The first step in making a choice is to have a choice.
If we want our children to take responsibility,
then we have to give them responsibilities.
–Alfie Kohn
Change your thoughts and you change your world.
–Norman Vincent Peale
Those Pesky Variables
As we gathered around the rear lab bench, I held up a familiar object.
“What do I have here?” I asked.
“A potato” replied the entire class.
“Right, it’s a potato.” I replied. “And what do we have here?” I asked.
A few girls closest to the bench leaned in so they could read, and Michelle replied, “Hydrogen peroxide.”
I nodded approval. “And what do we usually use hydrogen peroxide for?”
Again, a chorus of responses about cleaning and disinfecting.
“Which means that if you are bacteria on your skin or any other kind of cell, it is pretty toxic stuff.” I continued. “But according to the introduction, cells make H2O2 as a by-product when they engage in cellular respiration. So somehow, they have to be able to break it down in order to survive.”
I gestured at the screen. “How do cells to that?” I asked.
Several of the girls turned to read the introduction to the activity being projected while a few hands went up immediately. I slow counted to five inside my head to allow my screen readers to get a few hands in the air before calling on Phoebe.
“They turn it into water and oxygen.” She said.
“Very good.” I replied. “Cells turn the hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen, chemicals a cell actually needs.”
I poured some H2O2 into a small specimen bowl and then took a knife and cut a cross-section from the potato. “Now I want you to watch something.” I told them and placed the slice of potato into the bowl. It immediately began to fizz as the girls all leaned in to observe it.
“What’s happening here? What’s the potato doing?” I said.
“It’s dissolving,” replied several of the girls.
“No,” I responded. “That’s the key; it’s NOT dissolving. The potato is doing what?”
There were a lot of puzzled looks and furrowed brows as they tried to work out what was happening. Then suddenly, Ella’s hand shot up, and I pointed at her.
“It’s a chemical reaction!” She said excitedly.
“Excellent,” I replied. “It’s a chemical reaction.”
I paused to let this sink in before switching gears a little. “But unlike the chemical reaction we performed the other day, where we combined the baking soda and vinegar to make the reaction happen, what has to be happening here?” I said.
More expressions of thinking taking place, and when hands went up again, I called on Brittany.
“The potato has to be doing it on its own.” She stated.
“Right.” I responded. “But what’s the only thing a potato is made of?” I asked.
“Cells” came the collective response.
“And cells are made of?” I continued.
“The biological molecules.” They replied, nearly in unison.
“And ONLY the biological molecules.” I said firmly. “Which means what is causing the chemical reaction we are observing?”
A general look of enlightenment began to spread across the group, and Susan uttered sotto voce, “One of the types of biological molecules.”
“And THAT,” I nodded. “Is our next task. To determine which of the types of biological molecules controls a cell’s chemical reactions. So head back to your tables, and you have the rest of the class period to work on designing your experiments.”
They shuffled to their tables with their groups, and I started my usual pattern of pacing around the room.
“Mr. Brock!”
“Yes, Katie,” I answered, walking over to their table.
“How are we going to come up with a hypothesis for this experiment that isn’t just a random guess?” She asked.
“Do you have your biological molecules chart?” I responded.
“Yes.” She answered.
“Why don’t you look at it?” I told her. “With what you now know about chemical reactions, I suspect you can narrow it down to a logical choice.”
She started shuffling through her folder of papers, and I turned to see the next hand in the air.
“Yes, Maiya?” I queried, strolling over, noticing that she already had her biological molecule chart out.
“Would it make sense?” she asked, pointing at a spot on her chart. “That since carbohydrates are responsible for energy in a cell that they might be the molecule that starts chemical reactions?”
“The use of energy is a key component of chemical reactions.” I replied. “Do you think that makes carbohydrates a logical choice for your hypothesis?”
“I do.” She answered, looking concerned. “But…”
I held my hand up. “Remember, it’s not about whether your hypothesis is right or wrong; it’s about whether it is logical or not. Ninety percent of the time in science, the hypothesis is wrong, but we still learn from that.”
That seemed to reassure her, and by then, the next hand was already in the air. It went on like this for several minutes, quick little Socratic dialogues, moving from table to table. But then Ella raised her hand, and I knew from overhearing where they were at in the design process that they were about to enter the uncharted territory this experiment deliberately presented to them.
“Yes?” I said, heading over to stand next to their table.
“Mr. Brock, we can’t figure out what the dependent variable is for this lab.” She stated.
“Well, what is it you are trying to show?” I asked her.
“Which of the four types of biological molecules causes a chemical reaction.” She replied. “But what are we going to measure to show if there’s a reaction or not?”
I pursed my lips; it was always a challenge this early in the year getting them to figure it out for themselves. “What did we learn in our last lab that makes something a chemical reaction?” I asked her.
“That there has to be a new substance created and that it has to use energy somehow.” She responded, her tone not quite hiding her frustration that I was not simply telling her what she wanted to know.
“So look over at the potato,” I told her. “What do you think is going to be your evidence for a new substance?”
Ella studied the potato still reacting in the specimen bowl and then her eyes widened. “The bubbles!” she exclaimed, making the link between the foaming and the production of oxygen.
“Okay.” I agreed. “And how did we know that energy was used in the reaction between the baking soda and the vinegar?”
“It got colder.” Ann Bradley said, joining the conversation. Then she added quickly, “That means there must be two dependent variables!”
“And they are…?” I said, turning my attention back to Ella.
“The presence or absence of bubbles and the temperature of the hydrogen peroxide.” She answered confidently.
“Uh hu, not ‘just’ temperature,” I added. “But what?”
She looked puzzled for a moment and then an expression of pure enlightenment came over her face that I knew I would remember for the rest of my life.
“The change in temperature!” She stated proudly. “You have to measure the temperature of the peroxide before and after you add the biological molecule to it!”
“Excellent!” I told her, then walked on to the next waiting hand.
To Learn by Doing
Up to this point, I have quite deliberately remained silent about describing what I think good teaching looks like because I do not think that the educational process can simply be reduced to technique.1 As the reader may recall, that is one of the fundamental errors that arises from the Cartesian approach to education, and any detailed description of good teaching earlier might have misled the reader into believing that an educator only has to act or behave in a certain specific way and then he or she will automatically be authentically engaged in the classroom. I wished to avoid encouraging that error.
However, I do think an “ecological” paradigm for education has to involve some understanding of a “how,” and I believe teachers who practice the three properties of authentic engagement outlined in Part I will do something fundamentally differently in their classrooms. But to see and understand how and why the act of teaching would be different in a good teacher’s classroom, we need to examine some epistemological issues we have not yet explored. Basically, we need to talk a bit about the mind.
The human mind, of course, is considered by many to be the most fundamental of our brain’s emergent properties, and while I am at heart a hard-core neuroscientist, I do recognize the value of employing psychological concepts and metaphors for understanding how the mind works when it comes to understanding the “how” of good teaching—just as long as we keep things grounded in the way the brain actually works. To quickly recap, then, when the brain interacts with its environment, this input and its processing causes the cellular components of the brain to reconfigure, altering both the number and types of connections between neurons and the frequency with which they communicate with one another. This alteration then affects the flow of electrical and chemical signals between the various structures and parts of the brain, and the mental properties–the “mind” we experience–emerges from this flow accordingly.2
What this means for the purposes of this discussion is that as the brain interacts with its environment, the mind develops cognitive tools–what I am going to call interpretive mechanisms–for making sense out of the brain’s perceptions (e.g. a newborn starts to translate hairy moving objects that lick and bark at it into “dogs”). Then, with each interaction, the mind that emerges develops increasingly more complex interpretive mechanisms (e.g. when water is poured from a short into a tall glass in front of a child, it looks like there is now more water to someone under the age of seven; while an older child realizes that the amount is still the same).3 Eventually, as these steadily more complex interpretive mechanisms increase in number and the brain continues to reconfigure its neural pathways in response to experience, the mind that emerges begins to use its interpretive mechanisms (e.g. that certain symbols are words) to construct what I am going to call operative mechanisms (e.g. language) that are capable of assembling paradigms of meaning about the world (e.g. literature).
We, of course, have a term for this process: stating the obvious, we call it “learning.” But the fact that the mind learns in this particular fashion means that effective teaching becomes about the “continuous reconstruction of experience” into ever more faithful translations of reality,4 and the implications for education are clear and obvious (and provide sound biological grounds for the classic notion of the liberal arts): expose children to as much and as many types of experiences and ways of looking at the world as possible, and the brain will build the necessary neural pathways to produce the interpretive and operative mechanisms the mind needs to cope with and make meaning out of those experiences
Yet, how best to accomplish this exposure? Are there ways of teaching that are better at this process than others? That produce the changes that are most beneficial and effective, the best learning? I’ve already clearly suggested that the answer is “yes,” and in the case of interpretive mechanisms, the kind of teaching best able to promote learning these mental tools is self-evident. It must be experiential because–to use the example from Piaget’s work–for children to learn to recognize that the amount of water in a tall and short glass are the same, they must repeatedly have poured water back and forth, measured how much is in each glass, etc. until their brains have built the necessary synapses to figure it out. Students must spell words, count oranges, hear sounds–they must do–before their minds will ever translate certain stimuli to mean language, others to mean numbers, and still others to mean music. The mind’s interpretive mechanisms are exactly that: how we make sense out of our perceptions of the world; hence the only way to learn them is by actually practicing the act of making sense out of something until we can.
But operative mechanisms seem different. Unlike interpretive mechanisms–which are, after all, simply skills for making single judgments (a child either recognizes that the letters b-l-o-c-k mean an object of a certain shape or they do not)–operative mechanisms can be used in a variety of ways to produce a variety of meanings. For instance, if a student uses the basic operative mechanism of writing with a set of words, he or she might write “A dog is cold and brown;” they might write “And a cold dog is brown;” or he or she might even write “Cold is a dog and brown.” In each of these sentences, this student would have correctly used the same operative mechanism on the exact same words to produce completely different meanings–from communicating a generic observation to making a poetic claim–and this same variability holds true for every operative mechanism from simple arithmetic to architectural composition. Therefore, with operative mechanisms, we have to wonder whether it even makes sense to speak of a “best” approach to teaching them in the same way that we could with interpretive ones.
However, a moment’s thought makes clear that the best way to teach operative mechanisms is exactly the same as the best way to teach interpretive mechanisms–just do it. In both cases, the emerging mind can only change because of how the brain interacts with its environment. Hence, if the only real way children learn how to construct judgments about perceptions (interpretive mechanisms) is to keep translating experience into coherent notions until their brains operate in the world effectively, then unquestionably the only real way children likewise learn how to use knowledge to make meaning (operative mechanisms) is to have them repeat this process until their brains operate effectively in this manner as well. As educator Alfie Kohn nicely illustrates this truth, “kids learn to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.”5 Hence, students must employ operative mechanisms in order to learn them, and therefore, the best teaching is that which engages children in actively using them.
What we must do, then, as educators is immerse students in actively employing their minds to construct the knowledge and skills we want them to have, either from scratch if their young enough or out of the raw material of their own direct experiences and memories as they get older. We must train children to discover concepts and acquire knowledge for themselves rather than passively receive it, and we must engage them in thinking critically rather than merely knowing critical things. We must create the conditions wherein students actively participate in unfamiliar (i.e. stressful) experiences and reflect with deliberation on the value and meaning of them in order to turn these experiences into new (to the child) knowledge about the world.6 Hence, we must make kids strive to write their own “textbooks” in place of reading someone else’s and to live their learning rather than observe it like some spectator.
Yet that can only happen if the real “stars” of what Stuart Palonsky has called “900 shows a year”7 are no longer the teachers. As educators, we must stop playing the cliché of “the sage on the stage” and start, instead, asking with each lesson planned and every action taken, “Who is really working here? Who is really changing because of what’s happening in this clasroom?” and then adjust matters to ensure that the answer is always “the children.” We need to start making what the student does the dominant focus of our professional self-reflection, and our teaching needs to be about the children applying ideas in ways they never have before to situations without preestablished explanations. When we do so, education can stop resembling a trivial paint-by-numbers project, and it can start looking more like…well, like my experience with Ella: demonstrating a cognitive tool in a new situation and then turning her loose to master for herself a broader outlook on the world. Thus, what our understanding of the properties of the mind that emerge from the brain’s functions ultimately tells us about our task as educators is that to teach well is to create ways to immerse our children in what we want them to learn and then to make ourselves dwindle steadily away until we are nothing but educational phantoms. As Lao Tzu once said, “a good walker leaves no trail.”8
To accomplish all this dwindling, though, will take a lot of love, guidance, and support along the way. After all, there does need to be a little P.T. Barnum in every teacher.
Light a Candle 