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.