Hi! It's Paul Andersen. Earlier this spring Vanessa Hill
did a video on BrainCraft called
"What's The Best Way To Teach Science?" She talked about
the importance of problem solving and how she was making both educational and
entertainment videos. Then my friend Eric Strong made a follow up video. He said
"The most important thing when you're teaching science is not to tell people
what they don't know, but to tell them what they know is not the whole truth."
And I'll put links to these videos. But i've been teaching science for a couple
of decades. And so I thought I would throw my hat into the game.
What's the best way to teach science in my opinion? It's to do science.
And to summarize my motto it's this:
Don't Kill the Wonder! (and don't hide the practices) Now what's the Wonder?
The wonder is a look that you see on a person's face when they're
REALLY interested in a problem but they don't know the answer.
Generally you put your hand on your chin, you move your eyes to the side and you
give it serious thought.
It looks like this, or looks like this, or like this.
It doesn't matter how old you are. The Wonder looks the same.
And as a teacher I knew when I saw wonder in my students eyes
that I had a hook in them. That they were excited about
the content that we were going to cover.
And so the WORST way to teach science is to start by explaining!
You want them to have that curiosity and then follow that curiosity.
And a way to introduce that to students is to use the Wonder tube.
The Wonder tube looks like this.
And so what happens is i can pull down on the Red pom-pom
and the blue one goes up (so they seem to be connected)
I can pull up on the green one. That's also connected to the blue
which is connected to the red which is connected to the yellow.
So it's almost as if they're all connected in the middle.
So hopefully you're trying to figure this out.
The weird thing is if you pull it apart in the middle
it's not really connected in the middle.
And so what's going on? This is a lot like science!
We don't know what's going on on the inside.
But we're curious about what's going on.
That's the Wonder! And so if I were to start by
simply telling you how the Wonder tube works
I would kill the Wonder. It's the worst way to teach science.
Now you might say: "All you've done is made videos.
You've made hundreds of videos on science where you do nothing
but explain!" And that's totally true. But that's not what my classroom looks like.
My classroom looks the opposite of that. My classroom always starts with
good questions. If we're going to deal with light, for example,
I'll start with a question like this.
I don't know if you've noticed but in pictures like this space is black.
Why is space black? Now it's important that you think about that.
And that I don't tell you the answer to that question.
If we're dealing with photosynthesis I'll ask you this question:
Where does the mass of a plant that's growing come from?
And I want you to expose what you're thinking.
Or better yet let's start with an experiment!
Instead of giving you the equation for a pendulum
I'm going to have you look and
do experiments on the pendulum
to figure out what's affecting the period of the pendulum.
You should come up with that. You should answer that question.
Just like scientists have answered it over the last couple hundred years.
And so when I say don't kill the wonder what I mean
is that don't take away that curiosity in a science classroom
that's so important! I think we can do that in videos as well.
I think it's just a little bit more difficult.
Now the second part of my motto is this:
don't hide the practices. What does that mean?
When you're teaching science it's not the content you learn.
What's the most important thing?
It's the actual practices of doing science.
And so these are the practices of science.
These are what scientists spent hours and hours and hours
doing every day. And so when you're learning science
this is what you should be doing. Developing models..
You should be testing those models, analyzing data,
communicating that information with other people.
And so it's.. We live in an ironic time.
At a time where people are so excited about science
and new discoveries but students are not excited about their classroom.
And I think one of the reasons why, is that
what we do, is we tend to just explain all the time.
When you explain all the time what you lose is the Wonder.
So in the next set of videos I'm going to talk about these practices
and how you as a student and you as a teacher can use them
and bring some of that wonder back into the classroom.
And I hope that was helpful.