Sometimes students come back after graduation and tell me things they learned in my class.  I hear a lot of good things, but I never, ever, hear things like this:

"Gosh, I am SO glad that you taught me all the functions of proteins in cells; this has really helped me in college and in life" or "Man, am I glad you made us memorize what happens in each stage of mitosis; I don't know how I would get through life without that information."

Silly, I know, but you get the idea. 

But that's what students sometimes think school is all about--knowing stuff, being able to recite all this stuff back to someone. As if life were a huge game show where they will be tested on how well they can answer random question thrown at them.  Some students think school is about getting right answers.  Or, at least, some of my students think that.

I can't let them think this, because life really isn't about right answers.  It's about what you can do with what you know.

Sure, I want my students to learn my science stuff, but I want them to use it, work with it, turn it over in their minds, examine it from all sides, and then run away with it in new directions far, far away from where I took them.  Most importantly, I want them to learn fundamental skills that they will need no matter where life takes them--the first foremost of those skills being to learn how to learn on their own.

But students who think school is always about getting things right find learning on their own very uncomfortable.  They want to get questions right, and they expect that learning activities should be structured in such a way so that they can easily get things right on the first try.  They are used to teachers (WARNING: GROSS ANALOGY AHEAD) pre-chewing their educational food for them and dropping it into their brains.  They are used to teachers smoothing out the learning bumps ahead of time, taking away any of the real steps to learning. These students think that any kind of struggle or uncertainty they encounter automatically means they are not learning, because it's not easy.

How do I know this?  Because these students e-mail me every time I assign an activity where I don't talk at them about the content first.  I get some electronic push-back when I throw them in the educational knowledge-pool without a life preserver (a.k.a. me).  In general, the e-mails I get express the following sentiment:

"Doing <whatever activity I have assigned> isn't helping me learn; I learn it so much better when you explain it."

To me, this translates into, "I need you to do this thinking for me."  And then I feel saddened that my students aren't yet empowered to try and do their own learning without fear.

This is exactly what happened on Wednesday, when I assigned students to make flashcards in StudyBlue about 11 words they will need to understand in order to master our cell chemistry objectives.  I asked them to do things like write analogies, two-line rhymes about the words, and find pictures that represented the words.

I received many, many emails, all of which lamented about how I never talked about any of these words first, so they weren't learning anything by doing the activity.  What they didn't understand was that they were working to gain valuable background knowledge necessary to later understand how those words were connected to the concepts in our cell chemistry objectives, and that they would be fixing these cards as the learning progressed.  They wanted me to take away those uncomfortable first steps in learning something new.  They didn't understand that real learning, especially at the start of something new, often involves feeling a little lost.

Rather than answer any of the emails or simply telling students this in class, I decided to show them why I do what I do. 

The next day, I had students review what they had in their cards with their teams, and then we played what I like to call "Human True/False."  This is where I hang a "true" sign and a "false" sign in opposite corners of my room, and, after I ask a true/false question, students move to the appropriate corner.  As I asked my questions (which were to see if they were making the mistakes I knew students always made with these words--it was a great formative/pre-assessment tool), I would stop after each one, explaining and demonstrating....in other words, I did what they asked me to do.  I explained all the words to them.

We all sat down after this 10 minute activity, and then I reviewed their daily question--which required them to know what I had just explained to them.

Not one student could repeat back to me what I had just said a few minutes ago.  Not a single one.  I was met with blank stares, uncomfortable looks, and a lot of random guesses from thin air.

After pointing out that I had just explained every single bit of information they would need to know in order to answer the daily question, I then explained why I don't talk about words or concepts until students first have a chance to try and make their own meaning:

My explanations come from my brain; in order for them to call the knowledge their own, they had to use their brains first before hearing my explanations.  Otherwise, the knowledge is never truly theirs.

However, what I said that I think hit home the most (or, at least, provoked a lot of uncomfortable shifting in seats and rolling of eyes) was this: Just because I say it doesn't mean they learn it.  I am there to support them, to guide them, to help them, redirect them, and to provide the right conditions for learning.  And sometimes those conditions start with uncertainty, confusion, and rampant mistake-making. But those conditions for learning must, for the most part, start with the students--not the teacher.

I made my point that day.  However, when trying to redefine what learning is and both the teacher and student roles in the process, it's a point I'm going to have to make over and over again, I'm sure.