How can we best prepare students for the next generation? (The following is based on a TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson.) As science teachers, we are trained to be keen observers of student behaviors. Most of us are naturally good at this. This is a direct development of our science minds. We see natural changes and can make predictions, but predicting the timing and the degree of future changes decades away, is extremely challenging. That being said, the students we are teaching today will live and work in that world. Graduates and students today are facing globalization, a robotic workforce, academic inflation, high-speed travel, rapid population movement, rapid advancements in computer technology, climate change, and a raft of environmental issues. The world is changing at an accelerated pace. Students today need to more creative than ever to compete and be the problem solvers that can take on these challenges successfully.
We as teachers, administrators, and legislators have a large stake in creating curriculum and practices that allow students that are creative to flourish. The problem is that we reward students that excel in less creative courses, and diminish the types of courses that produce creativity. Some teachers that I work with are masters at using teaching crutches that allow a student to get the right answer by reducing the solution and limiting creativity. In the world of hyper testing environments, are students being taught that being wrong is unacceptable? Think about it, we reward students for getting near perfect or perfect scores. In fact we praise them with lavish awards and scholarships. Colleges use SAT scores based on a few dimensions of learning, mathematical aptitude, reading and language skills. In general, students learn that in order to be accepted into a college, they must emphasize the courses that the SAT measures, and de-emphasize other courses that are very creative, including arts. This by nature reduces the creative courses that SAT focused students enroll in. Please, I’m not being disrespectful and I’m certain brilliance can shine in any area, but there are specialized minds and very creative thinkers that are not being developed to their fullest potential.
In New York State, many new educational programs are being implemented. In science we are transitioning into the NYSSLS based on the Next Generation Science Standards. How we teach NYSSLS is an important as the performance expectations themselves. Administrators need to realize that every teaching discipline is different. If a science teacher that tries to set up interesting teaching phenomena for 3D learning is not given adequate time or supplies to accomplish this, then creativity and problem solving will be lost from the start.
In order to teach students to be more creative, as often as possible, we should allow students to fail with less penalty, allow them to realize that real problems and solutions do not always lead to an absolute answer. Many times, solutions lead to unsolved problems and more questions. Reward the journey as well as the end result. I’ve seen many students reach an impasse in science investigations and simply assume they have failed and stop working. Why? Because the reward system in most schools and higher academia fail to allow creative solutions that don’t fit standard grading. Students are taught that failure is unacceptable, so students stop investigating when things go bad and they probably experience a dose of damaged humility as well. However, it’s at this point that student creativity and grit for reworking the new questions generated needs to be taught and rewarded. We should allow time for these type of open-ended activities and not jump to assigning a grade or a score when a student reaches a predesignated result. Encourage and guide the student with the new problem. Allow them to struggle, and reward them for creating new hypotheses to solve using the information gathered from the previous attempt.
If we all know that an experiment that can’t fail is flawed from the start. Then why do we teach students that failure is not an option? It’s not just above average ability that should be rewarded without failure. If we seek to produce the type of problem solvers for the next generation and well into the future, then we must reward creativity, perseverance in finishing, and the raw ability of tackling unexpected results as the cornerstones of the next generation of problem solvers.