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Chuck James, St. Andrew's science teacher and CTTL Design Thinking Research Lead, speaking to teachers from the Association of Independent Maryland and DC Schools during a workshop focused on creating the ecology for creativity, design thinking, and innovation.

Are We Just Teaching to the Mold?

By Chuck James, CTTL Design Thinking Research Lead

In 2024, when visiting a market in Mexico City, I came across a woman selling ice molds. The ice molds were in all different shapes and sizes. Some molds produced flower-shaped ice cubes; some produced sea creature-shaped ice cubes. Weeks later, after teaching a class at St. Andrew’s, I reflected on my floating tortoise-shaped ice cubes and had a small realization about my lesson that day and, more broadly, about education in general. Is most education just teaching to the mold?

During the 2023-2024 school year, for the first time, I taught Conceptual Physics to 10th and 11th graders. Using my MBE (Mind, Brain, and Education Science) training, I decided to record my lesson on light and its absorption, reflection, and refraction. Afterward, I listened to the lesson and learned. From a standards perspective, the lesson was solid. From an experience perspective, the lesson was engaging. I used light sticks to prime my students’ thinking about light, and the physics question of the day asked students to imagine light from distant stars. From a scientific inquiry and problem-solving perspective, the lesson was ice cold. While the lesson had consistently produced outcomes – a set of ideas very similar to the ones I taught – the students were not partners in creating new forms and shapes of the knowledge they were taught.

In today’s world, education is like the conventional ice molds we all have in our freezer. Humanity’s “ice cubes” are remarkably uniform in size and shape – save for the large sphere of ice I once had to pay a dollar for in Montana. So too are our expectations for teaching and learning science. We start with consistently uniform cubes of knowledge and assess against those very standardized cubes. Indeed, I started my lesson with a body of knowledge – my ice cube. The content had structure and form. Most teachers, myself included, melt the ice into concepts, content, vocabulary, images, and experiences. My lesson emerged directly from those concepts, content, vocabulary, images, and experience. When I listened to my lesson recording, I realized that I was asking my students to reverse engineer my “ice cube,” and collectively, they repeated the pool of content, applied the concepts, and reassembled my ice cube.

Where did my students add value? Is teaching nothing more than assembling and reassembling ice cubes of prescribed dimensions and form? Why did the shape of my students’ content and concepts have to form an ice cube identical to my own? The question led to an important shift in my teaching in the next class. Because I was teaching this content for the first time, I fell victim to the safety of the familiar. Melt and refreeze the ice cube. I needed to challenge the students’ creativity, curiosity, and wonder. I now needed to create snowflakes, not simply ice cubes. I needed to allow students to create evidence of their learning, not simply re-package the content I taught.

Ask Yourself…

Is there a way to insert a problem, challenge, or question that will alter the shape and form of student responses? How can I make student responses more creative, individual, and unique? How can I shift my classroom interactions from being melt and refreeze to melt, create, and shape?

During the next class, I provided students with a piece of phosphorescent paper and a bright light source and asked them to create an investigation that explored the properties of the photons that the paper absorbed. Proposals from the students were immediate. “Can we send the light directly and then through water, and measure the temperature of the surface of the phosphorescent paper to see how much energy was absorbed?” A second group wanted to investigate the use of multicolored filters. Another group explored distance and its impact on energy absorption by measuring when the image remained visible on the phosphorescent paper. Students were asked to conduct three trials and collect at least one other group’s data to write their observations: what happened, explanations (why what they observed happened), and interpretation (how might this phenomenon be experienced in the real world?). The questions and content they encountered were characteristically different, deeper, and differentiated than those I had covered the day before. Students investigated different questions and, therefore, had to explore different terrains of knowledge.

Ask Yourself…

Am I creating a balance between simply forming repeated content and individual applied learning that creates unique outcomes? Am I practicing the research that suggests supports Problem-based Learning?

The summary of one such study:
https://www.edutopia.org/article/new-research-makes-powerful-case-pbl/

The students broke the mold, and I offer this as a postulate. If, after I melt and deliver my “ice cube” of content and concepts to my students, my students consider those concepts and return an “ice cube” of identical form, I need to reconsider my lesson. If the results of my students’ work all look the same, have I achieved inspired teaching and learning? Students can create their molds for the content they experience. Once I “melt” the core content, does my teaching allow for students to reshape that content into a mold different from my own, or are my classes repetition rather than creation? Are my students reproducing my ice cubes or challenged to create unique snowflakes that require personal creativity, perspective, and application?

Ask yourself…

Are students’ responses to challenges, problems and questions, more alike than different? Is there a different format that will produce more varied results?

So much of education today is educating about, and toward, the known, not the new. Venturing out of the conventional mold that produces that conventional mass of content is challenging for me and perhaps all teachers. When teaching about light, hundreds of years of the known pushes all of us to frame lessons toward that generic mold of ideas. Once I challenged my students to experience the content in an entirely new and personal way, I introduced a new level of learning. If the goal of education and of science is to imagine beyond the universe of existing ideas, how do teachers get better at allowing our students to reform the ideas they learn in imaginative and new ways? The answer is curiosity.
Curiosity is that fabulously good feeling that classrooms turn many learners against. By allowing my students to develop their investigations of light, I released a bolder experience, deeper understanding, keener explanation, and a greater authenticity into my science instruction. My discovery? The shape of ice isn’t always a cube. Let’s stop teaching as if there is only one shape and form to the learning our students experience. Forget the ice cubes. Let it snow!

Check out Chuck’s Design Thinking book here.