Minds of Our Own video, from Learner.org

Watching this video was both enlightening and amusing. Starting with the amusement, one researcher is quoted as saying (without a hint of sarcasm that I could sense) that they, miraculously, discovered about a decade ago [possibly a few decades now] that children have minds of their own. Really?

My first thought was that the researchers did not remember what it was like to be a kid. My second thought was that they also either did not have children of their own, or it had been a long while. My third thought was a bit more charitable in that they probably had been taught that when in school themselves and the video seemed on the older side.

But it still makes sense that this would have been the thought. If you think about the education system, at least when I was a child, it was based around the idea that children will learn if you just tell it to them. But children are not blank slates. Sure, we can give them some ideas, but we have to change what they believe. They pick up their own ideas as they learn. Sometimes we have to alter or guide their ideas, but they will have them.

A lot of good ideas were presented in the video. Our technology is growing extremely fast, and I think that many young kids, even though they grow up with it, look at it more like a magical feat than with any real understanding. Lights require power and if I flip this switch, that turns on the power. That's the general idea, but it does not allow any insight into how the bulb turns on, or why.

One researcher put it quite well near the beginning of the video: “If one cannot light up a light bulb with a battery and a wire, then everything built upon those basic ideas has problems.” If students do not comprehend and are not able to apply the knowledge they learn, they cannot truly use it. And that is, really, one of the biggest goals of a school; to provide a way for students to learn something they can use in life.

And this can be difficult when students struggle to hang on to their beliefs and ideas. The video had two different examples regarding vision and how the eyes work, and three different students who had erroneous ideas about that process. Two of the students insisted that they would be able to see an apple in a pitch-dark room. The idea, pointed out by the scientists, likely came from inexperience in a truly pitch-dark room. Most of us equate a completely dark room with our own bedroom in the middle of the night. So, if you do not realize that light still enters the room from different places, you might come up with the idea that, given enough time, your eyes can adjust to any environment, even one without any source of light. And yet, after experiencing a completely dark room, the two students still clung to the idea that, hopefully, given a bit more time they would have been able to see that apple on the table. The other student believed, after observing his own cat's eyes, that our eyes emit light to help us see in the dark.

These examples show how we tend to filter things out that are not important to us, and that we see what we believe we will see. The more solidified a student is on an idea, the harder it will be for them to let go of it.

This can, obviously, be a great challenge to a teacher. In order for a student to change their ideas, they have to see for themselves that the idea is wrong. And even then, the change can be hard. An instructor they interviewed, and helped to change his style of teaching, commented that it is difficult to let go of things you believe when you are still not sure of what you are grasping.

So how do we help our students make this change? That is a tough question to answer. One set of teachers they followed were using an extremely scientific approach to teaching their class. They guided discussion, but left the discovery up to the students. It is slower learning that way, but all the students they interviewed agreed that they knew the material extremely well. One teacher said that “it's not just important to have hands-on learning. It's important to have heads-on experience as well.” Students need to engage not just their hands, but their minds as well. And considering that students learn more outside of the classroom than inside (in the earlier years at least, perhaps throughout life for some subjects), we have a small, but important opportunity to help our students to learn how to learn.