Melina Furman
I invite you to close your eyes, and we'll do an imagination excercise.
Now, think of a good school,
a good school's classroom.
Done? Don't cheat.
Now open your eyes.
Does it or does it not look like this?
It looks very little alike, right?
Raise your hands. Who of you have ever been in a class that looks like this one?
Who of you feel identified with this scene?
All the audience.
And it doesn't matter where one asks this question.
In any place in the world, the answer is pretty much the same.
When one looks through the window of a classroom in any school
and in many schools in all parts of the world, the scene looks a lot like the one we see here.
There's something really bad we're doing with education and it's time to change it.
Look again at this picture of the little chests.
On one side we have the teacher that's pouring this waterfall of information over the children,
but look what's happening on the other side, with these children, these little chests.
On one side we have the orange chest, that, well, it sits on the first row,
it's really okay, with its eyes wide open,
and it, in some way, manages to enjoy this class and benefit from what the teacher has to tell,
and that's really good. The problem with orange chests is that, generally,
they are just a few, there are little orange chests in each class.
Look at the farther chests, the blue one and the red one.
We have, on one side, the blue and the red ones closed with four locks,
they don't want to have anything to do with school, after year and years of maybe failing.
And the most important and what worries me the most
is the great mass of gray chests, which make up for the majority
that spend hours and hours in school,
years and years of their lives without it leaving them much of a mark.
Or in fact, the mark of making it clear to them that learning is exactly that,
that learning is grey.
But who said school had to be like this?
Who said school couldn't be a space for innovation,
to learn to think by ourselves?
Who said schools couldn't be a space to have wonderful ideas?
And about wonderful ideas, there's a very nice book
that's called exactly like that, from a Canadian educator
called Eleanor Duckworth, and this author told
the story of Kevin. Kevin was a very young boy
whom the teacher gave a set of straws to--drinking straws-
like these ones of different colors and sizes,
and before he was told what he had to do, Kevin looked at the teacher and said:
"wait, I know what I'm going to do with this, I just got an idea."
He played for a while, and ordered them from shortest to longest and looked at it triumphant.
Kevin had had an idea. It was small and simple,
but it was his, he had thought of it by himself.
He had had a wonderful idea.
And for more than ten years we've been thinking and working
in different spaces with a group of people that is, luckily, constantly growing.
With scientists, educators, people enthusiastic to change schools,
trying to better... to make better schools, and in particular the science that is taught in them.
What does this science thing have to do with wonderful ideas?
Well, a lot.
Because the scientific spirit has, on one side, a search component,
a curiosity one, of permanent exploration,
and, on the other, it has a rather analytical component, a more logical one,
more related to systematic thinking.
When these two components merge, these two halves find themselves,
the magic happens and then the ground becomes fertile enough
for wonderful ideas to grow in lots.
These years we've learned many things, working with schools,
with principals, teachers, children, parents.
I'd like to tell you some of those things today.
And many are good news.
The first good one, I think,
is that at least in paper, we all pretty much agree on the fact
that school needs to be a space to learn to think critically,
to learn to innovate.
We know what is there to be done.
If one reads Argentina's classroom syllabus
and those around the world, I'd say, one will find things such as that school
has to motivate the habit of curiosity, the ability to ask oneself questions,
that there have to be situations in which there's debate,
that school has to be there for that.
However, when we look through a classroom's window, we see scenes that look a lot like those everyone raised the hand to before.
The second good piece of news is that to soak classrooms
with scientific spirit, to make science with children,
for there to be investigation in classrooms, questions, discussions,
there's no need to speak in riddles.
You don't need a pretty sophisticated laboratory as this one either.
All the contrary. There's no need for a clean slate.
We need to think in what we've been doing and what we've been doing right
and give it a spin, but one we've though of before, of course.
A strategic spin.
And I want to show you some examples so you see what I'm talking about.
That I'm talking about something pretty within reach, nothing too esoteric.
This is a photo of first graders of a school here, in Chaco.
They're doing an activity which is done in all first grades of the country, I'd say.
Very common. Teachers send the children to gather things in their small jars
down the schools yard or garden, like these children are doing.
Back to the classroom, the teacher asks them to classify them.
Some are living beings and others are non-living elements.
They place them in this poster and up to that point everything's fine.
What is the spin we started to think with the instructors
and teachers for this class to be useful,
not only to explain what a live being is, which is fine,
but also to teach something very important: to debate ideas?
And to debate since we're very little.
Because we can start to build arguments
and learn how to debate with one another since we're a few years old,
as you'll see now.
So then when the teacher adds to the things the children bring
some more polemic things, less obvious, like an apple,
a small tree trunk, a dried leaf, discussion arises.
We'll try it now: is an apple (imagine I have it right here),
a living or a not-living element?
Let's see, raise your hands those who think it's a living being
so I should put it in this side of the poster.
There are some hands over there, many of them.
Who thinks an apple is not living being? I'll put it in these side of the poster.
The other half. I think the opposing side is the winner, in this case.
Well, as it happens in this audience, it always happens in first grade of all schools.
There are always those who stand for one or the other
and things get tricky.
And what's important stops being the answer
but rather which arguments do I use to counter the other one's,
to discuss and defend what I believe in
and something even more important:
what arguments do those who think differently than me have?
And always, always, and this never fails, at some point one of the children
comes up with a wonderful idea,
and says: what if we make a third group?
A group of doubtful elements, or, like in this image, a group called "I don't know yet".
And in those "I don't know yet", children learn
to work with uncertainty, as scientists do, there are some things we still don't know.
They also learn that to answer the questions we have
it's not enough to generate what we know here and now.
We have to keep searching, learning, studying.
And now I'll show you a scene of some children
a bit older, of fifth grade, working in the province of Buenos Aires.
And in this scene the children are studying
the physical properties of sound, in a class about sound.
And in the moment the teacher stands up and tells them, well, that sound is
a wave that travels through different mediums
and at what speed it travels over each one, that the children should write down
and tell it in a test, as they do traditionally.
What we did was something a bit different, that made the class
take off and allowed to teach, again, other things.
Now, the children, had to say in groups...
they had to imagine ways to answer
in which mediums can sound travel and in which ones it goes faster.
And in the different groups, it always happens: wonderful ideas come up.
Like these kids who decided to test
what happened to sound from a vibrating tuning fork,
if it was capable of traveling though a path of solid matter such as aluminum paper.
And one of the most interesting things of all this
is that these scenes of children making science in the classroom,
are not isolated scenes.
It's something that can be done in all schools
in reasonably enough times.
And here I want to show you the results of a program called "Escuelas del Bicentenario" (Schools of the Bicentennial).
It's a program for primary schools all over Argentina.
It works with schools... more or less 150 schools in seven Argentine provinces
and reaches over 45 thousand children.
They're schools specially within very vulnerable contexts,
of high indexes of educative vulnerability.
At the beginning of the program, in 2008,
we made the kids in fourth grade take a test,
a science test.
But not just any test.
First of all, it was test of things the kids should've already learned
before from first to third grade, so that means that in third grade they should've been ready to answer them.
And the sort of questions we could think of like...
precisely, questions for thinking.
They had to suggest experiments, invent measuring artifacts,
solve everyday situations.
And what we saw in the beginning was that there,
as the graph shows, only 34% of the children
could solve this. This small part of the pie chart that's in blue.
Very few children in fourth grade could answer this test.
Three years later, after much training
and accompanying school's teachers and directors in the road
towards this new way of working, that I've been telling you about.
When we started making science in the classroom with the kids, the thing turned on itself like a glove.
And what we saw was that the new children in fourth grades in this same schools,
Could now answer this thinking exam.
There, in blue, we can see the 84% of the children
could answer a thought-inducing exam.
And some of the greatest things
that happens when one works with that model, is that many children
start making their own investigations,
making themselves questions and trying to answer them.
And this is Ignacio's case.
Ignacio is a child in fourth grade of a primary school in the city of Mar del Plata,
where we're carrying an investigation with one of my students
who's called Florencia di Mauro,
and after some months of work, Ignacio started bringing
more samples of the things which had occurred to him to investigate on his own,
with his friends, with his family.
And this was the first one: the first thing Ignacio wanted to know
was who was the fastest -- the snail or the worm?
He wanted to know that.
And here we have Ignacio's notebook, and then...
his scientist blog, because he took notes
as we had taught him scientists do.
And then, Ignacio wrote down what would he compare the motions with,
what materials would he use, how would he measure who finished first.
He did something very interesting too, which was to state all possible results
before starting the experience, as we had taught him to do.
So he said: well, maybe the snail wins and then the worm comes after,
or maybe not, the worm gets there first and then, a bit later, the snail arrives,
or it's a draw.
And finally he did it, he measured, and you're probably wondering what the result was,
and it turns out the worm was... it looks like it took a bit of an advantage over the snail
and he came stoked to tell us. But beyond the result,
what's important, I insist, is the mental pathway of being able to imagine
how to respond to things that intrigue us, the things we want to know.
And another of the things that apparently kept Ignacio sleepless
and that could revolutionize the industry of cosmetics (attention, here)
was: What gives better results in making our hair soft,
using shampoo alone or using the shampoo and conditioner combined?
Ignacio had the luck, look at this goldmine for any researcher, really,
and this is the pure truth, of having two twin sisters,
two older sisters, with long hair, the same length.
And the sisters volunteered happily for his experiments.
And so then Ignacio, once again, thought of what he was going to measure and how,
what he'd compare, how would he measure the hair's softness,
what he had to do concretely in his experiment.
He anticipated all possible results and after liters and liters of water
and of shampoo and conditioner,
he came to a conclusion... No, I'm not going to tell you this one.
I'll leave you with the lingering idea
so you can investigate in your homes.
And I was telling you just before this, that in this path
of doing science inside schools and transforming classrooms
into spaces where to have wonderful ideas is possible.
It can be done and in reasonable time. I bring a message, truly optimistic.
But we also learned, in these years, that to make that possible
some indispensable conditions are necessary.
And the first one, is to have teachers that can teach this way,
as in any educative change.
But teachers need to be helped to be able to teach this way.
It wouldn't be fair, neither possible
to ask someone to organize an investigation with the kids in the classroom
if they never learned in this way during their formation.
Not in primary school, secondary school, or in their teacher training either.
We need to transform the way teachers are learning.
Here we have two teachers of the Tucumán province
that are investigating, this this case, what happens with heart rates
when we do different types of workout,
what happens when we get scared.
In this other, there are teachers of different provinces
finding out what makes a parachute fall faster or slower.
Look in these photos, the teachers' faces,
the expressions of enjoyment and the expressions of hard work and concentration.
They're the same expressions we see in the children's faces in the classrooms
when they're thinking, when they're enjoying learning.
The second condition, which without it none of this is possible,
is that we need to generate joint works paces in schools.
Spaces where to think hard with others,
where teachers, where professors can imagine alternatives
to what they've already been doing, try them, sample them, bring them back,
discuss them with their peers, and see what they'd do different next time.
As if it was a true practice laboratory,
where the class becomes something that can be innovated upon.
We live in times where there's a lot of discomfort in teachers
for many reasons, but one of them, I believe, which is not minor
is that teachers and professors feel what they're doing isn't worthy anymore.
There are already lots of children no longer interested in school.
What we see year after year, school after school
is that when one does science in the classroom, when one teaches others to have wonderful ideas,
the spark of vocation is really turned back on.
Teachers meet again with their desire
and pleasure that comes from teaching.
And this way, learning stops being this grey experience
and turns in all, all of what learning can be:
a rainbow-colored adventure.
Thank you!
(Applause)