How do we get our students to actively design rather then passively consume information? How do we prevent our students from falling into a creative chasm where they get lost in too much information? How do we create trail blazers? How do we get our students to unleash their creative minds? We teach them how to be independent learners. We provide hooks and discrepant events because they add to comprehension, encourage interest, and help with recall. We lay the framework and let them write the discourse.
The brain is a muscle, we need to train it just like we do any other muscle. We stretch before exercise, why don't we stretch before we learn? How can we teach our students to do this? Teach students to make great observations. Their surroundings often become background, they walk through it never stopping to notice the subtle changes that occur daily. They neglect to embrace the vast differences and similarities of behaviors and actions occurring around them. A fun way to get their minds more focused is to place hidden objects around the room. Make them noticeable. Do not mention them and see if students do. Give a candy to the first student who does. Then add more and change them and students will begin to look for them, making more observations.
Create situations for students to use deductive reasoning as well as inductive reasoning. Put an answer to a question on the board and have them work collaboratively to determine the problem, they will need to work backwards to problem-solve. Get students used to thinking out-side-the-box by presenting them with problems that can not be solved. Situations that challenge them to find a new way of using their critical thinking skills. To discover that the path is more important than the destination. All learning is based on prior knowledge, we need to turn that prior information on its head and create experiences that challenge these beliefs.
Optical illusions, brain teasers, case studies, and simple demonstrations like dry ice bubbles can change their way of thinking and open their minds. Students minds need to be blown every day, challenged every day, not always by teachers but by themselves. Teachers need to set up circumstances where students may be confident in their answer only to be wrong. To get frustrated and determined to figure it out. Once they feel safe to fail and take-risks this will become ingrained in their learning. They will accept failure as a detour and detours can be exciting.
For example, I put two cups of clear liquid on a table in the front of the room. One is water, one is water with mystery beads (these absorb light and become virtually invisible) I place a straw in both. The mystery bead cup, has a straw standing straight up while in the other cup the straw is leaning on the side. I have them guess what is happening. They can only look at the cups, not touch it in anyway. They are convinced the mystery beads are gelatin or I glued the straw to the bottom, I empty the water and show them the beads, explaining our eyes do not always provide us the correct information. Observations are not always right. How do we make sure what we see is the truth? We need to teach them to collect lots of data to determine this.
Using discrepant events removes zombie like symptoms. When they go home after an exciting, active, authentic day of science, sit down at the dinner table, and their parents ask "What did you do today?" they smile and explain that "Did you know..." rather than a shoulder shrug. Every time you hold back an explanation and allow students to discover it on their own you enrich learning. When you ask open-ended questions that lead to multiple answers and discuss them as a class you help spark interest. Science does not have one way of doing things, it is not based on permanence but on fluidity. Never let compliance, zombie thinking, rear its ugly head in your classroom. Allow students to take the lead and their excitement will keep them focused and engaged.
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