The “Ah-ha” Moment Revisited
Fourteen years later. Small urban all-girls school in Baltimore.
Two sections of biology. One section of senior electives (genetics & anatomy), and one section of AP Biology—for which, thank the Heavens, I am fully qualified.
It is 2nd Period on a lovely early May day. Things are going per usual….
A chorus of “Mr. Brock!” erupted across the classroom and not for the first time, I wondered silently how so many groups could manage to have questions at exactly the same time. I flashed my hand signal at each group to let them know what order I would come around and then walked over to where Chris, MariaLisa, and Dasha were working.
“Mr. Brock, I’m still confused about the positive control,” said Dasha. “Why do we need ‘before samples’ of soil from our plots?”
I signaled to the other two that they should pay attention to this as well and stepped over to the board. I sketched a quick graph.
“Let’s say this first bar on the graph is your negative control and this second one is your independent variable. What would this graph say about your hypothesis?” I asked.
The three of them studied my sketch for a moment.
“It would confirm it,” replied Chris.
I then drew two additional bars on the graph to represent possible data from samples taken from before they applied their variable. I made the height of the bars nearly identical to the first two.
“Now what does this graph say? What does knowing the population of bacteria before you apply the fertilizer tell you?”
All three looked puzzled, and then Chris’ eyes widened.
“There were already more bacteria in the fertilizer plots to begin with!” She declared.
“Meaning?” I asked.
“That the fertilizer didn’t do anything to the bacteria.” She answered.
I nodded approval. “And that, Dasha,is why we need a positive control; to see if our experiment even worked in the first place.” I gave them a “next question look.”
Chris just had a clarification about one of their experimental steps, but when I turned to MariaLisa, I could tell she was feeling anxious about whatever was troubling her.
“What’s up?” I asked her.
“Mr. Brock, I still don’t understand your feedback on our background portion of our report. You keep asking how the fertilizer might disrupt the nitrogen cycle, but I don’t get it.”
“Okay,” I replied. “Why don’t you get out a copy of your list of ingredients in the fertilizer you are using and let’s find the diagram of the nitrogen cycle in your textbook.”
I knew this would take her a moment; so I signaled that I would be right back and checked in with a couple of the other groups in the queue before returning.
“Ready?” She nodded. “So what is the key ingredient in the fertilizer that is related to the nitrogen cycle?” I asked.
“Ammonium.” She replied.
“All right. I now want you to find on your diagram where the ammonium is located.”
She studied the picture for a moment and then placed her finger between two of the different bacteria groups involved in the cycle.
I reached down and pointed at one of the groups.
“What does this arrow tell you ammonium is to this group of bacteria?” I asked.
“It’s their waste product.” She said.
“And what about this other group?” I queried, using my finger to highlight the arrow leading from the chemical to the next group of bacteria.
“It would be their food.” She responded.
“So when you pour excess fertilizer into the ground, what do you think happens to each of these groups of bacteria?” I asked her.
She puzzled over it for a moment.
“You’re making the first group live in their own waste and you’re over-feeding the second group?” She responded hesitantly.
I nodded. “So what do you think happens to the first group and what do you think happens to the second group?”
“I would think the first group would suffer, maybe even die, while the second group would use all that extra food to make more bacteria.”
Again, I nodded. “The first group has its population crash and the second group has its population exploded, which means when you take the fertilizer away….?”
“Well, the one group would be dead.” She replied. “But then the second group would no longer have its food from the first group….”
You could see her puzzling it out; so I gave that little extra push.
“So what happens without additional fertilizer the next time….”
I let my thought hang there, and MariaLisa jerked her head up, with a look of pure amazement.
“Oh my god, Mr. Brock, we’re turning them into ‘junkies’!”
I smiled. The “ah-ha!” moment never grows old for a teacher. Only now I knew how to do it deliberately.
An Ecological Paradigm: A Call to Authentic Engagement
So how do we create the conditions for the “ah-ha” moment?
If learning is an emergent property of a non-deterministic system, then perhaps we need to start by asking ourselves what makes these kinds of systems what they are. We have already seen that they are non-reductionist: that they cannot be broken down into their component parts and retain the properties of the whole system. However, the opposite is equally true: isolating even one component from such systems is effectively meaningless because it is the unique relationships between all of them that give rise to the system in the first place. Furthermore, because individual components are essentially meaningless in isolation from one another, there is an ethical element to these kinds of systems, a structure to their relationships that must be maintained to keep the system going. Thus, what characterizes non-deterministic, non-linear systems is a community of relationships functioning together as a distinct unit, where any change in a single connection or ingredient threatens to alter or destroy the identity of the system.14
However, what I’ve just described is an ecosystem, and I propose that when we recognize this essentially ecological character of the systems that produce learning, we quickly realize the way to avoid the pitfalls of the Cartesian paradigm and find a way to reform our schools successfully is to stop envisioning schooling as a “machine” to fix and to start envisioning it as an “environment” to restore. To see how this might work, we must first recall that in ecosystems, the health and vitality of a given environment depends on how successfully its inhabitants fill their respective roles—their niches. Trees in a forest, for example, perform their physical and chemical tasks in response to the other living things they encounter, and it is out of their authentic interaction in this web of relationships–their engagement–that the various properties of the forest emerge. But if one of these trees or other organisms in the web disappear or if something inauthentic arrives (such as the application of a pesticide or the invasion of a non-native species), then the emergent properties of that forest will change and, hence, so will its heath and identity as an ecosystem.
Of course, the implications for education are clear. Like real ones, school “ecosystems” also depend on the authentic engagement of their “inhabitants.” How teachers, students, and everyone else in a school choose to participate–to be engaged–in the relationships which make up that educational community determine all its emergent properties just as the interactions of organisms in the natural world generate all the characteristics of a forest or wetland. The quality of the learning, the safety of the classroom, the success of the graduates, the well-being of the larger neighborhood–everything emerges from the degree to which all involved are authentically engaged, and where the children and adults are all genuinely “inhabiting” each of their respective “niches,” schools are healthy, productive places where “ah-ha” happens regularly.
Yet one individual has a greater degree of impact on this health and productivity than any other “inhabitant” of an educational community, and that is the teacher. Like a keystone species, he or she occupies the niche that informs all the relationships involved in the learning environment, and thus, the authenticity of his or her engagement plays the single most pivotal role in deciding the success and fitness of the instructional “ecosystem.” A teacher’s “identity and integrity”15 are the very heart of education, and where his or her full engagement with students is lacking or–worse–inauthentic, then the consequent environment is not one where much genuine teaching or learning are going to happen. Hence, while schools need all their “inhabitants” to be authentically engaged to function at their most effective, they need their teachers’ authentic engagement to function effectively at all.
Again, the implications for education are obvious. If we want a system that finally works, we must increase how authentically engaged our teachers are in their classrooms by diagnosing and fixing how well they are inhabiting their “ecological” roles in the first place. But to do that, we must enter “the tangles of teaching”16 using a paradigm that sees education in environmental rather than mechanistic terms, and that is the purpose of this project.
Specifically, I will focus on what it means to be an authentically engaged teacher (since that is the aspect of an ecological paradigm with which I am most familiar), and what I want to suggest is that authentic engagement in teaching involves three critical things: 1) embracing the role of co-learner in all educational situations; 2) generating appropriately intimate rapport with students; and 3) employing a full understanding of the tension between the brain’s plasticity and its hard-wiring. Using learnings from my own 30 years as an educator, I will be exploring each of these qualities in more detail in Part I of this project, looking at what a teacher with these properties can accomplish in Part II, and examining the challenges of being such a teacher in our society in Part III. I hope in so doing to provide a vision of education that can help replace the inadequate one we currently have, and I hope thereby to contribute to repairing some of the damage it has done. We have an obligation as educators to be the best teachers we can be, and in what follows, I hope that my words might enable those of us in this profession to meet that challenge better. I believe our children deserve it.
Light a Candle 