Teaching Kids About Change
Over the past couple months I have been working with teachers and other people involved in education across Maine on the question of how we can do an even better job of teaching science. Everybody that I talk to agrees that we should be giving kids the tools and know-how to think about whole systems, rather than just knowledge about a bunch of scientific facts. Everybody also agrees that teaching about systems means teaching about change. Unfortunately, everybody also agrees that this is hard.
Heck, teaching about change is even hard to think about. Sarah Nelson and I attended a meeting up around Unity, Maine, last week and got to thinking about this problem on the drive back. If you were going to pick someone to have in the car with you while your mind began working over this question, “What does it mean to teach about change?,” Sarah would be the person you’d want with you. She is a Canon National Parks Science Scholar, associated with the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Environmental and Watershed Research, who has spent most of the past eight years looking at changes in the watersheds at Acadia. She combines this rigorous research work with a real interest in working with high school students.
Learning to See
One thing that jumps out in front of any conversation about change is that you can’t teach about it if the students can’t see it. So, one part of teaching about change is teaching kids to be more skillful observers. To take a very simple example from our work in the intertidal areas around Schoodic, you can’t tell whether there are changes in the makeup of the local crab population if you can’t separate one species of crab from another. The same thing goes for snails, seaweed, spiders, butterflies, trees, and so on. Students need a basic foundation in biology before they can even notice change.
Beyond having the background training to know what you are looking at (this is easy with a lot of things — snails and crabs, for example — harder for others — mosses and flies come to mind), you also need to have the motivation and focus to WANT to pay attention enough to see differences. Sarah reminded me that, in our workshops at Schoodic, we have seen that this motivation and focus increases when students are engaged, first-hand, in the actual collection of the samples and data. For some reason, sorting through the stuff that you have collected yourself is much more interesting that sorting through stuff that someone else found.
The lesson that we can take away from this is that getting kids to commit the kind of attention necessary to even notice change in the first place is a lot easier if you get the kids involved, hands-on, in the sample and data collection. This can’t just be a textbook exercise.
Seeing Connections, Not Just Facts
But — OK — let’s suppose that we create the engagement and can train students to observe carefully. Will they learn about change?
No. Or, more accurately, they would do so only very slowly, wandering around and hitting a lot of dead ends. It would be a little like giving someone flour, water, and salt and waiting for them to fool around long enough to make good bread. The careful, informed observations are the ingredients. They are absolutely essential, but are not sufficient to help students develop a useful understanding of how systems change.
What’s missing is method — in this case the methods of working with, arranging, and aggregating the raw ingredients to see patterns and to generate hypotheses that can be tested. Put another way, students need an introduction to the key concepts associated with change — conceptual tools — so that they have a way to move beyond their observations toward an understanding of change.
Conceptual Tools– A Start at a List
A conceptual tool is a big, key idea that you can use to see things in a new way–to link observations and to see relationships that you could not see before.
As an example of a “conceptual tool” it would be hard to do better than Darwin’s introduction of the “theory of evolution.” Darwin came up with a way of seeing change that was radically different than the prevailing understandings of his time. Before Darwin, the focus in biology was on uncovering what were assumed to be immutable laws of form — a grand ordering of life in which the living forms were expressions of a deeper, universal order. Darwin came up with the very different idea that forms and structures changed over time, driven by natural selec-tion operating on differences caused by random variation. Darwin gave us a new lens through which we could see change in a different way.
Another important concept that can help students think more productively about change is “sustainability.” They will sometimes encounter sustainability in the form of a system that is in balance — an equilibrium system — but they can also encounter sustainability in systems that continually take in energy and dissipate it. The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is one example of a non-equilibrium system that has been stable and sustainable for a long period of time. You, and I, and other living creatures are other examples. Helping students master a comfortable, working familiarity with these ideas — stability, equilibrium systems, dissipative systems — seems like a core objective in any program designed to help students see and understand different kinds of change.
Here’s another example of an important conceptual tool: We send kids through most of high school giving them the idea that the rate of change is proportional to the amount of energy exerted. You pedal your bike harder and you go faster. Setting aside friction, wind resistance and such, if you pedal twice as hard, you go twice as fast. It is easy for kids to over-generalize the idea that systems are linear with regard to how they change. It’s a good concept, but it doesn’t work everywhere.
We should perhaps have students spend more time in rowboats. You move to one side, and the boat tips a little. You move a little farther, it tips a little more. But at some point, when you move just a little more, the boat tips over. It’s a dramatic state change, it happens really fast in response to only a small input, and suddenly you are in a new equilibrium state. Kids need to have a feel for that model of change that is just as sure as their feel for linear change.
Words and Sentences About Change
By the time that Sarah and I worked through this list of concepts, we were back at her house in Bangor and it was time for me to drive on back to Schoodic by myself. We didn’t manage to list all the concepts, and perhaps not even the most important ones. But I do think that we got a start on at least approaching this question of how we teach students about change.
Yes, we need to start by getting the students out in the field, working on real problems, collecting their own samples and gathering their own data. That is an absolute requirement, just like the flour and water in bread. But we also need to give them a conceptual toolkit for understanding change. It might be useful to think of this just as a “vocabulary of change.” What are the key words — the basic concepts — that need to be in this vocabulary for it to be functional? What are the key entries in a “working vocabulary” that enables a student to talk, think, and write about change in ways that are accurate and that can lead to new insight?
Once the students master a basic vocabulary, we could help them learn how to put the “words” together — how to connect concepts in ways that make sense, and how to avoid connections and “sentences” that don’t work. Given the vocabulary, we can move on to helping students master a grammar of change.
I am getting ahead of myself and ahead of where we are in this effort to improve science education. Let’s start with the vocabulary. What are the words about change — the key ideas and concepts — that we need to introduce to students in high school?