Most people can maintain an attention span of eight minutes. Then the mind begins to wander. So why do teachers at all levels continue to drone on to rooms full of glassy-eyed students? Simple answer: That is how most teachers are taught how to teach.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. I just thought you should know that while I’ve never actually flown a jet airplane before, I have read all the technical manuals.”
Imagine being seated on that plane. Or imagine members of the Phoenix Suns just talking about technique and strategy instead of really practicing and scrimmaging. What if your brain surgeon had only studied medicine in books? Sure you are ready for the operation to begin?
Such scenarios are laughable. Our culture stresses hands-on experience above all else in nearly every situation. Every situation, it seems, except the education methodology and training of teachers.
The classroom situation is not so surprising if you consider the typical teaching method—teachers rely primarily on mind-numbing lectures to impart wisdom. After all, that is how they were taught.
Arizona State University professors Fred Staley, Jim Mayer, and Susan Wyckoff are just a few members of a multidisciplinary team dedicated to changing that antiquated system. Their rule: Replace droning lectures with hands-on interactive teaching, especially where topics such as mathematics and science are involved.
“For the United States to compete in a world where our labor costs are higher than those of economic rivals, survival depends on a scientifically literate work force,” explains Mayer, an accomplished scientist who directs ASU’s Center for Solid State Science research.
“To accomplish that, we must use a ‘hands on’ teaching approach,” he continues. “We must give students a view of the world based on some reality that they can concretely deal with and manipulate. If not, math and science principles will remain just more meaningless statements that could be wrong, more irrelevant concepts that have no real role in life.”
Mayer is part of a university-wide project called the Arizona Collaboration for Excellence in Preparation of Teachers (ACEPT). ACEPT’s goal involves teaching budding young teachers more about mathematics, science and technology. That accomplished, step two is to instruct them how to teach in more age-appropriate and stimulating ways.
ACEPT team members are experts in all areas of mathematics, science, and education. The team’s first task is simple: Reform the courses required by all candidates for teaching certificates.
“We’re finally waking up after teaching the wrong way for years,” admits Susan Wyckoff, an astronomy professor and ACEPT leader.
“People have only about an eight-minute attention span. We know that after eight minutes, minds wander,” she says. “Yet, we’ve continued lecturing to glassy-eyed students simply because that’s the way we were taught. From now on, our instruction actively incorporates hands-on and significant research which is clearly relevant to daily life.”
For example, Wyckoff now teaches her Introduction to Physical Sciences class using 77 networked computer stations and student “science kits.” She initially assists while students, working in small groups, discover things on their own.
Groups of students enter individual findings into a computer station, which instantly collates and displays class results. Wyckoff says she uses those results to stimulate discussion rather than just lecturing.
“There’s a tremendous body of knowledge to suggest that involving all five senses in the learning process results in simultaneous messages being sent to several areas of the brain,” Fred Staley says.
Staley is a professor of education. He has studied the process of science education for years.
“Presented with such multiple sensations, the brain becomes ‘alive’ and ‘engaged,' opening multiple pathways to the limbic system,” he explains.
The limbic system is where emotion resides in the human brain. According to Staley, stimulating the limbic system provides two major positives. First, the brain stores emotional experiences in long-term, rather than short-term memory. Second, interactive experiences, which tend to stimulate such emotion, usually involve all five senses.
Lectures typically stimulate just one or two senses—sight and/or sound.
The end result? Interactive sensory stimulation typically forges five life-long learning links. Lecture formats often trigger only two passive links that fade away once the lecture is complete.
Not convinced? Picture your wide-eyed, 16-year-old with freshly minted driver’s license in hand. He wants to take your car. You know he successfully completed drivers’ education class. You know he scored a perfect 100 percent on his written driving test.
Despite all of his self confidence, you also know that he is still just a babe in the woods when it comes to the driving game.
He simply lacks important hands-on experience and related critical thinking and judgment skills. For example: What to do when it suddenly rains or a tire blows. How to calculate whether he can really make that left turn in the face of on-coming car traffic. How to juggle a 64-ounce Thirstbuster or Big Gulp while shifting gears.
Instinctive fear alerts parents of new drivers to the value of hands-on experience. So do new-driver accident statistics and sky-high insurance rates.
Unfortunately, personal experience also clues in parents to one other important fact: that getting behind the wheel and actually driving is both a great deal more fun and more beneficial than simply reading driving books. That’s why, in the end, your sweaty palms will eventually yield those treasured keys.
Recognizing the absurdities inherent in the airplane, basketball, and surgery scenarios cited earlier seems easy.
Luckily, ASU’s ACEPT team members have now gone a long way toward convincing educators of the absurdities of teaching reading, writing, ‘rithmetic, and research passively. They also have developed more appropriate teaching methodologies.
Such efforts should prove significant. ASU is the nation’s fifth largest university. ASU also has one of the largest ethnic minority enrollments in the United States. The latter fact is especially important given that minorities and women are dramatically underrepresented in both the mathematics and science disciplines.
ACEPT-related projects currently taking place in Arizona include Teacher Education for Arizona Mathematics and Science (TEAMS), the introduction of an interactive Patterns in Nature course, and a traveling Patterns in Nature van.
TEAMS is charged with quickly supplementing the teaching pool by drawing mid-level math and science practitioners into the teaching field. The program specifically targets grades 5-8. Statistical findings indicate those grades as the level where math and science education are weakest.
TEAMS members spend a full year studying interactive teaching techniques. They also work with master teachers in partner schools. Graduates emerge with a master’s degree, a teaching certificate, and a mandate that they take real-life math and science into schools.
The Patterns in Nature program is part of an updated ASU math and science curriculum. ASU experts designed the course to help make future teachers more science literate.
The Patterns in Nature van is a rolling, fully equipped science laboratory. ASU experts use it to demonstrate state-of-the-art technology on location at elementary and middle schools. The van serves as a free, traveling classroom for current students and their teachers.
There are other interactive ASU math and science programs aimed at young students. These include Women In Science and Engineering (WISE) and the Center for Academic Precocity (CAP).
WISE introduces high school age girls to the truly exciting aspects of science. Each girl spends several summer days on campus building rockets, viewing comets or atoms, and working on a variety of experiments.
CAP provides kindergarten through high school children real-life science experience. Each summer, more than 400 young students spend 20 days “playing” in age-appropriate computer, biology, physics, video production, and mathematics classes. CAP also offers evening and weekend classes throughout the year.
—Lindsey Michaels
