The Crescendo in the
Science Classroom
The mindset of a learned
student in the 21st century
You may laud music that
draws you into a dreaminess state of mind or it can provide a stimulus for
foot-stomping action. Music carries with
it an emotional content along with complexities and subtleties. Music moves people and it is a pleasurable thing
to experience. It is a form of escapism
for the mind.
Flow, as described by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in his book on the
psychology of optimal experience, details a similar experience of losing oneself
in the moment, but this is now done within the realm of academics. Students
become so engrossed in the event that time stops, focus becomes laser-like and
the world around them seems distant.
This euphoric pleasurable learning mindset is an outcome of living
experiences that swell, like a crescendo, and resonate with students
emotionally and academically.
The moment,
the crescendo, that all-encompassing event is what educators call the learning
experience. Employing teaching and learning strategies in the classroom geared
toward open-ended problem solving experiences, will ebb-and-flow their way
toward this event and produce that moment for students to immerse themselves in
learning. Students, working on projects,
forge forward with experimentation or toil over the analysis of data looking
for relationships while collaborating within teams of students that discuss
outcomes and evidence-based conclusions.
From the
genesis of their education, students need to be enculturated in this new way of thinking. Initially, students
experiment with what is obvious or well know, like gravity or heating matter, but
learners have to eventually rethink their assumptions about the world that they
inhabit by relying upon new evidence and new understanding creating broad
sweeping mental images of the universe that they experience. There has to be an
emotional investment by students to want to learn new outcomes and embrace the
relevance of knowing and understanding science and its effects upon their
lives. Project-based science is the means to this end result.
The current
generation of K-12 students have not experienced coherent strategies, in the classroom,
designed to develop critical thinking. Currently,
teachers and students are going through a tough learning curve to move pedagogy
from rote memorization and standardized testing without understanding, toward a
more realistic accounting of students that are now learning how to become more
effective problem solvers.
We can only
hold students accountable for what they have experienced in school and in
life. To change the way students learn
is to change the expectations that we have for them in our classrooms. Modeling this new way of thinking will increase intrinsic motivation of students
to learn and perform and thereby change education forever.
