“Does this mean that I never tell kids the answer?”
I occasionally facilitate professional development workshops for teachers as part of the Next Gen Science Exemplar System (NGSX), and in them, teachers ask questions like this one a lot. A central aim of these workshops is to help shift science classrooms from places where students learn about science ideas to places where students figure out science ideas. It’s a shift that often means letting students wrestle with ideas for much longer than most of us are used to.
For many teachers, this is a risky shift. What if students can’t figure it out? Or worse, what if students get it wrong? To let students voice misconceptions and NOT correct them goes against our deepest teacher instincts. What if they’re entrenching misconceptions on our watch?
Furthermore, figuring out is messy and time-consuming. As one participant put it, “If I just tell them, it will take me twenty minutes. If they figure it out, it might take them a week.” With pressures to have students score well on standardized tests, we feel responsible for covering any ideas that might appear in a test question. The stakes are high.
So what do we tell the teacher who wants to embrace these shifts. Do we never tell students “the answer”? If we do tell them, how do we know when?
My current way of thinking goes like this: We should be ready to give kids the lecture/presentation when they ask for it.
Asking For It
Imagine a classroom where the teacher stands at the board at the beginning of class and says something like this: “Good morning, everyone. Today we’re going to talk about the electromagnetic spectrum, one of the most important ideas in science. It can be used to understand everything from X-rays to sunburns to the beautiful colors of flowers. It even explains how your cell phone works. Your objective in today’s class is to be able to compare the different parts of that spectrum and explain what they have to do with wavelength. Let’s begin with radio waves … “
Now imagine another classroom where students have been asked to explain why the Earth doesn’t get unlivably cold at night when the sun is no longer shining on it. After all, the dark side of the moon is frigidly cold. Why doesn’t the Earth cool down like that? Students draw diagrams of their ideas, but they get stuck. The teacher asks what they already know, and the students say, “Well, we know that both the Earth and Moon are warmed by the Sun. That’s why they get warmer during the day. And the earth does get colder at night. Just not as cold as the Moon. What we can’t figure out is why they cool down in the first place.”
The teacher in that second classroom listens for a bit, and after a few probing questions, calls the class together and say, “It sounds like we agree that energy from the sun is what warms the Earth and that that energy somehow leaves the Earth later.” Students nod. “But it sound like you’re stuck on what that energy is really like. I mean, what really is sunlight?” The room is silent. Now that the question’s been posed, nobody really knows. “Would it be helpful to know what sunlight is?” Some nod. “Well, I have some information on that. Would you like me to tell you?” Students nod, more vigorously this time. Some exchange relieved looks. “Well then, why don’t you take your desks by the whiteboard?”
Giving the Answer
Even if the teacher in the second scenario gave the exact same lecture, the students’ experiences would be profoundly different. For those students in the second scenario, the teacher didn’t have to explain the purpose of a lecture on the electromagnetic spectrum. It arose out of a student need. The context was self-evident. The teacher was giving students something that, a few minutes before, they’d decided that they really needed.
We don’t have time for students to figure out everything. And even if we did, that wouldn’t be the best use of their time. There will always be value in explaining important ideas. Which ideas should students figure out, and which ones should we give them so that they can figure out something else? That all depends on the context, the students, the teacher.
It’s not that figuring out as a way of learning abolishes the lecture. Rather, it gives the lecture purpose. From the student perspective that lecture means something. It’s now a valuable asset, something they can do something with, rather than an end in itself.
When do we tell kids the answer? I think it’s when they realize that they need it.