A pile of useless facts
“What we may know as fact today may not be facts when our students are adults.”
Garrett Phelan, principal of Cesar Chavez Charter School (Plaut, 2009, p. 95)
This is the beauty and nature of science: its knowledge is tentative and based on the evidence we have today — but the amazing thing is, we continue to discover new evidence every single day that can alter facts we were once certain to be completely true! It is for this reason that science must not be taught solely as a body of unchangeable knowledge and useless facts; rather, students must be taught how to think and act like a scientist by creating “classroom instruction that mirrors authentic scientific pursuit” (Plaut, 2009, p. 92). But what is “authentic scientific pursuit”?
Uri Alon (2013) speaks of his own experience in scientific research while working towards his Ph.D. He had reached a point in his research where nothing seemed to be working, and he had begun to question the very tenets on which his research was being conducted. In his science classes growing up, he had only ever learned about the results of scientific research, not the process.
“I wasn’t like Einstein or Newton or other great scientists whose results I had learned about… and so obviously, I couldn’t be a scientist.”
How many future scientists, researchers, and engineers have we lost because we have fail to teach our students that failure is okay? Scientists fail all the time. As Alon (2013) learned and now tells his students, “You are going to get stuck and not know what to do.” But failure is not the end-all, be-all like we treat it when we give our students long tests asking them to regurgitate a bunch of useless facts. Failure is a part of the scientific process, and it is often in this failure that creativity thrives. When you get stuck or fail is when you are forced to either give up or find a new way. And this itself is the essence of science: finding a new way when you inevitably get stuck.
So how on earth do we help our students do the seemingly impossible: fail and not give up? The answer lies in how we structure our classrooms. Our students need a vast amount of support to make it through those seemingly impossible moments. Teachers must create a classroom culture that encourages students to take risks, ask questions, and try over and over again. Such a culture will not be built overnight, but rather through the continued use of affirmation and motivation. Students must understand the goal is growth, not a final grade. Cara Gutzmer and Phillip Wilder (2012) call this responsive teaching, where the teacher and students work together in a shared partnership to achieve the goal of student growth. Teachers center the learning on the student, so they can respond to each individual’s needs, successes, and failures.
A positive and encouraging culture alone won’t prepare our students for the future. As teachers, we must also provide our students with opportunities to be scientists. Recent movements towards inquiry and problem-based learning (PBL) have inspired some schools to adopt the NewTech Network curriculum, which is based on the following four tenets: culture that empowers, teaching that engages, technology that enables, and outcomes that matter. Students at the schools are not simply taught a bunch of facts to memorize; instead, they are given the opportunity to solve real-world problems, practice communication skills, and develop responsibility for their own learning. Teachers can — and must — teach for meaning, not memorization. This means helping students understand the big concepts, encouraging students to ask questions, creating meaningful problems for students to apply their knowledge and skills, and creating opportunities for revision (McTighe, Seif, & Wiggins, 2004). Students need to know how to think, how to ask questions, and how to obtain and evaluate evidence, not just as scientists, but as adults in society. A scientific knowledge that is “a mile wide and an inch deep” will not help our students be creative thinkers, effective communicators, or lifelong learners (McTighe, Seif, & Wiggins, 2004, p. 5). Students must learn about and practice the process of science, not just the results.
These authentic pursuits and supporting culture “inspire the kind of learning that illuminates our common future” (Plaut, 2009, p. 94). We can’t afford to lose any more future scientists to the fear of failure. We must value revision over perfection, creativity over facts, and thinking over memorizing. And we must support our students in their inevitable failure.
References
Alon, U. (2013, June). Why science demands a leap into the unknown. TED. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/uri_alon_why_truly_innovative_science_demands_a_leap_into_the_unknown
Gutzmer, C. and Wilder, P. (2012). “Writing so people can hear me”: Responsive teaching in a middle school poetry unit. Voices from the Middle, 19(3):37–44.
Google Images.
McTighe, J. Seif, E. & Wiggins, G. (2004). You can teach for meaning. Educational Leadership, 62(1), 26–31.
NewTech Network. (2017). Retrieved from https://newtechnetwork.org/
Plaut, S. (2009). The right to literacy in secondary schools: Creating a culture of thinking. New York: Teachers College Press.
