I recently spend part of a week at Raystown Lakecamping with my family.  My children enjoyed spending time with their cousins cliff jumping, swimming, and boating.  We did “tent it,” which always leads to some levels of uncomfort.  In order to mitigate the lack of sleeping amenities we did the traditional thing:  use an air mattress. 

 I don’t know about you, but I’ve had traditionally bad experiences with air mattresses.  Night one is usually fine, but then there seems to be a problem with air leaking, which just progressively gets worse.  The mattress gets pumped up at night, starts off firm, but by morning, various body parts are clinging to the hard ground.  Ugg. 

Thinking about this, I realized that temperatures change during the day – at night, when the mattress is full, it is cool, but during the day, the heat build up. In an air mattress, that means the molecular motion of the confined air increases, causing additional inflation and higher pressure during the day.  This then puts additional stress on the matress, which potentially creates microleaks. 

So I thought that if the pressure was relieved, this would prevent the additional pressure from building up.  Sure enough, with a partial deflation, I went back to the mattress in the afternoon to find that it felt fully inflated.  This, of course, died down during early evening, when I re-pumped the mattress before bed. 

Interesting  . . .

When I evaluate my thinking, I see this as a problem solving situation – which in my past definitions is a logical/analytical process.  However, I am forced to think that there was some creativity involved.  So I am at this cognitive dissonance trying to decide whether (or how) problem solving is a creative process.  I have traditionally distinguished problem finding and problem solving as different cognitive processes – but there may be some blurring that I need to think about more.

Earlier this year, I was asked to participate (as a subject) in a research study examining teacher’s expertise as it relates to pedagogy, subject expertise, and inquiry (research) skills.  During an interview, I was asked to recall a meaningful experience that influenced my teaching.  I have orally told this story many times, but the researcher was recording and transcribing.  I was fortunate to receive a copy of the transcript and am sharing it below:

Question:  Can you recall what experiences informed your understanding of science teaching?

My response:

Yes! I can very much pinpoint the event that really helped focus and change my perception of myself as a science teacher. And it took place in March 1998. I was working with a teacher and he said, Frank you would really like this event, is called the Junior Science and Humanities symposium.  It takes place at UConn and I really encourage you to go. I think you are going to get a lot out of it.  Take a couple of students if you would like, and by the way, can you take my son too.  He’s at the right age and I think it would be good for him to go. So I went to this symposium at the University of Connecticut.  What I found were students presenting results from their research. It took place in 15-minute platforms: they did 15 minute talks followed by questions and answers from the audience.  I was sitting in the audience utterly mesmerized by these students – how well they were presenting.  I sat back and said what a fool I had been. As a neophyte teacher, I was teaching the way I was taught.  Here I had my mind opened to remind me what really made a very positive influence in my development as a scientist and that was working in a research laboratory.  Watching those students I realized what was meaningful to me – what made me a good student of science.  It was not the didactic book knowledge but rather the meaningful exploration of science as a way to develop knowledge. So I walked away from that event saying this (authentic, applied research) is what I should be doing.  From that point, I really started to shape my philosophy of education.  At that point I did not know what inquiry meant or perhaps I had not defined it as well as I do today, but I understood the value of doing authentic research.  The Junior Science and Humanities Symposium really shaped my whole philosophy of teaching – that we needed to move students towards the individualization and the authentic opportunities for them to do meaningful science. So I can confidently say that was the most important experience in my professional career to date.

There is so much more to the story too.  At that symposium there were also students presenting posters.  I went up to one of the students who has developed this device and it was basically a homemade spectrophotometer:  it’s a device used to measure interference of light.  He was using it for photosynthesis or some whatever reason. He was very proud of himself and I was chatting with him and his teacher happened to be there. The students was from Greenwich High School, which was the next town from where I was teaching.  I met this teacher, we really got on very well, and he became a mentor for me to inculcate me to doing science research process with students.  He really was a wonderful teacher and it was an amazing experience in the sense that I recognized what I valued in my education and also I met someone who shared the same values as I did.  We both had extremely positive experiences doing research with students.  He became a mentor for me.

Click HERE!
photo credit: Mike GL

I am constantly amazed by the reality, that I am sitting in my kitchen, hooked up to nothing, and writing, which seamlessly travels through the air to parts unknown.  Today, I virtually spoke with my brother-in-law, the impetus to the sliced bread story and got the following link:

http://www.nysenate.gov/press-release/return-common-sense

I like how we are using 21st-century skills (collaboration, written communication, problem solving) and tools (IT) to make the process almost effortless. We are such consumers of information – the real challenge is to become better producers.

I think I need to follow up with this senator and see if I can conduct a recorded phone interview to get some more perspective on this interesting story which just oozes problem finding/problem solving in such a different type of context.

I’m sure there is more to come . . .

http://www.sde.ct.gov/sde/cwp/view.asp?a=2618&q=320892

My kindergarten daughter brought home a book from school today, When I Grow Up.  My daughter’s teacher has, throughout the year, had the students complete “Think Books,” where the children draw a picture and write a sentence to explain their “story.” I can tell by the book that the teacher was working on “evidence.” The student had to say what she wanted to be, then explain the reason.  The teacher then assembles the student work and makes a bound book that the children bring home on different nights to share with their families.

What I like about the “Think Books” is that the students are making an authentic product that they share with their families.  There is a certain level of quality when it is shared with many.  Here’s her page:

Maggie's Career Think Book

from blog.beliefnet.com

A recent .news story (which, honestly, I heard from a secondary source and haven’t yet found the primary, yet . .. ) talks about the budget crisis in New York State.  Recently a Corrections Officer came up with a potential way to save a large amount of money.

Replace prisoners’ hot dog and hamburger rolls with sliced bread. (I don’t know if it’s white bread or whole wheat!:)  In any event, this apparent switch will save the state of New York over $3,000,000 per year!  Unbelievable.

I am looking forward to heading to the supermarket to verify the cost-savings and how many hot dogs and hamburgers we are talking about . . .

from plimoth.org

However, this gets me to thinking about teaching, learning, and creativity.  We certainly have a problem finding/problem solving situation here.  But I think what I see that is important is that it is situated.  If the person wasn’t working in the prison environment, this would have probably been a non-existent thought.  It was necessary and critical that this individual had practical, real experience with the environment so he developed an expertise to recognize that there was a potential money-saving option.

I think there is a lot here that I am not yet seeing, but wanted to be sure to document this idea for further thought and analysis.

The trustworthiness of a qualitative study can be increased by maintaining high credibility and objectivity. A research definition of trustworthiness might be: “Demonstration that the evidence for the results reported is sound and when the argument made based on the results is strong.” In order to maintain high trustworthiness in a qualitative study, Krefting (1991) suggested four criteria to ensure valid interpretation of data: truth value, applicability, consistency, and neutrality. In the qualitative approach, truth value is measured by credibility: having an adequate engagement in the research setting so recurrent patterns in data can be properly identified and verified. Applicability is established with transferability: allowing readers to be able to apply the findings of the study to their own situations. Since a qualitative researcher’s perspective is naturally biased due to his or her close association with the data, sources, and methods, various audit strategies can be used to confirm findings (Bowen, 2009; Miller, 1997). Therefore, trustworthiness of (a) interpretations, and (b) findings are dependent on being able to demonstrate how they were reached (Mauthner & Doucet, 2003).

I saw the following comic strip and thought that it was worthy to share from the qualitative paradigm philosophy. Confirmability (confirming the thoughts/biases/results) is critical in qualitative research. Let it go and the findings are suspect at best.

Maggie reads to the class

Today I had the opportunity to visit my daughter’s school for her Kindergarten Author’s Tea.  I LOVE when teachers give their students the opportunity to present their work in an authentic setting.  It doesn’t matter what grade, K-12 – giving students the opportunity to share their work with the community increases the value and quality for the child.  I’ve included a few pictures and embedded a video of her reading the story.  Be sure to leave a comment for Maggie below!

Maggie shows us her book

Maggie is joined by her sister Anna

I recently viewed an interesting TED video by math teacher Dan Meyer.  He had a very interesting  perspective on problem solving.  I am going to summarize my learning in the form of questions:

Are the problems we give students to solve worth solving?  If we present problems in a way where everything is there, we create impatient problem solving.  If all of the information is provided in advance and there is no filtering necessary, are we really providing a compelling questions?  Or rather, are we just “smoothing it out” to make it easy for students?  When we really problem solve don’t we usually have insufficient information or an abundance of information that needs to be sifted and sorted?  Don’t we have to go to multiple, reliable sources to gather the necessary data?   Do we scaffold too much for students, instead of teaching them the skills of developing their own collaborative scaffolding skills?

Watch the video.  It will certainly give you something to think about . . . .