of my beliefs and training, and embrace the canned labs that I had always been warned about.  My grad school professors referred to a practice called algor-heuristic teaching - a blend of algorithms and heuristic learning.  At the time I envisioned the practice of this teaching style as the walking of a fine line between lock step movement toward a learning goal and the anarchy that results when you give 22 high school freshman complete control, but this conversation has made me reassess my understanding. 


In light of my new understanding I will be giving my students an algorithm.  Don't worry, I'm not jettisoning my educational philosophy based on a conversation.  Instead of trying to balance on that fine line,  I'm transcending it.  The algorithm will give them detailed, step by step instructions on how to design their own experiments.  Wish me luck!