where passion, learning, and scientific reasoning meet
Disappointment. Failure. Frustration.
These words have run through all of our minds at some point or another. They often penetrate our way of thinking at times when we have not met an expectation that has been placed on us. That expectation could be placed on us by other people, or it could have been an internal expectation. Regardless, failure to live up to an expectation can be very difficult.
I felt these feelings in December of 2010, which happened to be one of my biggest turning points in my life. I was in my first year of my doctoral program at the University of Kansas, and the work had become overwhelming. Let me clarify, the lab work had become overwhelming. I took very difficult classes and was able to do very well in them. However, whenever I went into the lab, I felt a sense of frustration. I had worked on a project in the lab for several months, and the results did not come out as I had hypothesized. I was frustrated, and I wanted to give up. This feeling stemmed from the fact that every other lab that I had ever done was successful. These labs were done in a class and were done to accomplish a certain learning objective. I never learned that failure was a key part of science. As a result, I was left to feel like a failure throughout all of my lab work.
Fortunately, I was a teaching assistant for the organic chemistry lab, and I discovered something that had not really been on my radar. I loved teaching! On top of that, I felt like I had been robbed of an authentic scientific experience because I had no idea that creativity, problem solving, and embracing failure were crucial in becoming a great scientist. At that point, I switched over to education, and I was able to start teaching at Iola in the fall of 2012.
Fast-forward to now. My experiences have greatly impacted who I am as an educator and what I expect from my students. I now have believe that students should have an experience in science class that is vastly different from traditional methods. Through my experiences in graduate school, STEM workshops, and Modeling Instruction (this is the educational philosophy and curriculum that I align myself to most), I believe the following things should be emphasized in a science classroom.
- Students will have the freedom to design their own experiments. This means that students should be allowed to ask their own questions, devise their own experimental procedures, analyze their own data, interpret their data, use their data to make predictions.
- Students will be empowered to construct models that are used to explain scientific phenomena. This means that they will collect and use data from experiments to make sense of the world around them. They will then explain these models using multiple representations.
- Students will have a growth mindset. The end goal of the student should not be to receive a grade. Instead, they will be pushed to think beyond a grade. Each person will experience “failure” in the course, but they will understand that it is simply part of learning process.
- Students will communicate their ideas to their peers. This is a crucial part of the scientific community, and it is an equally important part of the science classroom. Through this, students learn how to effectively explain an idea to other.
I have been attempting to incorporate all of these beliefs in my teaching practices, and over the years I have been progressively getting better. This year, my goal is to be the best teacher I have ever been. To help us document the learning process during the 2019-2020 school year, I have decided to take pictures of our class as we go throughout the year. As we look at these pictures, we should be able to see students living the goals that I have set.
So why the name Action at a Distance? Well, the phrase itself has a lot of meaning in the history of science! Non-contact forces, like the gravitational or electromagnetic, are forces that certainly act at a distance. To experience this, all one has to do is hold a magnet close to a refrigerator without actually touching it. There is a pull there…an attraction. Additionally, Albert Einstein actually used the phrase to describe Niels Bohr’s views on quantum mechanics, except that he claimed that it used “spooky action at a distance.” While these are all very good examples of action at a distance, I thought the phrase also fit in very well with my teaching philosophy. The word ACTION implies that the students are DOING science. The word DISTANCE eludes to the fact that I am not going to be the “sage on the stage.” Instead, I will be a facilitator of their learning.
Through this “Action at a Distance” approach, it is my hope that students walk away from my class with a realistic and appropriate view of science.
Action at a Distance 