When I was in the 7th grade, we were asked to deliver an introductory speech about ourselves for an English class assignment. My best friend Paul introduced himself as someone who was very fluent in English, which he claimed proved that he was very smart because he had been told that English is a very difficult language to learn. While Paul was really just trying to be funny, his remark was actually pretty insightful. English is a notoriously-difficult language. Most native English speakers don’t even question the fact that the words “thought”, “through”, “though”, and “tough” each look similar but sound completely different, nor question the absurd reality that the words “bologna” and “pony” somehow rhyme.
Even though other Western languages like French or Spanish
tend to be easier to learn than English, most native English speakers find it
far more difficult to learn a second language. I personally took French in high
school for two years. While most of my English was learned without a teacher
licensed in the subject, most of my French was learned with a trained and highly-experienced
professional for about an hour a day over the better part of two years. Today I
can barely get beyond “Bonjour!” and would certainly not be prepared to visit a
French-speaking region. However, were I to spend even just a week in Paris, I
would probably be more fluent in speaking French than I was after two years in
a French language classroom in the US.
The differences between the ease of learning our native
language and the difficulty of learning a second language can be attributed to
many factors, but one of the most important to consider is the difference
between acquisition and learning.
Acquisition,
Learning, and Literacy
James Paul Gee, in his 1991 work, “Rewriting Literacy”, made
a clear distinction between acquisition and learning. Gee defined acquisition as the process of gaining
skill or knowledge subconsciously through exposure as well as trial and error.
According to Gee, this is very different from learning, which is an intentional process of gaining conscious
knowledge or skill from a teacher. We unconsciously acquire our first language
in a manner that seems almost effortless, but we almost always have to struggle
to learn a second language (unless you were fortunate enough to grow up in a
multilingual household).
Gee makes the case that much of our knowledge and skill
comes through a combination of unstructured acquisition and intentional
conscious learning. Driver’s education is a classic example of this. In most driver’s
education programs, you begin in a classroom where you learn the fundamentals
such as where to place your hands on the steering wheel, how to read road
signs, and how to parallel park. We all know quite well that this intentional
conscious learning is far from enough to fully prepare a student for the
realities of driving a car, which is why the vast majority of students will
also take part in numerous hours of behind the wheel with an instructor and a
parent before getting their official license at age 16. If teenagers could just
take a multiple choice test to get their license without the actual driving
experience, our roads would be much more terrifying.
Agriscience education is no different than language,
driver’s education, or any set of knowledge and skill that is to be gained by a
student. If anything, agriscience courses are even more dependent on the combination of these two forms of education
because much of agriculture depends on both
knowledge and skill. Whether it be performing sutures to close a wound, using a
microscope to identify a pathogen, collecting soil samples for testing, or
delivering a marketing presentation, students in agricultural courses can only
be fully prepared for careers and their personal futures if they can gain
knowledge through both acquisition and learning. In fact, if you consider the
three-circle model of agricultural education (classroom and laboratory
learning, personal preparation, and career experiences), two of these three
circles are more about gaining education through acquisition than from learning.
James Paul Gee would probably be very happy about this, as
he argues that we tend to be more proficient in regards to knowledge and skill
sets when they are gained through acquisition instead of learning. However, learning
in a classroom setting results in more conscious awareness of the knowledge and
skill that have been gained, making what occurs in the classroom and laboratory
setting just as important as what occurs in immersive career experiences and
personal growth opportunities. Nonetheless, a student’s classroom experiences
can be enhanced by combining a mixture of learning and acquisition through
strategies such as the problem-solving approach to teaching.
The Problem Solving
Approach
The Problem Solving Approach is a method of instruction with
origins going back to the work of John Dewey. If you are unfamiliar with John
Dewey, you should get pretty familiar with him if you intend to work in the
field of education because his work and philosophy serves for much of the basis
of modern education. The problem solving approach tends to consist of four
major themes:
- Engagement: the lesson or curriculum reflects a real-world consideration that is recognizable in the lives of students.
- Inquiry: students must use curiosity, exploration, observation, and hypothesis formation to create answers for questions that may or may not have a right answer (or may have multiple right answers).
- Solution building: the teacher in these lessons acts as a coach, enabling students to work in teams to make accurate observations, identify patterns, and develop rational models to explain an unknown phenomenon (this, by the way, is the basis for much of the practices that serve as a major component of the Next Generation Science Standards).
- Reflection: once students have addressed an unknown situation in a manner that results in a plausible explanation based on evidence, logic, and critical thinking, the teacher again acts as a coach to elicit their reasoning, challenge their assumptions, and refine their analysis in a manner that both allows students to recognize gaps in their logic and breaks in their comprehension of core concepts in the material.
It should be noted that all of these components reflect a student-centered model of education.
Traditionally, we think of the teacher as a repository of facts and information,
a person who identifies when a student is wrong and re-directs them to the
“correct knowledge”. Look at any multiple choice exam or teacher’s edition of a
textbook and you could easily be forgiven for thinking that this is how
education is supposed to work. I assure you, there are certainly more effective
ways to be an instructor.
While there are many reasons to teach in a student-centered
manner, among the most notable is that almost all students only have teachers
in their daily lives for about 12-17 years. Individuals who were taught in a
teacher-centered model are pretty much screwed for the rest of their lives
because they consistently relied on an ‘expert’ to tell them what was right or
wrong. This would be just fine if you could learn all of the facts in the world
by the time you were 18 (and assume that no other facts would be discovered),
but the fact of the matter is that you continue to be exposed to new
information and ideas throughout your entire life! Good teachers therefore make
themselves increasingly unnecessary by teaching their students how to make
observations, propose questions, develop hypotheses, analyze evidence and
arguments, and determine the validity of a conclusion. Good teachers enable
their students to constantly ask themselves how they know they are not wrong
even after they graduate. By utilizing a student-centered model of education,
you can enable a student to make sense of the world even as new information and
discoveries occur in their lives.
Furthermore, the problem solving approach enables a deeper
comprehension of knowledge and a greater development of skill because it tends
to entail a combination of acquisition and learning. Not only do students
develop a conscious awareness of the knowledge and skills they have gained
through their education but they have a better command of that knowledge and skill
because it was developed in a manner reflective of real-world situations. If
students can further immerse themselves in a career-based experience through
FFA, an SAE, and other similar opportunities, they will enter the workforce
with career-ready levels of knowledge and skill.
Student-Centered,
Problem Solving Approaches in the Classroom
Without knowing any particular terms for these ideas, I
began my career as a high school agriscience teacher with similar intentions. I
had realized that there were stark differences between the education I had
gained through acquisition on the Wisconsin dairy farm on which I had been
raised and in the classrooms in which my old-school teacher-centered education
had occurred. When I was experiencing a real-world environment through my acquisition-based
education on the farm, I was unconsciously gaining expertise in a set of career
and life skills that would remain with me for the rest of my life. However, I
was not experiencing the same level of benefits in my high school classrooms. When
I became a teacher myself, I yearned for my students to have the experiences
that I had once had on our farm. In my opinion, the perfect classroom was an
environment where the lessons could be not just learned but experienced as well.
As a new teacher, I worked tirelessly to create the types of
environments where students could gain knowledge and skill through both
learning and acquisition. I built pens, cages, and coops and filled them with
cattle, chickens, ducks, rabbits, and a persnickety classroom cat named
Tiffany. I regularly utilized our school forest and greenhouse, developed
landscaping gardens, and created a working department office that was run by
students. Using corporate donations, salvaged lab equipment, and as many grants
as I could apply for, I renovated a spare room into a functional, modern
scientific laboratory and made a point to use it at least once a week for any
applicable class. As much as possible, I tried to force the real world through
the doors of my classroom and into the lives of my students.
However, facilities alone do not make a student-centered,
problem-solving, inquiry-based curriculum. To do this, I set up a curricular model
that I taught in four phases:
- Awareness – high school students need some kind of knowledge base before they can fruitfully engage in inquiry (because if you don’t know what you don’t know, you can’t be expected to do much inquiring). After an introductory activity in which I probed for their prior understanding (and misunderstanding), I provided students with a specific set of notes and guided worksheets to develop their knowledge base so that they could determine what questions to ask.
- Interaction – once students reasonably had the knowledge they needed to ask good questions, I provided them with problem-solving opportunities in which they could formatively assess their understanding of this knowledge and apply it in a real world scenario. This wasn’t a cookie-cutter lab where they blindly followed steps as if they were baking a recipe. These were truly inquiry-based experiences in which students had to make predictions, propose a rationale for their hypothesis, collect data, and explain the patterns in their data using models learned from classroom material.
- Mastery – in the interaction phase, students were guided and coached by their teacher to reach a point in which they could reflect and come to a logical conclusion. The mastery phase was the time for me as the instructor to ‘fade out’ and see if these students could achieve similar results in a less scaffolded and less structured setting. This typically served as part of their summative exam, ending their lesson in a real-world manner.
- Career Preparation – in preparation for their eventual college- and career-goals, my students developed career-and-college portfolios, took part in 15 hours of career experiences outside of class, and took part in an exit interview in which they connected the lessons learned in class to what they intended to do after high school. This component was pure acquisition-based education and provided a chance for their classroom-learned knowledge and skills to be applied.
What I have just described also happens to be very
reflective of the structure of the 2015 AFNR National Standards, which are organized
in three levels.
-
The broadest level entails the Common Career Technical Core (CCTC)
Standards – these are standards that apply to all types of CTE courses.
-
Within the CCTC standards are the Performance Indicators. These are the
“actual standards” as we typically think of them, and reflect what the National
Council for Agricultural Education (or “The Council”) believes to be the specific
content necessary for proficiency in a given agricultural course.
-
Finally, each Performance Indicator has Sample Measurements. These sort of look like what we would assume are the standards, but are actually more like suggestions for what a teacher could provide in their curriculum to satisfy the Performance Indicators and the 2015 AFNR National Standards as a whole.
Finally, each Performance Indicator has Sample Measurements. These sort of look like what we would assume are the standards, but are actually more like suggestions for what a teacher could provide in their curriculum to satisfy the Performance Indicators and the 2015 AFNR National Standards as a whole.
The sample measurements are also reflective of problem
solving approaches in education. These measurements are organized into three
columns, with the leftmost column being the standards pertaining to awareness (terms, vocab, concepts, etc.).
The middle column includes the intermediate
concepts, which involve the application of the basic knowledge for a given
Performance Indicator. The rightmost column includes the mastery concepts. These tend to focus on having students make
predictions about unknown situations, apply lessons in a manner similar or
identical to a workplace situation, or utilize large amounts of content to
reach a conclusion. Notice that Mastery does not consist of perfect
memorization of terms or concepts; this is still the Awareness level (the most
basic of the three). Mastery can only come about when a student is able to
apply their decision-making skills in a real-world scenario, often in a
group-based situation that involves hypothesis formation, data collection &
analysis, and communication of interpretations.
Examples of
Student-Centered, Problem Solving Approaches
It took me the better part of a 10-year stretch in
classrooms to reach a point in which I felt comfortable about my effectiveness
with these methods and ideas (let alone to even realize that they existed). My
work was far from perfect but my descriptions below might help you to get a
better grasp of what I am describing.
One of my more-effective examples of using a problem-solving
approach was in my introductory Agriscience course. This two-semester course
focused on the scientific method, the carbon cycle, cellular respiration, and
photosynthesis in the first semester, and on genetics and biotechnology in the
second semester. This might sound very different from an introductory agricultural
course in other schools, but the point was to enable my students to understand
the systems that serve as the basis of all of agriculture, food and natural
resources. Agriculture at its simplest is really about the acquisition of
biomass in a manner that is productive for human needs. Photosynthesis serves
as the source of all carbon for carbon-based life & biomass, respiration is
the process in which these organic carbon molecules are used to produce the cellular
energy (ATP) that is necessary for acquiring and building that biomass, and
genetics pertains to how these processes can be made more efficient and
productive. In short, if a student can understand these three processes, they
are then capable of developing a deep comprehension of all factors, decisions,
and considerations in any field of agriculture.
The unit on cellular respiration was a challenging one to
teach, especially to a class primarily made up of freshmen in high school. As
with all my lessons, students began with an Awareness portion of the material. After asking how the breakfast
they had consumed an hour earlier became the energy they needed for the rest of
the day (and making them aware of the gaps and misconceptions in their
thinking), I allowed for time for students to independently complete a set of
notes. Once students had developed a base of knowledge from which they could
start the inquiry process, I provided them with the first example of Interaction; students had to work on
dry erase boards in teams of four to develop five ways in which they could engineer
the cells of cattle to produce more ATP, enabling the animals to become more
productive. After a sufficient amount of time, I brought the students back
together and randomly called on groups using a set of dice. Regardless of whether
their ideas were right or wrong, I asked them to explain their rationale behind
the ideas they proposed. I used another randomly-selected group to critique
their ideas. We as a class came to a consensus about each idea, and my coaching
ensured that they reached the right conclusions without “telling them the right
answer” by questioning their responses so that they could see their own gaps in
logic and knowledge. The most powerful tool I had in this phase was the phrase,
“Tell me more…what are you thinking?”
After a quick multiple choice quiz to a) make sure that all
students were at a level of proficiency necessary for moving on and b) to make
sure that students took the time to ‘cement’ the knowledge in their mind, we
moved on to the Mastery level. In
the week that followed, students were challenged to determine the changes to
cellular respiration that resulted from different kinds of carbohydrate “feeds”
and explain these differences using their base knowledge from the previous
week. To do this, students used yeast cells and measured the differences in the
CO2 production during the respiration of different kinds of carbohydrates
(sugar, starch, and fiber).
Students began with a cookie cutter lab so that they could
become familiar with the equipment and protocols. They then redesigned the lab
by changing an independent variable (e.g. adding caffeine, increasing the
temperature, using fiber instead of sugar, etc.). They made their predictions
about what effects the changes would cause, proposed rationales for their
reasoning, collected data, identified patterns, and proposed models based on
their prior material to explain their results. By the end of the week, they
worked in teams completely unassisted by their instructor. Their reasoning was
developed and critiqued within and among their groups. They applied their
reasoning to other scenarios such as cattle or corn, knowing that their model
organisms were representing the same cellular processes that occur in essentially
all living organisms. While their education on the topic began as learning, it
concluded with acquisition, ensuring that they could reach mastery while also
being consciously aware of the specific set of knowledge and skill that they
were mastering.
Other classes worked in a similar manner. My vet students
first debated how and when sutures became necessary for a wound to fully heal before
completing independent notes on the topic of suturing. This was followed by
videos and demonstrations of me performing suturing, concluding with each
student performing and practicing suturing on bananas. Students in my
Agribusiness course discussed and then completed notes on the principles of
marketing, followed by addressing hypothetical marketing scenarios for a
business, and concluding with developing a marketing plan for their own future
business that they could create while they were still in high school (which
some did). Students in my Natural Resources class followed notes and discussion
of habits with predictions and calculations of biodiversity in different
portions of the school forest in relation to the quality of the habitat in
those areas.
In each case, the instruction was designed to allow students
to eventually address specific real-world problems or considerations. Student
responses were not judged as right or wrong, but defendable or not defendable
based on argumentation and discussion so as to allow them to function
independently without their teacher. Students did not learn obscure facts as
much as they learned underlying phenomena that helped them to explain
real-world considerations such as why fertilizer was necessary for a field, how
the type of crop affected the sustainability and carbon-neutrality of a
biofuel, or how invasive species could decimate an ecosystem. Their education in
my classroom often began as learning but continuously progressed until it was
more about acquisition-based education through situations that were as
real-world as a classroom environment could provide.
Conclusion
My high school French teacher once lamented that she
couldn’t kidnap us and leave us alone in Paris. Looking back, I now realize two
things: 1) that was a terrifying statement when taken out of context, and 2)
she was absolutely correct in her realization that what we were learning in her
classroom could never compare to how we could learn a language like French when
immersed among native French speakers. Similarly, agricultural educators could
never provide the level of education that could be achieved if our students
could be immersed in an environment like a farm, forest, laboratory, clinic, or
corporate headquarters. However, we can strive to create environments in our
classrooms that reflect the real-world scenarios that occur only outside of
high schools through strategies such as the problem solving approach.
Utilizing acquisition-based teaching methods such as the student-centered
instruction, the problem-solving approach, inquiry-based education,
experiential learning, and others can be challenging. Many teachers did not
have similar experiences as students, making it hard to envision what this kind
of curriculum might look and feel like in practice. It can often feel like
students aren’t learning as much because they are covering fewer concepts (but
gaining a much deeper comprehension of those concepts). Classroom management
can be a challenge when students are encouraged to work in teams and converse
with each other instead of just quietly taking notes or completing worksheets.
However, while these methods have their challenges, the
benefits certainly seem to outweigh the drawbacks. If in doubt, remember back
to your own student experiences and ask yourself which lessons were most
enjoyable or most impactful. How many of us fondly remember taking multiple
choice tests and writing endless notes? How many of us forgot all of the
material on a long multiple choice exam by the time we got our grades back? On
the other hand, how many of us really enjoyed taking part in labs that felt
like real world situations? How many of us preferred to work in groups on
projects in which we had some control and decision-making opportunities? How
much more valuable did our education seem when it the connections to our future
lives were unquestionably obvious?
In my experience as a teacher, the greatest feeling of success only occurred when I knew I was no longer needed, when my students could stand with me as an equal and I could have confidence in knowing that their success in life was as inevitable as I could make it. Teaching isn’t about telling students the ‘right answers’, whatever they may be. Teaching is a profession in which we make sure that students leave us with the ability to ask questions, determine answers, solve problems, and think critically long after they have stopped worrying about the grades that we would assign to them. To ensure that this can occur, we must enable our students to practice functioning without us and create a classroom environment that enables this to happen on a daily basis.
Craig Kohn
@AgKohn
kohncrai@msu.edu
Previous Contributions to the AEE 412 Methods Blog by Mr. Kohn include:
2015 - Systems-based Learning: http://psuaee412.blogspot.com/2015/11/guest-blogger-series-systems-based.html
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