What are you trying to accomplish?

When we teach science, or any subject, we need to think about what our goal is and how to accomplish that goal. Do we want to tell our student a fact and have them memorize that for future assessment or use? Sometimes that is your goal and that is ok. Do we want them to understand the information and be able to take that information and apply, analyze, or even create new ideas or inventions? This is critical thinking. I would love to say that everything can be a big happy fuzzy inquiry moment, but that isn’t realistic. Sometimes you need to tell them something or teach them something without them exploring or questioning first. Your child needs to understand how to work a Bunsen burner before he burns the house down. You don’t need to understand how the yeast causes the bread to rise before you bake a loaf of bread. If your child is exploring how to maintain a flame in a zero gravity environment… we are going to need a little more knowledge, a knowledge that is best gained by exploration. The same thing goes for the child that will become a baker. It will help him be a better baker to understand how yeast causes the bread to rise, and what alters how the yeast will behave. He or she will probably figure that out via exploration. Every good baker does a lot of experimenting.

We want our children to be critical thinkers. They aren’t going to wake up one day and have those skills. It is important that we are fostering critical thinking skills in our learners. This means that we may have to step outside our comfort zone. I wrote about the 5E model earlier. I want to give you a little more information about things we know are working and a gentle nudge to try it out yourself. There was a study published in School Science and Mathematics in March of this year that spoke to this correlation between using an inquiry based model of learning and the level of “brain work” involved – my term, not theirs. [i] This study was on middle school students and what they found was if you want your students to do higher order thinking (again “brain work”) then you will be more likely to have that occur if you allow students to explore before providing explanation.  If you give students water and containers and let them explore, they are forced to make their own comparisons. As parents we do this all the time when our children are younger. You give your child a tray full of food and let them explore it and make meaning of it. As they age, we tend to move away and rather than allowing them to explore, we show them. Again that isn’t bad and it is sometimes necessary, but we have to balance that with other approaches in order to develop critical thinkers.

Your learner will never know everything there is to know, but they have better access than any previous generation to knowledge. Maybe what we want is to ignite their passion and understanding to create people who are problem solvers. Few artists pick up a paint brush and make masterpiece after masterpiece. They must explore their medium and understand more about the how and why. They discover more as they explore and gain the skills to create. The same is true in science. Don’t open a textbook and expect them to memorize everything. Don’t move from pre-planned experiment to pre-planned experiment without allowing them a chance to explore and construct their own knowledge. Leave them to their own devices and let them be explorers in one of the last frontiers, science. You may find their abilities are more than you could have ever hoped.

Stay tuned for my ways to transition some of your learning experiences to a more inquiry based approach.
[i] The Relationship of Teacher-facilitated, Inquiry-Based Instruction to Student Higher-Order Thinking.