The Long Game

My jaw clenched as I left the post-observation meeting.  Nobody likes negative feedback, but this was different - there was an agenda here.  I had taught a lesson on scientific consensus and climate change, and my assistant principal had taken issue with me pointing out the inherent bias held by the American Association of Petroleum Scientists.  Outwardly, I like to think I took the critique in stride, but inside I fumed.  In situations like these I tend to play the conversation over and over in my mind.  For the first several hundred replays the verdict was the same.  I was right and she was clearly wrong.  Eventually, my focus started to drift to the most important words said in that meeting, “Let the data speak for itself.”  And that’s when I realized my assistant principal was right.

Four years later I was listening to a radio show called This American Life and an Episode called Kid Politics.  The episode discusses a sharp decline in American belief in climate change between 2006, the year Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth came out and 2009, the year Climategate erupted.  As I listened further I started to realize how important my assistant principal’s advice was.  The radio piece featured an educator trying to convince a student that the Earth was warming as a result of humans, with each argument falling flat.  The student, entrenched in her own perspective and bolstered by research done on the internet held true to the same belief she had going into the conversation.

This year I have students who are similarly entrenched in a belief that doesn’t match my own, but I’ve given up convincing them one way or the other.  Instead I try to give them tools: I teach them to look for data that is close to the source, I have them conduct experiments that test the physical principles that are central to the debate and I give them a forum to make arguments in front of their classmates, then I argue against them, whichever side of the debate they fall on.  I’m not sure what impact this unit will have on these students’ views on climate change, but I am confident they will come to rely on science more when they make their arguments than they did when they started.  This has two effects: First, these students will be less susceptible to the winds of change borne of propaganda that will be placed in front of them from both sides of the debate.  And second, while our beliefs may still differ, my assistant principal and I will have found common ground.

The Information Economy

Wednesday, February 15th
12:54, My Classroom - I ask a student to put away his cell phone

I certainly see why teachers have a distaste for the use of some technologies in the classroom.  One of the major behavioral issues I run into as a classroom teacher is students surreptitiously texting under their table or behind a book.  This distraction mentally takes them out of the classroom and away from the subject at hand.

1:17, My Classroom - I take away the cell phone because the student was using his cell phone, again.

While using technology in class is a choice for students, it’s also a habit.  Students reach for a cell phone as naturally as they might tap a pencil on their table.  To them, their phone is like an appendage and some students react as such when it’s taken away.

2:48, Science Department Meeting - A coworker breaks the news to another: There is a new iPhone app that allows people to identify tree species by using the camera to take a picture of the tree’s leaf.  The second coworker expresses concern that students don’t have to think anymore.

I’ve put my time in with a dichotomous key.  I can identify most New England trees without an iPhone app.  If I had the app, I would have saved countless hours deciding whether a tree’s leaves were double serrated or just serrated.  Of course I could have spent the saved time texting my friends or I could have used my time analyzing forest structure or predicting a tree stand’s future.  After using the app often enough I probably would have memorized the trees anyway. 

6:22, My Car - I hear a radio piece on Facebook going public claiming that we are not just living in an information age, but an information economy.

In education, one of the current buzz phrases is “21st Century Skills”.  The radio piece reminds me that we live in a different world than the one in which I went to high school.  In the information economy, information, like that which Facebook, Wikipedia or countless other website collect, is the raw material.  One of the key 21st Century Skills we need to impart to our students is to learn how to process all of this freely available ore, into something more valuable.

The default setting of technology is to be a distraction.  Without much work it becomes a cheat or crutch.  As educators, we have two choices: We amputate the diversions that have become an extension of our students’ bodies or we turn these tools into something even greater.  Let’s turn these technologies into the calculator of the 21st century, saving time rather than eliminating tools.  I say we use technology as spring board, catapulting students into deeper thought and broader accomplishment, leaving the simple math to the machines.

A Galaxy Far, Far Away

I can’t recite my school’s shared vision from memory, but I remember the first half of the first sentence: Gray-New Gloucester High School is a student-centered...  It seemed strange then that students would vote overwhelmingly that they did not feel like they had the opportunity to make choices regarding their learning.  Or, that more than 80% of teacher respondents said they didn’t have sufficient training to help students own their learning.  After a staff meeting regarding these and other survey results I started thinking about my own classroom.  How much choice do my students have in their learning?  How much ownership?  How much did they really want?  How much do they need to be successful in the “real world”?

In my classroom this year I have tried to give students more choice when it comes to how they do experiments, but outside of this small concession I haven’t really given them that much choice in how they learn.  For instance, when studying rock formation, everyone saw the same sediment settling demonstration, everyone read about the Naica crystal cave in Mexico and everyone saw the same slide show.  It seems obvious then that everyone’s response to the unit question would be very similar.  Is this student-centered? Certainly not to the degree I’d like it to be. 

In my next unit I’ll be teaching astronomy with the essential question “Will humans ever meet an alien?”  What if I give the students the reins?  They get the unit questions and enough data to figure out the answers.  Then, they map the path to figuring out the solution.  As an example, the first unit question is “How long would it take to reach your star at the speed of light and at the speed of the fastest human-made space rocket?”  The students would be given the parallax angle of a star.  With the question, and the available information at hand they would be responsible for 1) creating a plan of action to find the solution and 2) setting out to figure out the solution.    Of course the students wouldn’t know that a parallax angle is the distance a star appears to move as the Earth revolves around the sun or that light moves 186,000 miles per second, but the internet does and it is right there at their fingertips.

In my mind I can picture it and it seems wonderful, but I have been warned.  I surveyed 2 classes worth of kids and asked them if they could have figured out a similar question from last unit without the direct instruction I offered and got mixed results: some were confident, others not as much.  I’ve also asked fellow teachers their advice and they responded in warning tones: students  don’t want that type of choice, high school students don’t learn that way.  There is the voice in my own head, too: You’re veering too far from traveled ground.  So maybe the vision is as reachable as the stars my students will soon be studying, or maybe I’m just interpreting it wrong.  Or maybe, just maybe these students will reach for the stars and arrive at their destination.