Closing Conference Conclusions

So the Alberta Teachers' Association Science Council's Science Teachers' Conference concluded this weekend. It was held in Calgary for the first time in recent memory, and myself and my colleague Brian were part of the organizing team.

The first takeaway of the weekend was that being on the other side of the registration table is a vastly different experience. Problems arise and need to be dealt with, and the overhead view is quite different from what you get moving session to session.

The second takeaway is that volunteers are important. Organizers and programmers can design a wonderful set of speaker sessions but without enough volunteers A/V material doesn't get delivered to the proper rooms, giveaways never get handed out, and speakers don't get picked up at the airport.

That said, the conference was a fantastic experience, even though I only managed to make one session - that of University of Calgary professor Dr. Leslie Reid. Dr. Reid related her attempts to redesign her undergraduate geology course to move it more inline with Assessment For Learning and Focus on Inquiry methodology. These are the same things that many Albertan teachers are trying to do, except that Dr. Reid is carrying it out with 400 students in a university lecture hall.

Instead of attending sessions then, I spent most of my time talking with fellow conference-goers like Frank Jenkins, who helped define large parts of the Chemistry curriculum, and with whom I briefly chatted about the early efforts to reform high school science in Alberta during the 1970s. Bernie Galbraith, who received the ATA Science Council's Long Service Award, was in a similarly reflective mood.

A first for the conference was the organization of a Science Education Leaders Day where Science Alberta's Hyacinth Schaeffer and her group of Fort McMurray teachers talked about their efforts to create a school culture conducive to science education.

Next year, the goal is expand the circle of conversation, hopefully drawing in more post-secondary voices, as well as more French Immersion sessions and First Nations, Metis, and Indigenous perspectives.

Foucault vs. Education

We've attached  a link to an article applying the ideas of French philosopher Michel Foucault to education. Much of it is taken from his work on the underlying philosophies of prison systems, Crime and Punish, and it's somewhat scary to consider how similar the two institutions are - however, if you remember that the purpose of education is (considered by some) to be the development of the individual while that of prison is the rehabililation (redevelopment) of a corrupted individual, the analogies become much clearer.

There's certainly lots to consider about the subtle effects of the school system, but one of the immediate take aways is the suggestion that increasing persistance and sophistication of surveillance of students will result in an arms race between students and the administration. As schools take ever greater measures to observe and monitor their students, those students reluctant to be a part of such doings, will resort to greater and more underground efforts to avoid detection. Thus, there would appear to be a natural limit to how much policies such as lanyards and closed circuit televisions can curb student behaviour.

Here's the link: http://www.eden.rutgers.edu/~auderey/Applying%20Foucault%20to%20Education.pdf

Facebook is the New Outlook

Last week Techcrunch posted a story on the troubles of Microsoft in maintaining it's market position under the headline, "Facebook is the New Outlook". Granted, the Techcrunch article is a lot more about Microsoft, taking Facebook's status as the dominant communication platform among younger online users. This was something our colleagues over that The Daily Wenzel already speculated about.

Why is this important to educators? If Facebook is the new Outlook, where is your District positioned if it still bans student email?

Lessons from Google Chrome and the Changing Landscape of Science Education

As we mentioned last week, we were very interested in what Google Chrome had to offer. Since it's release, it has essentially been our default browser. The user experience has so far been similar to that of Firefox or Safari, but perhaps a little faster, a little more stable, but since we don't really do anything fancy with our browser, it's basically the same. However, Google Chrome has nevertheless provided us with an "Ah-ha!" moment. As part of their backstory, they mentioned how the nature of what a browser does has evolved dramatically over the last few years, and the inherent structure of a web browser was designed to do something different. Imagine the efficiencies, Google asked, if you started from scratch, knowing all the current things a browser had to do.

That idea became particularly poignant yesterday for two reasons:

1. The District server went down yesterday and our office was stunned by how little physical work we had to do. All of our correspondence had transitioned to email,  all of our referring documents were hosted on the server. Once all the face-to-face meetings were over, and we caught up on filing, there was little else to do other than old-fashioned pen-and-paper planning for the upcoming week. It was shocking how much had changed - five years ago the office would have been far more functional in the absence of online connectivity. For teachers in the classroom, the effect was more muted, but there nevertheless.

2. As part of our job, we are tasked with providing the School District with equipment lists to stock all new schools before they open. Since the District opens a new school almost every other year, the Science equipment list is something of a running item. I inherited my list from my predescessor three years ago, who last had to revise her list the year before. It is, and was, a pretty basic list of material, posters, books, beakers, test tubes, thermometers, chemicals, pendulums and so forth. However, within even the last three years, the numbers of smartboards in our District has mushroomed, and bluetooth connectivity has appeared in printers, smartboards, projectors, and laptops. Looking at the school start-up lists, I wondered if it was time to go digital? 

Certainly such a change cannot be made without consideration: can digital equipment such as multi-sensor handheld probes over a more diverse student experience? Are there physcial skills from more "analog" equipment that students are still required to learn? What are the effects of Jr. High students working in an all digital environment as they transition to high school and post-secondary institutions that might not have made similar changes?

Google Apps Follow-Up

Last week we gave an inservice on the potential uses of various Google applications for teachers and students. One of the teacher participant mentioned that it appeared Google was trying to create a seemless user experience to keep people within the "Googlespace". Little did we know how much of a reality this would be as Google announced it's new browser this week, Chrome.

Promising a smoother and more memory-efficient environment, we at Exploding Beakers are currently testing Chrome out. Chrome can be downloaded here.

We also know that graphic novels are a new area study for some schools and programs, and so we would recommend checking out the comic book that Google developed to explain how Chrome functions. What we liked about it was that it is a good example of how technical information can be communicated using the same techniques we usually associate with fiction. Check it out here.

Off and Running

Tomorrow we'll be at St. Brigid's School offering two professional development sessions for teachers: the first on video-conferencing and telecolloborating, and the second an introduction to Google Apps.

A brief outline is as follows:

Introduction to Video-Conferencing:
1. Brief overview of the two main uses of video-conferencing, the first as a chance to level the equality of access to different experiences, specifically bringing content to the classroom. Perhaps more rewardingly though, is the role that video-conferencing can play in furthering school-to-school projects.
2. The main system - our District chiefly uses the Polycom Video-Conferencing hardware and software, with stand-alone, portable, and desktop units in use at different locations.
3. The alternative - SMART's Bridgit software allows users to link up and share what's happening on their SMARTboard screens. Not really "video-conferencing" but collaborative all the same.
4. The potential alternative: Skype, or other voice-over-internet-protocol has the potential for some great one-to-one interactions.
5. Resources such as 2Learn.ca and www.CILC.org that promote video-conferencing and school-to-school projects.

Introduction to Google Apps
1. Setting up a Google Account and iGoogle.
2. Gmail, Google Calendar.
3. Google Docs - creating, sharing, collaborating on a document.
4. Blogger.
5. Google Lively.
6. Google Reader, RSS in Plain English as a metaphor for teaching in the 21st Century.

The Beginning of the End?

An interesting idea has been floating in the back of our minds this week, based on three separate incidents, two of which came our way via Google Reader and RSS feeds (something we point out, only because we are preparing a small presentation on Google Apps for teachers and administrators on Wednesday, something we'll talk about shortly), and the third based on a chance encounter earlier this month.

The first bit of news was that Amazon is set to offer a student edition of their Kindle reader, to tap into the growing demand for digital textbooks. Having dealt with some of the possibilities inherent in placing digital versions of texts in the hands of teachers and students, we believe that increasing the availability of digital textbooks will ultimately increase the number of teachers and students who take advantage of the manipulative and impermanent nature of digital text and use to craft more engaging, interactive learning experiences.

The other bit of news came from TechDirt, in which they mused about letters to the editor, and in fact the whole process of hard-copy letter writing in the digital age. One of the interesting aspects of the article was an excerpt from Vice Magazine in which the magazine complains about the lack of letters they receive, as compared to earlier in the magazine's history (presumably before email became commonplace). One of the oft-echoed complaints about "correspondence" in the Internet Age is that it does not translate into action, and in fact, masks a kind of passive consumption of media (as if it were somehow greater than the passive consumption of television). During the past year of writing this blog, we have yet to hear any feedback online. We are, both here and at The Daily Wenzel, to write our blogs in the middle of an actual geographically based community and often encounter people on the street who offer their comments. For the record, The Daily Wenzel, publishing since 2006, has received perhaps a dozen comments in that time, chief of which was a hard-hitting critique of their interpretation of philosopher Paul Virilio (see, Virilio vs. Facebook).

The last piece of the puzzle stems from an encounter with a pair of much older teachers who firmly endorsed the criticism's mentioned above. Modern technology, they offered, created isolated individuals - a point that we would agree with, though we were surprised at our surprise at watching them make entries in their paper dayplanners.

How will these teachers relate to students who arrive to their classes to with their Kindles and their iPhones looking to compose assignmnets online and then email them to their teachers?

The problem, as we see it, is partly as follows. If students are embracing digital technology to the extent that within five-to-ten years high school and college students will exist in world that is comprised almost exclusively of digital resources and digital communication, to purposely exclude oneself from this world is dangerous and, one might say, irresponsible. Yes, reliance on modern technology, as with anything, requires balance and guidance, part of what the teaching profession is meant to offer to students. Teachers need begin their engagement with students at the place where the students are, and then begin to move them towards a desire destination (hopefully arrived at through a combination of student goals, teacher goals, and government regulations). The teacher that stands imperiously at the front of the class demanding students to be at a particular location, claiming perhaps that they are holding the line on "standards", is facing a very hard uphill battle.

Many industries are facing difficulties in dealing with workplace cultures that span generations ranging from the so-called "Greatest Generation" of the Depression and the Baby Boomers, to Generation X and the Millenials. Unfortunately, it seems that in education, the stakes are higher.

The Paradox of Education

We are in a society that values the results of education.

We are a society that believes that education is the right of every child.

We are a society that believes education can unlock the potential of every child.

The role of teachers is to help maximize the potential of every student.

Research consistently points to the in-class impact of out-of-class problems related to immigration, language acquisiton, social integration, employments, diet, abuse, and notions of "class perspectives" on the role of the home in education.

Processes are already underway to extendthe reach of educational insitutions into the spheres, often in colloboration with health, welfare, and police agencies.

The conclusions that can be reached is that the best educational results can be obtained in situations where the educational system assumes control for all aspects of a child welfare, establishing a baseline of expectations.

This raises the spectre of the return to residential schools carried out on a grand scale for the majority of families.

If phrased this way, the above mentioned scenario is not only undesirable to parents and teachers, but reprehensible.

Some educators used to make reference to "equality of opportunity" relying on interventionist educational policies that aim to redress educational deficiencies stemming from out-of-school factors; i.e. schools with large populations weakk in reading or math receive considerably more time on these subjects, often to the detriment of others like history, science, art, and physical education, since the length of a school day is finite.

It has been suggested that the end result of this will be a kind of apartheid class-based educational system where students of upper class families are taught management techniques, middle-class students learn team-work and role-playing, while the lower classes are rewarded with lessons on following orders.

This then becomes the teaching paradox: if we can not stomach to support the best methods available to achieve our desired results, then what is it we really desire from our educational system?

How Deep Is Your Love (of Bias)

This past week has been dominated with sessions, discussions, and presentations at the ADETA e-learning conference at the University of Calgary. One of the common themes that routinely crops up is the comment that "Things have changed. Technology has stood the old paradigm on it's head." Often these kinds of comments are made in regards to various social applications and so-called "Web 2.0" apps, though the most succinct one I heard was made in reference to RSS feeds via the short video, "RSS In Plain English". Basically, the Plain English video said that in "the old model" (without really explaining what the old model was), the reader went out and found information, where as in the new model, the information came to you.

This is an important distinction and not just for web apps. There is a notion that basic educational processes are in need of significant change, now that information is freely available. The "old model" of education is one based on the following precepts:

1. Information is hard to find.
2. Information is hard to understand.
3. A teacher is someone who has already found and understood the information.
4. A teacher's role is to help others understand this information.

Essentially, this a picture of informaiton scarcity. The development of boards of education serve to define and train teachers, while the emergence of sanctioned curricula introduces the interesting wrinkle that not all information is equal, nor is all of it desirable. Textbooks help to deal with the idea that the information students are required to know needs to be gathered in one place for them, that they are lacking in the skills needed to process and evaluate the information on their own.

Many people at the conference here, have suggested that this is paradigm that new tecnologies have overturned. No longer do students need to be told what to learn, or to be limited to learning solely what's in the curriculum. Sort of a no more fences approach to learning.

However, hidden even deeper behind this is the basic idea that the process of education is about information transfer. It's been stated several times during discussions, and we've even said it in a previous post here on Exploding Beakers. To suggest that education is simply about the transfer of knowledge is to still rest on the image that the student is an empty vessel or blank slate that needs to be "filled up" by the teacher or educational agency. Listening to discussions where people are excited about the implications that new technologies have for education, and they all talk about the creative abilities they offer students. But where is the call for students to create new knowledge in curricular documents? This I think is the new challenge for educational reform, and one that truly places the emphasis on students and student learning.

RSS Feed

Can't believe I haven't added an RSS feed before, but there it is.

Microsoft Worldwide Telescope

Earlier today we downloaded the Spring Beta for Microsoft's Worldwide Telescope, their attempt to answer Google Sky. Our initial impressions are that while late to the field, MS has at least done a good job. We are quite enthusiastic at this point,especially the guided tours part, and hope to post more cohesive thoughts in a few days.

Download your copy here.

Science 2.0

Ok, forget the 2.0 moniker - hold your nose if you have to, but here is an interesting article documenting some changing work habits among academics. It's called Science 2.0, not really because it's a reinvention of the scientific process, but rather because it talks about the application of web apps to scientific endeavours in academic settings. The point to take away from this, potentially, is yet another example of how institutions of learning can try to use some of these tools, like wikis and blogs, to increase a students capacity to work with and learn from other students.

The Consumption of Post-Secondary Education

The following entry owes much to discussions I've had over with the folks at The Daily Wenzel and has been cross-posted with them.


Let us begin by acknowledging that the following rests somewhat on the ideas of Thorstein Veblen, Theodor Adorno, and Max Weber. You would also be correct to guess that the conversation revolves around "class", ie. "working-class", "middle-class", and "upper-class", though such labels bring to mind specific occupations and our talk deals more with social outlooks, values, or beliefs, independent of specific occupation.

To begin with, we believe in the value of studying popular culture. We believe that popular culture is an important vehicle for the exchange of ideas. We subscribe to the Journal of Popular Culture, although we are increasingly disappointed with the approach that the journal is taking to the study of popular culture. For years though, we have been unable to describe just what it is that makes us unsatisfied with it. Perhaps now we are a little closer.

Thorstein Veblen is noted for his ideas about the consumption pattern of social classes, specifically that people tend to follow their social betters. For example, in the nineteenth century, the houses of the rich had large rooms for receiving guest, while middle-class homes developed the parlour. Working class structures attempted to mimic this to the best of their abilities, given their often cramped floor space. Or, take kitchenware. The upper classes, it is assumed, eat meals off of expensive plates, and many families (of middle and working-class status) have special dinnerware (china) that they save for "fancy" occassions, where family members are dressed up, and elaborate, and sometimes expensive, food is served.

There is a crucial difference in the consumption trends between the social classes though, and that is the degree to which each class is able to make their wealth "work", that is, function as capital. For working-class families, much of the wealth is tied up in the family home, and generally not available as ready capital. Middle-class families tend to be to convert some of their wealth into capital in the form of stocks, bonds, etc., while the upper-class is assumed to have ready supplies of capital on hand not just for stocks, bonds, but also for business start-ups and such.

According to Theodor Adorno, there is also a difference in the relationship of these groups to popular culture. If we allow the division of popular culture into so-called "high-brow", tending to carry with it moral messages, or intellectual overtones, and "low-brow", popular culture that tends to satisfy emotional needs, it is generally assumed that the upper-classes favour popular culture that is "high-brow" and working classes favour "low brow", with the middle-classes enjoying a spectrum of both. Adorno was also one of the first to articulate the belief that popular culture (or what we might term "mass commercial culture" as opposed to "folk culture" both of which tend to be wrapped up in "popular culture"), could also function as a method of pacifying the working classes. Later writers on consumption, such as Conquest of Cool author Thomas Frank, and even in his own way, John Leland, author of Hip: The History, have suggested that richess of popular culture's emotional experience and the desire of novelty on the part of the working-classes, are effective ways of bleeding off wealth from that same class.

At it's heart, this kind of argument rests on the same sort of self-denial premise that Max Weber put forth. The so-called middle-class thrives under capitalism because capitalism reward self-denial in favour of disciplined investment. The working-class on the otherhand, fails to "get ahead" because it is too interested in self-pleasure. This is also typically the premise behind many of our rags-to-riches stories.

So, our question becomes, do these two social groups have different viewpoints on the purpose of post-secondary education? We would argue that there are (at least) two different social groups present in post-secondary institutions, those who view it in terms of self-denial and self-investment, and those who do not. To reference Veblen, for this second group, post-secondary education is not seen as a utility, but as a social goal attained by higher social classes. The proliferation of courses dealing with topics of popular culture, that treat it as an area of relativistic meanings and interpretations (a sort of atomizing of the audience) and not as the basis of praxis, enable post-secondary education to be consumed as novelty items and effectively bleeding off the wealth of students and student families.

Thus, the attainment of post-secondary education has generally been seen as one of the most effectives of social mobility, but we are increasinly wondering whether or not this remains the case, and whether more and more courses about popular culture are in fact undermining this effectiveness?

Those Who Can Teach, Those Who Teach Do

There is a very interesting conversation going on at Weblogg-ED, concerning the role of teachers as experts in light of a new term called, "produsage" from Axel Bruns' Blogs, Wikis, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. From the synopsis provided, and the ensuing conversation, one of the main points being made is that if students are to view teachers as experts in Web 2.0 tools, then teachers need to be actively engaged in using those tools themselves. This led to much discussion around the general notion of teachers as experts, a term many teachers appear to be uncomfortable with using to describe themselves, as well as to some debate regarding just what a teacher is an expert in - is it content area, information transfer, or both?

We would submit, at the secondary level at least, that teachers are, or need to be experts in both. Clearly, the difference between a scientist and a science educator is the expertise that the educator has in allowing/facillitating the transfer/gaining of science knowledge in someone else. Part of this process involves understanding not just what consitutes "knowledge" in a particular discipline, but also what "knowledge" is worth transferring in a socially constructed process, and what can be left for self-discovery. To do this, one needs a certain level of expertise in the content area one teaches. Modern staffing though, that only deals with full-time or half-time equivalents, makes this problematic and occassionally leads to scenarios where teachers end up teaching subjects they have no expertise in, solely because the timetable needs a teacher in a classroom.

Another wrinkle in this problem is that teachers need to viewed as experts in their content area by students, so that students can trust that the knowledge they are receiving is accurate and authentic. This becomes highly problematic in certain subject areas. As science teachers, we are very impressed with our colleagues in music, drama, art, and phys. ed, in that they are always talking about the non-teaching community activities they are involved with; ie. so-and-so is playing on this sports team, appearing in this production, or performing with that group, all of which grants them a degree of authenticity that it is hard for science teachers currently to match. When was the last time any of us was engaged in scientific research, production, or other activity related to our field?

One the ideas that we've been trying to develop and shop around here at Exploding Beakers is the idea of the Summer Teacher Internship, that would see teachers placed in science organizations for a week or two over the summer. So far it's just a dream . . .

Schooling is a Social Function

Supposedly, Mark Twain once wrote, "Don't let school get in the way of your education," suggesting that there is a difference between "school" and "education" even though most schools and school districts would define themselves as "learning" or "educational" institutions. Perhaps though, the idea that Twain had in mind, was that an education revolved around personal interests and experiences (a la "my education"), whereas a bureaucratic institution such as a school, has always carried with it certain top-down notions (i.e., the increasingly popular and derogatory "You got schooled"). A school, typically, exposes all students to a pre-defined set of experiences and information, while an education is a unique result of the personal reaction to those experiences and information.

As spring break draws to a close and the school year gears up for its final thrust, we have been thinking a lot about the role that social networks can play in "21st Century Learning". In the course of our research, second generation terms like "Web 2.0", "School 2.0" and "Classroom 2.0" have cropped up time and time again. Here are three good links that provide some interesting points on the whole idea:

David Warlick, "I'm getting Diigo"

Working Toward Excellence, "A Glossary of Classroom 2.0 Terms"

Now Is Gone, "The Four C's of Social Engagement"


We would agree with Warlick that the future of the textbook ought to be as some sort of nexus where students could engage with each other over. However, we would extend this idea a little farther, as we personally question the need for a textbook at all. In our opinion, Warlick's key idea is that students engage around the course content, which is usually contained within the textbook. The user experience within a social network, gives emphasis on personal choice to direct, and help co-create experiences, something more in line with Mark Twain's take on schooling and education mentioned above. The article, "The Four C's of Social Engagement" describes some fairly typical ways that businesses and marketing agencies are using social networks, and the question that we find ourselves asking is, what is stopping us as educators from doing the same thing?

Shifting Cultural Touchstones?

It would be very interesting to us here at Exploding Beakers to try an unearth commentaries from those who lived through the last major media shift - that is people who were around for the shift from an oral culture to a print culture. Did they moan and groan about how "those kids today with their books just don't understand the workings of Druidic culture like they used to? Why can't anyone recite Homer anymore?" By the very nature of the shift in medium, comments of the champions of the old guard are very hard to find nowadays. How many of us would be able to "read" the impassioned defense of the BetaMAX format its users probably made and recorded- on BetaMAX?

There is a story here, from USAToday about the general disconnectedness teenagers exhibit from their cultural antecedents. As an aside, we are intrigued by the timing of this discovery, as we were shocked by one of the questions directed to OSCAR-winning actress Marie Cotillard, while on the red carpet. The (very) young American journalist asked Cotillard, who later that evening won Best Actress for her portrayl of famed French singer Edith Piaf, that (and we're paraphrasing) since she [Piaf] had died before you [Cotillard] were born, did you know anything about her before beginning the film? However, this is also the central issue raised by the author of the article - that American youth are starting to live more and more in a cultural vaccuum, where the only history they are exposed to is in school history curricula.

In light of some of our earlier posts about the shift we are currently experiencing away from print and towards visual mediums like television and the movies, it would interest us greatly to see how these same students would have fared on subjects that are equally represented in both print and visual cultures. Much has been written about what was gained and lost in the change from an oral to print culture (primarily by authors like Marshall McLuhan), but it remains to be seen how the current process will unfold.

Stealing Ideas

If you talk to us long enough, or hang around long enough, eventually you'll realize that one of the things we are prone to doing is stealing ideas from one context and applying them in another. Today is no exception.

A few moments ago, our friends at The Daily Wenzel, posted a comment and article on the nature of criticism, made within the context of computer gaming. However, within that posted article was a link to another article on how to analyze computer games from a game designers' perspective.

What we found inspiring was the brief discussion on pacing and interest (page 3). We have long been fascinated with the way games such as World of Warcraft or even MySims contain segments of the game designed solely to instruct players in how to play the game. We've argued that teachers need to explore this more in terms of creating more student-centred classroom activities with a greater degree of independence. Furthermore, the way that these games give their players the illusion of unlimited choice (go anywhere, do anything), but actually constrain them to a few options based on prior accomplishments is again something teachers can learn from.

Thus, James Portnow's simple act of describing the methodical rising and falling action of pacing and interest in games offers a similar discussion point. As Portnow suggests, the pace and interest is design to climb steadily over the length of a game. A game is broken down into levels, and a graph of the pace and interest would be mirrored for levels as well, with a peak just before the conclusion. Overall, as each level gets harder, the graph would steadily advance higher.

Imagine you are planning your course for the year: how do you take into account the pacing and interest for your students. Typically we find it easy to imagine that for science classes, the pacing and interest graphs would be relatively flat, day in and day out, punctuated only by the occassional lab, and rising with the advent of the unit exam.

What we would like to propose is something that follows more a levelled game approach. Students are informed at the beginning of the year of some kind of problem to investigate or solve, that would combine elements of all of the various units that make of the course. Then, within each unit, students would engage in a variety of problem-solving activities that could ultimately be applied to their year-end problem. These activities could provide the near-end interest spike that Portnow says game levels should have - what we do feel is certain though, is that this spike should not (and could argue could not) come from a unit end exam.

More on unsupervised spaces

This is a follow-up to yesterday, as we didn't think we explained as much as we could have.

Students, especially high school students (who we have the most experience with), are very experienced and literate in the educational process, even if they rarely articulate it. However, by the time they reach high school, they understand a lot of the unspoken expectations and rules. for example, when students in a science class are instructed to follow a lab exercise in a textbook or set of worksheets, their expectations about the nature of school fall in place as such:

1. A teacher is not allowed to engage in any activity that could deliberately hurt me. All activities must be "safe".
2. An activity or lab would not appear in a textbook if it didn't work.
3. A teacher would not waste time choosing an activity to do if it didn't work.
4. If I follow the instructions, the lab will work.

These beliefs often operate to shortcut any critical thinking a student does as to whether or not the lab has actually worked. Time and again, we have seen students use the wrong material, or miss a step in the instructions, and therefore unknowingly contravening #4, but still expecting the result they achieved to be consisted with the one expected. In a way, this is similar to the teacher's presence on the playground, to whom the students defer for all of their problem solving and conflict resolution tasks. When the teacher outlines a standard problem and proceedure, the students expect the result they achieve to be the standard, regardless of whether it is or not.

When individual student lab groups develop individual lab problems, assumptions #2-4 do not come into play. Furthermore, a teacher who deliberately cultivates an impression of aloofness regarding the students' lab proceedures, can even undermine #1. More importantly is taking advantage of the following student misconceptions:

1. The teacher has a limited set of knowledge relating to scientific principles and experiments, but this set includes all principles and experiments related to the current course.
2. Student creativity is infinite.
3. It is easy for students to come up with problems or investigations not anticipated by their teacher.

Belief in #3 is not universal, in fact a lot of students have trouble with the independence implied in #3, for a variety of reasons. Conversely, a lot of new teachers believe in #3 and are afraid of turning students loose in a lab for fear it will highlight the teacher's shortcomings as per #1. However, while #1 is mostly true, #2 and #3 are conditioned heavily by student experience - hence the importance of talking to students about what they have done in past courses with different teachers. We have found that when given the chance to develop their own problems, independently of each other, most student groups come up with a range of only three or four problems, owing to the fact that they have a limited range of related experience to draw upon, and in most cases these problems a fairly predictable by the teacher. However, because the students have developed them on their own, their belief that the teacher can help them solve their problem is greatly diminished, increasing the need for them to engage in their own critical thinking.

All Work and No Play?

Thanks to BBartel, of Exploding Sink fame, who alerted us to this article via Twitter. It deals with the role of play in the development of young people (although it draws primarily on research of young animals). In reading this, we were reminded of an earlier post by our colleagues at The Daily Wenzel concerning a childhood game of theirs called "Murderball". In it, they attempt to highlight the importance (they feel) of unsupervised places for children to occupy and control.

We have always been somewhat sympathetic to this view, and in part, it fits in with some of our own (unresearched) notions of play. The presence of a teacher or parent on a playground or in a room, simultaneously reinforces notions of power (discipline and rules) as well as safety. Part of the point in the Murderball piece was the way in which children use unsupervised places to develop conflict resolution skills and teamwork. Another aspect of these places that intrigues us, is the opportunity it provides for problem-solving.

The article posted above explores a theory that unstructured play is a rehearsal of future skill sets, such as playing house or firefighter. Although some research calls into question play's ability to hone a specific future skill set, many seem to accept that it can enhance a general problem-solving ability (ie. mental agility).

One of our many (again unresearched) theories on student learning is that students are more likely to "learn better" when they find themselves in territory they can believe is unfamiliar and unique to them. While the creation of unsupervised spaces is a legal no-no, situations that minimize the teacher's role whether as safety-provider or rule-enforcer, do much to emphasize this. Just as students are forced to problem solve in unsupervised spaces, lab situations that are not developed by the teacher or textbook but student generated, can help to develop a sense of separation from the teacher, or other student groups if the problems are unique to each student.