Recently, when visiting a market in Mexico City, I came across a woman selling molds to make ice. The ice molds were in all different shapes and sizes. Some molds produced flower shaped ice cubes. Some produced sea creature shaped ice cubes. Weeks later, after a lesson, I reflected on my floating tortoise shaped ice cubes and had a small realization about my lesson that day and more broadly, about education in general. Is most education just teaching to the mold?
This year, for the first time, I am teaching Conceptual Physics to eleventh and twelfth graders. With my MBE (Mind, Brain, and Education) training, I decided to record my lesson on light and its absorption, reflection, and refraction. Afterwards, I listened to the lesson and learned. From a standards perspective the lesson was solid. From an experience perspective, the lesson was engaging. I used light sticks to prime my students’ thinking about light and the physics question of the day asked students to imagine light from distant stars. From a scientific thinking perspective, the lesson was ice cold. While the lesson had consistently produced outcomes – a set of ideas very similar to the ones I taught, the students were not partners in the process of creating new forms/new molds for the knowledge.
In today’s world, education is very much like the conventional ice molds we all have in our freezer. Humanity’s ice cubes are remarkably uniform in size and shape. (Save for the large sphere of ice I once had to pay a dollar for in Montana). So too are our expectations for teaching and learning science. We start with consistently uniform cubes and assess against those very uniform cubes. Indeed, I started my lesson with a body of knowledge- my ice cube. The content had structure and form. Most teachers, me included, melt the ice down into concepts, content, vocabulary, images, and experiences. My lesson emerged directly from the meltwater of those concepts, content, vocabulary, images and experience. When I listened to my lesson recording, I realized that I was asking my students to reverse engineer my “ice cube” and collectively they repeated the pool of content, applied the concepts and they reassembled my ice cube.
Where did my students add value? Is teaching nothing more than assembly and reassembly of ice cubes of prescribed dimensions and form? Why did the shape of my students’ content and concepts have to form an ice cube identical to my own? Next class, the question led to an important shift in my teaching. Because I was teaching this content for the first time, I fell victim to the safety of the familiar. Melt and refreeze the ice cube. Now I needed to challenge the students’ creativity, curiosity and wonder.
Next class, I provided students a piece of phosphorescent paper and a bright light source and asked them to create an investigation that explored the properties of photons that the paper absorbed. Proposals from the students were immediate. Can we send the light directly and then through water and measure the temperature of the surface of the phosphorescent paper in order to see how much energy was absorbed? A second group wanted to investigate the use of varying-colored filters. Another group explored distance and its impact on energy absorption by measuring the time the image remained visible on the phosphorescent paper. Students were asked to conduct three trials and collect at least one other group’s data in order to write their observations (what happened according to the data), explanations (why did the observation happen), and interpretation, (how might this phenomenon be experienced in the real world?).
The questions and content they encountered were characteristically different, deeper, and differentiated than those I had covered just the day before. Students investigated different questions and therefore had to explore different terrains of knowledge.
The students broke the mold and I offer this as a postulate. If, after I melt and deliver my “ice cube” of content and concepts to my students, my students consider those concepts and return to me an “ice cube” of identical form, then I need to reconsider my lesson. If the results of my students’ work all look the same, have I achieved inspired teaching and learning? Students can create their own molds for the content they experience. Once I “melt” the core content, does my teaching allow for students to reshape that content into a mold different from my own or are my classes repetition rather than creation?
So much of education today is educating about and toward the known, not the new. Venturing out of the conventional mold that produces that conventional mass of content is challenging for me and perhaps all teachers. When teaching about light, there are hundreds of years of the known that pushes at all of us to frame lessons toward that generic mold of ideas. Once I challenged my students to take the melt water from my starting form of content and create a new mold that will freeze/shape that melt water in an entirely new and personal way, I introduced a new level of learning. If the goal of education and of science is to imagine beyond the universe of existing ideas, how do we as teachers get better at allowing our students to reform the ideas they learn in imaginative new ways? The answer is curiosity.
Curiosity is that fabulously good feeling that classrooms turn many learners against. By allowing my students to develop their own investigations of light, I released a bolder experience, deeper understanding, explanation and a greater authenticity into my science instruction. My discovery? The shape of ice isn’t always a cube. Let’s stop teaching science as if there is only one shape and form to the learning our students experience.