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.
