Honouring student ideas
A constructivist shibboleth
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When I trained to be a teacher, I had to complete a number of projects. One of these involved interviewing some 16-year-olds about their views on satellites. These students had not spent much time thinking about satellites and had not yet been taught the relevant physics. When I asked them what they thought kept satellites in orbit around the Earth, they reasonably suggested rockets.
This is not correct. Satellites are in free fall. A key insight of the genius Isaac Newton was that the force that causes an apple to fall from a tree is the same force that causes satellite motion. When I teach this, I even use Newton’s thought experiment of a huge cannon to explain what is going on and I preface this by telling students they are about to cleanly and elegantly understand something that most people who have ever lived have not understood. I make them feel clever and special.
However, this was not the purpose of the interview. Once the students had committed to the rockets hypothesis, I was supposed to challenge them. Wouldn’t the rockets run out of fuel? This caused bafflement and a little frustration. The technical term is that I had introduced ‘cognitive conflict’, a key component of supposedly constructivist teaching. However, these students did not go on to arrive at Newton’s insight. Worse, as memory faded, there was a risk that the most salient idea they would hold on to from our discussion was that rockets make satellites orbit the Earth.
A few years back, I found myself in the presence of a physics professor. He was the kind who liked to hold court and so, although irrelevant to the purpose of our meeting and noting I was a science teacher, he told a tale about how clever he was.
The professor ran courses for science teachers. One of these involved them constructing a telescope. He never explained what he wanted the teachers to learn from this and I suspect it was simply a cool activity he liked to do. Instead, the main purpose seemed to be to fool the silly teachers.
On entry to the lab, the teachers would notice an eye-chart had been placed upside down at the end of the room. One or two teachers might remark on this and the cunning professor would consent to one of them turning it the right way up. Once they had completed constructed, the teachers realised that the telescopes inverted the image and so that’s why the eye-chart had been placed upside down. I wondered how the teacher who adjusted the eye-chart would have felt at this point.
‘Cognitive dissonance’ and ‘cognitive conflict’ are related ideas that describe the human response to disconfirming evidence. The results are unpredictable and not something I would build a teaching method around. Indeed, when a person has publicly backed a position, it is hard for them to back down.
This is most easily demonstrated by social media arguments such as the ones I often engage in on Twitter/X. I have long given up on the idea that I will persuade the person I am arguing with. It happens, but it is rare. Usually, once a person has activated their ego and publicly committed to a position, they will use any rhetorical device at their disposal to avoid admitting they were wrong. They may challenge the definition of commonly understood words, reinterpret their previous statements in implausible ways or simply change the subject.
For an example of the latter, following my recent post on inquiry learning, I bizarrely found myself accused of not caring about child hunger.
Why argue, then, if it is all so pointless? Because there are others watching who have not publicly committed to a position and it helps them make up their minds.
Often, non-examples, bad ideas, common misconceptions and poor arguments are useful teaching tools. However, I avoid extracting these from my students. This could be unproductive and I want my students to feel clever. Instead, these will be presented as the product of some third party that we may all scrutinise together.
Because I honour my students’ ideas.