Translator: Tomás Guarna Reviewer: Gisela Giardino
Many people say that schools
are not teaching kids to think.
I think it's much worse.
We're teaching them not to think.
I'm a researcher in education
and one of my hobbies is to travel to schools
and gather all the questions that show up in the blackboards.
I love blackboards because they're like a way to immerse myself,
like a spy, into what's going on in the classroom.
It's a big window to what's going on there.
My job is to research how natural sciences are taught in schools.
From kindergarten to university.
To think of ways to improve it.
And in general, I find questions that are all very similar.
All cut from the same cloth.
I'll tell you some of them, and you'll see if you know them.
What's a cell? What are its parts?
You're following up to there, right?
What's nutrition?
How is it different to nourishment?
What types of forms can energy take?
How many layers does planet Earth have?
Let's see, I'll beat you with this one:
What does Newton's first law say?
And this last one, I bet
you all studied it
and very few of you would be able to answer it today.
What are the phases of mitosis?
How awful! Right?
What do all of these questions have in common?
They're factual questions.
They are questions that are answered with data,
with a fact,
with a definition.
Questions whose answers I look up in a book, copy it,
even if I haven't completely understood,
I'll forget them tomorrow, if I want.
Is it wrong for these questions to be in blackboards?
I don't think so.
In fact, it's good, we want kids to come out of schools
knowing what a cell is,
knowing the different forms energy can adopt.
The problem is not that these questions are in blackboards.
The problem is that these are the only questions
in our blackboards.
I'll show you an example of my favorite blackboard,
look at the extreme.
I'll read it to you, it says:
"With help from the book,
answer the following questionnaire:
Question A:
Do cells take part in the process of growth?"
What is the answer to this question?
That they do.
"Question B:
Do cells reproduce?"
Well, also yes, no?
And in teacher training, the scenario is quite similar.
Two years ago we conducted a research
at a very prestigious teacher training institute,
from the north of Argentina.
And we went there to see what questions teachers made in their final exams
to their students, who would be in the future, also teachers.
We sorted them and we found something awful.
71% of those questions were factual.
And a good part of them were terminological questions,
questions that are answered with a single word, a technical term.
I'll tell you and example so you can get an idea of what I mean.
This is a dialog between the teacher who is evaluating
and the student that's sitting for it.
The student said the word 'donate',
but the teacher wanted him to say 'transfer'.
They're talking about a process called 'electron transfer',
which, as you all remember, happens in the mitochondria.
(Laughter)
And then, the teacher says:
"It's not a donation, what is the correct word?"
Absolute silence on the other side.
"Let's see, I'll try to help, imagine I'm in Misiones.
I have a son in Corrientes and he needs money.
What do I do?"
"I send him money!" says the student. "I got that."
"Yes, yes, I send it, but how do you call that in a bank?
Trans..."
At that point, as a teacher you don't know what else to do
for them to say the right answer, you start using your body.
-"Trans..." -"Transport!" says the student.
He's about to kill him, right?
"No, I transfer. It's not the same to donate than to transfer.
It's very important for you to know the right words."
But what's most important of this investigation
is that when we interviewed those very same teachers,
we asked them what was the point of what they wanted to teach,
what did they want to achieve with these future teachers.
They all agreed in one thing.
We want to teach them to be curious,
we want to teach them to understand the world,
we want to teach them to think critically.
And despite that, even with the best intentions,
our classrooms, both in schools and in teacher training,
are full of factual knowledge,
of lifeless knowledge.
And this is serious,
not only because we're losing the chance of teaching
things far more important, more interesting.
It's even more serious because after years and years
and so many years that kids spend in school,
they learn, yes,
but what do they learn?
They learn that learning is repeating, even not fully understanding.
That learning is to recite.
And they learn that learning is a dispassionate activity,
something we do for others, not for ourselves.
So then ... what?
How do we change this situation?
Maybe the question is, where to begin?
Obviously, we're in front of a very complex scenario.
It has a lot of causes;
some of them are extremely profound.
But one of the things we learned in these years,
of working a lot with schools,
is that one of the keys is to focus on the questions.
To transform these factual questions,
these dead questions,
into questions for thought.
In case studies, in challenges,
in problems that present intriguing matters,
that make you want to answer.
I'll tell you two examples of how this would be,
two examples we use a lot with schools.
The first one is a classic question of primary school.
Factual question as it can get.
What are the characteristics of living organisms?
And then we all learned to repeat as parrots.
Maybe you can help me.
Living organisms are born, they grow, they reproduce, and finally --
(Audience) they die.
Well done. You've all gone to school here, great.
This is what first grade textbooks say.
When kids grow up,
we tell them pretty much the same,
we just add some new bullet points:
living organisms have cells, they breathe, they respond to their environment.
See how a question for thought would be
on this same idea of living organisms
having certain characteristics in common that define them.
So it happens that yesterday I was baking bread at home.
I was baking and suddenly I realize that, jeez,
I'm missing yeast.
So I go to the supermarket to get some new yeast.
I took it from the fridge
and when I was in the line to pay
a lady looked at me and said, as if it were a secret,
"Hey, take care of that yeast, or it might die."
I stared at her.
"Don't forget yeast is a living thing."
I looked at her and said:
"Madame, forgive me, do you have some sort of problem?
How can this yeast, this little paste, be a live thing?
This doesn't look like any live being I know of."
And I left.
I first paid and then I left. (Laughter)
And while I was walking home, I kept thinking.
What if that lady was right?
How could I tell whether this yeast is or is not a living thing?
See how now
the "living things are born, they grow, reproduce, and die" renders useless,
it's not even enough to answer this question.
Now they've got to think.
And then yes, with a purpose,
they study that living things
have certain characteristics in common.
And together with the teacher they find the spin
to tell whether yeast follows them or not.
For example, living organisms reproduce.
What about yeast?
One way to find out
is to put some yeast in a humid piece of bread,
to wait for a few days, and new yeast appears.
We're doing well.
Living things have cells.
Does yeast have cells or not?
One way to find out
is to put some yeast under the microscope
and you can see a bunch of cells spinning around.
Can we kill yeast if it's a live thing?
One way to find out
is to leave yeast boiling for a while
then put it back in a piece of bread and see there's no new yeast.
The question is no longer a dead-end street.
It's a gateway to learning.
And I'll tell you the second example.
When kids study sound,
a classic factual question is: how does sound propagate?
And kids learn what this textbook over here says,
that sounds travel through a medium,
which can be liquid, solid, gas.
This medium has to vibrate.
Sound travels in waves,
and in different mediums it travels at different speeds.
In the void, there's no sound.
They copy it, put it in a test, some understand it more or less,
end of the story.
And we're moving right along.
See how one question could be to think about this same idea
of sound having to travel through a medium that vibrates.
And for that you'll have to jog your memory
and go back to your childhood.
Have you ever played with homemade phones?
I bet you did.
If you didn't, it's an expensive and sophisticated piece of technology,
something like this.
If you never played, this is the time, when you go back home today,
it's fun, very addictive.
And in fact that's what happened to Agustín and Violeta, two siblings
who had spent the afternoon in the yard of their house
playing with homemade phones.
After so much playing, something caught their attention.
In order for the phone to work, the string had to be stretched.
If the string was hanging, it stopped working.
So they started arguing, why could this be happening?
And Agustín said: "I know, Viole, what's really happening
is that if the string is hanging, it's loose, it doesn't shake,
and the sound doesn't reach the other side."
But Violeta didn't agree at all.
"Not at all Agus, what's happening is something else.
When sound goes through the loose string,
it reaches the bottom -Ping! It falls to the floor and can't go up again."
So they stayed there arguing.
What can we do to know
who of the two siblings is right?
And once again the question
opens the way to learn and to explore.
I made this question
after working with primary school kids,
with homemade phones, and it always went like
it did with Agustín and Violeta.
I'd say that lots of kids, half of the class,
were always convinced that sound fell to the floor
and couldn't get up again.
So then,
kids are put in groups to rack their brains
to find out how to check
who of the two siblings was right.
And always, one of the groups comes to a solution
that is simple, but brilliant.
To put the phone in a vertical position,
standing up, with a straight string,
and to speak from below and listen from above.
If Violeta is right and sound can't climb,
what will happen?
They won't hear anything.
Otherwise, if Agustín is right,
the opposite will happen, they'll hear great.
I believe what's special about these questions
is that kids not only learn ideas, important concepts
about how sound works, the living organisms, or any topic.
They also learn reasoning skills
that they'll use their whole lives.
They learn to debate,
to solve problems with others,
to analyze data,
to distinguish between different explanations,
they learn to think.
But this idea of questions for thought
isn't new in education.
However we're very, very, very far
from it being a reality in all schools.
But the good news is that when this happen
the results are splendid.
I want to show you some of them.
These are the results of a program we've been carrying out
since 2007.
It's called "Schools of the Bicentennial"
more than 130 schools passed through it,
schools that belong to the poorest area of all Argentina.
In the beginning of the program, we put kids to a test
filled with questions for thought.
And it went horrible.
Very few kids could answer them.
After four years of working with each school,
with teachers and headmasters,
rethinking each of the topics of the syllabus
with questions for thought,
the results were the exact opposite,
wonderfully better.
Now almost all of the kids could answer these questions.
And the best is that they said they were super easy!
They weren't easy at all, they were super hard!
What happens is that they had been working that way
with their teachers all the year.
That's why when I look at this data,
I feel we have a huge opportunity in our hands,
but also a huge duty.
Because what this data tells us
is that change is possible.
Not that it's easy, it's not easy at all!
It's hard, it takes a lot of effort,
it requires a strategy,
it takes doing things the right way.
But it's possible.
And it's possible in real schools,
motivating the teachers and professors
we currently have in the education system.
It's possible with the kids we currently have in schools.
And it's possible in reasonable time.
Our schools today are teaching not to think.
But we have in our hands the chance, and also the emergency, I believe,
to help kids reconnect
with the sense and the joy of their learning process.
Let's fill schools with questions for thought.
Thank you.
(Applause)