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.