I’m not a fan of Charades – the game where your team-mates try to guess a word or phrase that you silently act out. I’m not dead-set against it either, and will participate if that’s what everyone in the group wants to do. I’m not particularly good at it, nor am I particularly bad at it. But I do think the core idea behind Charades is relevant to my core profession: teaching and learning.
Basically, you’re trying to communicate knowledge to others. But there are limitations. Barriers, perhaps. In Charades, you’re trying to communicate through gesture and without speech. Trying to communicate a concrete action such as “frying fish” is a relatively simple task. However, trying to communicate an abstract idea such as “honesty” is much more difficult. (Bet you’re thinking of how to act this out right this minute!)
At its heart, chemistry is abstract. It’s a nanometer-scale dynamic world we can’t easily see. Chemistry does manifest itself concretely in our macroscopic world through color changes, gas bubbles, explosions, and strange odors. But chemical understanding requires connecting the concrete with the abstract. We make models, draw pictures, write symbolic equations, in an effort to convey these connections. But it’s not easy for new learners encountering it for the first or even the second time. And it’s only too easy for us “expert” teachers to forget what that first confusing encounter was like.
I had no idea what was going on the first time I encountered chemistry in secondary school. A combination of guesswork, following a protocol blindly, pattern recognition, and some memorization, somehow got me through exams. So I have a vague memory of being in the blind fog of supposedly-learning chemistry, although I suspect I learned little. But I’m not able to articulate exactly how the fog eventually lifted, and how multiple “Aha!” moments led to my own conceptual grasp of chemistry. Learning can be systematic, but it’s also mysterious.
One of the challenges I face as a teacher is the Curse of Knowledge. Just because something is obvious to me doesn’t make it obvious to a student. Imagine you have a song or a tune running through your head. Tap out the tune. Do you think someone else could guess the tune from your tapping? The song seems so obvious to you with the tune in your head. However, someone else trying to identify the song solely from your tapping will find it very, very, very challenging. (Try it if you don’t believe me.) Now I don’t think teaching and learning chemistry is in the same realm of difficulty, but as teachers we should be cognizant of the curse when explaining chemistry – it may seem so clear and obvious to us, but it’s likely not so for the student.
Hence, one important thing we must do as teachers is to get feedback by probing what and how our students are learning. Early in my teaching career, I was regularly surprised by the lack of understanding from students when probing what they knew. These days I am less surprised (having figured out where many of the muddy bits are), but I still experience the occasional surprise usually in office hours while one-on-one probing a student’s knowledge, especially when it’s one of the ‘A’ students, who seemed to have earlier demonstrated the knowledge in a quiz or an assignment. It reminds me that students often have knowledge in pieces, or full of holes (like Swiss cheese)!
As I ponder the seeming obtuseness of my own “Aha!” moments, I’ve been thinking about the role of Surprise in the learning process. One idea I’m mulling is a short end-of-class or after-class assignment where a student writes down either (1) “something that surprised you from today’s class” or (2) “something you thought was a good reminder to something you already knew from today’s class”. I’m pondering the merits of a closed assignment versus a discussion board. Ideally, I’d like the closed assignment to then be populated in the Discussion Board. I’ll have to figure out how to do this.
Thinking about Charades also made me ponder the nature of my multi-modal teaching pre-Covid. I’d have visuals projected on the screen, real-time writing on the board, oral explanations, and lots of gesturing. Confined to my Zoom screen, the richness of this multi-modal environment is diminished. Yes, I have supplemental videos and other textual explanations that students can access asynchronously. But these miss out on the real-time back-and-forth that may contribute to a richer and more salient “Aha!” moment. I don’t have the statistics to prove it, but anecdotally I think the best “Aha!” moments my students have experienced are usually in office hours, as a result of the back-and-forth; part-Socratic and partly assisted by a white board. Asking students to write or draw as part of their explanation can be very telling.
Amusingly, the Journal of Chemical Education has a recent short article on ChemCharades, a simple game developed to help students learn the uses of glassware and some lab techniques. (See abstract and citation below.) It’s not rocket science.
No comments:
Post a Comment