Iterations

Solutions and re-solutions for education

Social Dynamics in the STEM Classroom

Posted by Dr. Ann P. McMahon on February 27, 2012

As I design strategies for integrating STEM with social and emotional learning, I’m talking with mental health professionals, educators, and parents who work with neurotypical students as well as those with special needs. The Conceptual Framework for New Science Education Standards calls for more emphasis on science and engineering processes and 21st Century skills. An ideal way to accomplish this is to provide more project-based learning, which means that students will be working together more often, and in ways that might be new to both students and teachers. It’s not enough to focus only on the cognitive learning that must happen for each student. Students and teachers must attend to the social and emotional dynamics of the working group as well. But how? Just as there are strategies for teaching and learning science and engineering processes, there are strategies for facilitating healthy social dynamics.

Problem-based learning curricula often provide rubrics for collaboration among students. For neurotypical students and their teachers, these rubrics might provide reasonable and sufficient guidance. But I’ve worked with students in high needs school districts for most of my career in education, and many students come to school from environments so stressful that their ability to learn and work in groups is compromised. The effects of stress and developmental trauma on student learning and behavior are well documented. I dealt with it in this previous post. Even students from stable home environments experience ordinary developmental trauma (such as the birth of a sibling or moving to a new grade with a new teacher) that can interfere with their learning. How we educate children might be changing, but child development is not.

The challenge we face is how to help teachers create circumstances that allow students to feel safe and calm enough to work and learn together respectfully and productively. This requires teachers to connect deeply with children in a teaching environment that is increasingly driven by pacing guides and standardized tests. My approach is to arm teachers with a framework for understanding that all behavior has meaning and is rooted in a student’s prior experiences. Research has shown and teachers know that students’ cognitive understandings in the present are influenced by their prior cognitive experiences. Similarly, research also shows that people’s social behaviors in present events are influenced by past experiences that have wired the brain to respond a certain way, even if present circumstances differ from past ones. By decoding and addressing the meaning behind social behaviors rather than responding to them in an automatic or prescribed way, teachers can create the opportunity to meet a student’s needs in a way that can enable the student to choose to participate productively in learning activities. This approach makes classroom management easier for the teacher and improves the classroom climate for all students.

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My Research Findings Applied…

Posted by Dr. Ann P. McMahon on February 21, 2012

I wrote in my previous post about my dissertation research findings. In that post, I mentioned that I showed the engineering process used by designers at IDEO, a product innovation firm in northern California, to my elementary teacher participants as an example of best practices in engineering design. IDEO was founded by Dave Kelley, an engineering professor at Stanford, who has institutionalized his design thinking approach at the Stanford d.School. I wanted to experience that approach first hand, so last summer I traveled to Stanford’s d.School and earned a Professional Certificate in their Innovation Masters Series course called Design Thinking and the Art of Innovation.

It was awesome! I came home and immediately applied that approach by conducting an Innovation Institute for the administrative team at the University City Children’s Center through their LUME Institute. We’re using what I learned at Stanford to design and deliver innovative early childhood education experiences to children, parents and educators. Here’s a link to Stanford’s Student Spotlight profile in which I talk about my experiences in the course and how I applied what I learned to early childhood education. As I travel around the country speaking to and working with educators, scientists, engineers and businesspeople, I’m bringing similar insights and strategies for innovating K-12 STEM education. If you’re interested in learning more about my Innovation Institutes and unique approach to K-12 STEM education, invite me over for a visit.

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My Research Findings Are In…

Posted by Dr. Ann P. McMahon on February 14, 2012

I’m back to writing my blog now that I’ve finished my doctoral dissertation and degree. For my dissertation research, I studied the mental models elementary teachers have of what engineers do and their ideas about how they might incorporate the engineering process into their teaching practice. The Next Generation Science Standards are due to be released soon, and they will require that engineering practices be incorporated into the curriculum from elementary through high school grades, so my research is quite timely. What I found out should be important to teachers, parents, and school administrators as they work out how they will teach engineering to students.

Here’s what I did. I interviewed six elementary school teachers who teach engineering units that deal with science concepts as part of using LEGOs to solve design challenges. I also interviewed six elementary school teachers who teach science with textbooks and/or kits that include some kind of design challenge as a culminating activity. During each individual interview, I asked each teacher about how she teaches science and/or engineering, and showed her a video of designers at work. In this 22-minute video, designers at an innovation firm called IDEO redesigned a shopping cart. The IDEO designers’ process is quite engaging, and you can watch the video in three parts: part 1, part 2 and part 3. After each teacher watched the video, I asked her how she might translate what she saw to her classroom. I analyzed each teacher’s transcribed interview using a research method that allowed me to turn her statements into a mental model of how she perceived the designers in the video thinking and acting, both individually and in collaboration with their fellow designers. I also constructed my own mental model before I interviewed any of the teachers by having someone interview me in the same way I interviewed them. I used the same research method to construct a composite mental model for the IDEO designers. Then I compared all the mental models to each other to discover how each of us – and the composite IDEO designer – made sense of the process of redesigning a shopping cart.

What I found changed my focus significantly. I thought I would find that teachers who teach engineering units would talk about the cognitive steps in the engineering process with more depth and understanding than those who didn’t teach engineering. I thought that my own engineer/educator’s mental model and the composite IDEO designers’ mental model would provide clues about how to better teach the cognitive steps of the engineering process to teachers so that they could better teach it to their students. But that’s not what the interview data told me. Instead, all twelve teachers recognized the cognitive steps of the engineering process equally well, but every one of them fixated on the social and emotional norms and practices that the IDEO designers used (e.g. encourage wild ideas, defer judgment, build on the ideas of others, stay focused, everyone contributes, give feedback respectfully). That’s what each teacher wanted to talk about when she thought about how she would translate the design challenge into her classroom. That’s what she wanted to know how to teach her students. Each teacher believes that the cognitive steps can only be learned by everyone if the social and emotional classroom environment allows students to feel comfortable participating in the engineering process and working with their peers. (Go ahead, watch the video at the links above and you’ll see what teachers valued.)

When I compared teachers’ mental models to those of the professional designers and my own, I found that the professional designers/engineers focus on the cognitive steps of the engineering process and manage the social and emotional aspects of collaboration as part of those tasks. In other words, we know implicitly that we must work together well if we are to solve the design problem. We realize we can’t do it alone and adapt our behavior to work with others.

So here’s the bottom line: in order for students to be able to work together interdependently, teachers must teach those skills explicitly and intentionally. Though I only interviewed twelve teachers, both groups of six teachers were unanimous in their fixation on the collaboration skills they saw in the video. I think I’m on to something here that could be borne out with further research. I’ll be exploring the consequences of these findings in future posts.

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Education Reform – A Wicked Problem

Posted by Dr. Ann P. McMahon on March 16, 2011

Why is it so difficult to change the way we educate our children? We recognized thirty years ago that the existing industrial model of education won’t produce workers able to think critically and apply knowledge to solve today’s and tomorrow’s problems. We have defined and measured achievement gaps between many populations with great specificity, yet we cannot close them. I’ve spent the last two decades of my life working on several STEM education reforms because I believe that engaging children in a conversation with nature can transform their lives and their relationships to our planet. I still believe that. But here’s another thing I’ve come to realize. No matter how engaging the STEM experience, if a child’s brain is hyperaroused or depressed as a result of trauma (and remember, trauma can be ordinary life circumstances such as losing a tooth, gaining a sibling, or coping with parents’ divorce and remarriage), she can’t engage to learn. I’ve written about that here. So how can we address these  and other complex circumstances in education?

Engineers recognize that how one defines a problem determines the course of its solution. They have a special term for social problems like education reform – wicked problems. The term wicked problem was coined in 1973 in a seminal paper by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, a designer and an urban planner. They described wicked problems as messy social problems that are impossible to define, understand, and reach consensus about. Wicked problems can’t be neatly defined and are always entangled with other social problems. For example, it’s often said that the education problem can’t be solved until the poverty problem is addressed. These two problems are intertwined not only with each other, but with many other social issues such as crime, child care, health care, and unemployment. These entangled problems are made even more complex because they are values-laden. It’s impossible for everyone to reach consensus about how they should be addressed. There is no right or wrong answer, and each attempted solution will give rise to other anticipated, unanticipated, and delayed wicked problems. Furthermore, each wicked problem can be considered a symptom of another wicked problem because of their interconnectedness. Wicked problems are never solved once and for all, just re-solved over and over again. Hence, the current state of affairs in education.

Neuroscience, behavioral and cognitive research, and systems thinking research has revealed much about how we operate as individuals and in social groups. It turns out that we’re wired for connection with each other, and that our relationships define us more than our separateness does. Neuroscience also helps us understand how our brains function to limit our grasp of and responses to wicked problems. Dietrich Dörner gives many examples of how capable, intelligent and thoughtful people fail to understand complex systems and make wise and prudent decisions about interventions in them. Psychologist Dan Gilbert talks about how our brains respond with feeling and action to situations that are intentional, immoral, imminent, and instantaneous – and not to situations that aren’t. This was an adaptive trait that kept us alive long ago, but it short-circuits an appropriate and collective sense of urgency in the face of wicked problems like global warming and education reform, whose consequences play out day by day over decades. David Brooks synthesizes multidisciplinary research in a nuanced narrative of an emerging new humanism in his recent TEDTalk. This new humanism acknowledges what psychodynamic researchers have known for years: that our unconscious emotions give rise to our conscious reasoning, and that emotional fluency comes from attuned attachment experiences with important others early in life. The ability to form secure attachments underpins several abilities that bind us socially and are essential skills in solving and re-solving the wicked problems that face the human race. Brooks lists these as:

“Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.
Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.
Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.
Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.
Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or [oneness with the Universe]. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.”

These first three abilities appear in the three key findings about how people learn: 1) students’ preconceptions about subject matter must be engaged in order for them to learn new ways of thinking about the subject matter, 2) students must have a deep factual knowledge base that is organized for easy retrieval in a conceptual framework that makes sense for the subject matter, and 3) students are able to think about and monitor their own learning. Brooks’ last two abilities are embodiments of the three core emotional needs: 1) to feel loved, 2) to feel a sense of belonging and 3) to feel a sense of appropriate power over one’s circumstances. Schools should be places where students develop all of these abilities and experience the joy of learning through meaningful connections with teachers, peers, and the natural and human-made world. If students are to be prepared for a lifetime of thinking, playing, creating, loving and working, schools should be places where relationships are valued as essential to acquiring knowledge that is measured as well as knowledge that is important but not measured. The ability to collaborate with others to learn in formal, informal and social situations is a life skill.  Engineering experiences can provide meaningful and authentic contexts for students to practice learning in these ways. The teacher-student relationship can provide the secure base from which students can explore the joy in learning. Emotional safety and stability are necessary for the cognitive mind to develop fully.

Does anyone have a complete enough picture of the education system – from neurons to policy – to prescribe exactly how to do this? No one person does because the system is too complex for any one person to understand. The wicked problem of education reform requires transdisciplinary imagination to solve and re-solve. There are no quick fixes or silver-bullet programs that work for everyone in every context. The best hope we have of reforming education successfully is for stakeholders from multiple perspectives and disciplines who embody the five abilities above collaborate on innovative and iterative solutions adaptable for specific contexts. We must be creative and attentive to emergent consequences. Every iteration of a solution will change the lives of at least one generation of students. Neuroscientific and psychological research indicates that that educational policies and interventions should maintain and foster both the emotional and cognitive growth of each child. Policies that fail on either count could ultimately fail the child.

References:
Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (2000). How people learn: brain, mind, experience, and school.  Expanded edition. District of Columbia: National Academies Press
Brooks, D. (2011a, March 15, 2011) David Brooks: The social animal. TED Talks. retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/david_brooks_the_social_animal.html
Brooks, D. (2011b). The new humanism. STLtoday.com. Retrieved from http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/david-brooks/article_364f728d-2226-50ff-b26f-2560409622e4.html
Brown, V. A., Harris, J. A., & Russell, J. Y. (Eds.). (2010). Tackling wicked problems through the transdisciplinary imagination. London; Washington, DC: Earthscan.
Dörner, D. (1996). The logic of failure: Recognizing and avoiding error in complex situations. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books.
Gilbert, D. (March 15, 2011) It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. Harvard Thinks Big. retrieved from http://hutvnetwork.com/harvardthinksbig
Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155-169.

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Empathy and Education Research

Posted by Dr. Ann P. McMahon on March 6, 2011

Did you know that our brains are wired to connect with others? When an infant notices another baby crying, mirror neurons fire in the observing baby, causing her to cry too. Scientists believe these mirror neurons are the biological basis of empathy. Empathy is vital in establishing a sense of belonging in play, love, work and learning. Scientists have studied mirror neurons and empathy in many contexts, from neuroscience to social science. Vittorio Gallese documents his discovery of mirror neurons and his subsequent work here. Bruce Perry explores how and why empathy is essential and endangered in his book Born for Love. Jeremy Rivkin talks about the evolution of empathy in his RSA Animated presentation called The Empathic Civilisation here. I’m going to talk about what I’m learning about empathy as a researcher and as a participant in the research of others.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m conducting my Ph.D. research on elementary teachers’ mental models of what engineers do. When I’m not working on my dissertation research, I’m working with the staff of an educational organization to create a system dynamics model to help them better understand, nurture and replicate what they do very well. The best way I have found to understand and represent a person’s mental model or an organization’s process from the inside out is to join them as a compassionate witness in their experience – to empathize with them. Both projects involve systematically paying attention to what people say and do – their outside actions – then finding the connections to what happens on the inside of those people and the organization in a way that represents the authenticity of their inner and outer experiences to someone outside. Researchers and participants must trust one another if they are to learn from and with each other in this way. I know what it feels like to be willingly vulnerable in order to help someone else learn. I have experienced this kind of empathic connection with researchers as a participant in several studies, and I bring that awareness to my role as a researcher.

In my teens, I needed a specific dental procedure that was part of the state’s licensing examination for prospective dentists. I was invited by a dental school to be a dental student’s patient on his licensing examination day. I had a positive experience that day, and the results have held up over time. When I had my babies, I chose to deliver them at the teaching hospital where my doctor was on the faculty. Over the years, I have volunteered to be a participant in research studies on healthy living strategies and in studies of teaching and learning. The researchers in these studies made sure I knew how much they respected me, valued my participation, and safeguarded the data I provided them. I felt so good about helping them create new knowledge to help others that I intend to donate my body to science when I die. My friends in the medical professions who have learned this way tell me how profoundly that learning affected them. I consider that act my final opportunity to connect with another in order to teach.

I volunteered for each study because I was genuinely curious about the topic, so I asked lots of questions throughout. The researchers were eager to talk to me about their work to the extent that the study allowed. In entering their system as a study participant, I learned a great deal about their areas of interest, which were different from my own. What surprised me most were the insights I gained about myself by participating in the interactions they designed and reporting how I experienced them. In most interviews, I felt deeply heard as the researcher listened to what I had to say, then asked me to elaborate about specific comments I made. Their probing questions helped me discover meanings and interpretations I might not have become aware of otherwise. In some cases, researchers sent me their write-up of our conversations and asked me to make sure it conveyed what I meant (researchers call this process member-checking). It was clear to me that both of us were changed by our connection with each other within our co-created system that included me, my experiences within the study, and the researcher.

Now that I’m the researcher, I feel deeply honored by my participants’ willingness to open their practices to me and allow me to join them in their experiences of it. As I take apart our conversations in order to put the pieces together again into each person’s mental model of what engineers do, I am changed. I look forward to being changed again during the member-checking stage of my dissertation work. I hope my participants are also changed by our work together in ways that please them.

In my work with the educational organization’s members, we use a more interactive model-building process designed to stimulate meaningful conversations within the organization about what makes them unique and effective. The system dynamics model we are constructing together captures their collective and developing mental model of what they do and how they do it. It provides a shared, evolving representation they can build upon internally and use to communicate with those outside the organization. All of us are changing through working together in this way.

I find that the most satisfying thing about being a researcher and participating in another’s research is the empathic connection that changes everyone involved while creating new knowledge upon which others can build.

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Engineering a Happy Life

Posted by Dr. Ann P. McMahon on February 12, 2011

How can engineering an airplane set the stage for a happy marriage and family life? Engineers get lots of practice balancing both separateness and togetherness in their work. Let’s explore how this skill can help meet our core needs for autonomy and a sense of belonging in work, life, and love.

All of us strive throughout our lives for a sense of autonomy and to feel like we belong. As toddlers able to move around without help, we rushed away from mother to explore our world. As parents and other caregivers encouraged us to explore the world and to satisfy our own needs when we were able, we developed a sense of being able to manage on our own – autonomy.  We reveled in our ability to take on our big, new world until our developing brains allowed us to realize that we are small and we need others to help us. Around two years old, our brains finally allowed us to know one of the major conflicts of life: we like doing things on our own AND we need others to help us. So what did we do? We practiced coming to terms with these opposing needs as best we could. Our parents called this stage our “terrible twos,” when nothing they did seemed to satisfy us. We wanted to be picked up (belong to mother) only to want down again (be autonomous). We wanted help, and we didn’t want help in all sorts of ways that challenged the adults around us.

All of us began to figure out how to belong AND be autonomous as children, and we continue to do it throughout our lives. Can I do this on my own? Who will help me if I need it? We solve and re-solve this puzzle in everyday circumstances and at turning points in our lives. In particular, each time we face a choice that stretches our abilities or changes our relationships, we relive this dilemma. If we’ve solved this conflict for ourselves successfully enough times before, we will know ourselves well enough to be able to weigh our options and choose with confidence.

Life gives each of us many chances to meet our unique needs for belonging and autonomy. A career in engineering gives one many chances to meet these needs with others in a fun, fascinating, and structured way. Engineers work in groups with others who have different expertise within the engineering profession. They all are focused on the object they are designing. Most engineering groups develop a collective identity tied to that object – the Project XYZ group – and each member feels a sense of belonging within it. Each member makes a unique contribution and is autonomous in that regard.  The group develops many different models of its design together. The first common model is created and agreed upon through discussion and some rough sketches. Then, the structural designers translate the initial discussions and sketches into three dimensional computer models. Each member of the team takes that model and makes a different computer model that analyzes and optimizes the design for performance features within the member’s expertise – for example, strength, thermodynamics, or aerodynamics. Along the way, each person exchanges information with every other person on the team. The group comes together again and uses the new information each team member brings to negotiate a better design. Notice in the picture below that each member talks with each other member, then adds to the designed object.


They separate again to analyze the new design. This cycle of designing together, then separately, then together happens until the design does what it’s supposed to do and everyone on the team approves it. Then the group might disband and each person moves on to another project and group. So the design process incorporates autonomy and belonging. All team members must manage both of these for themselves in order to be successful in creating the designed object. And each engineer might work on many projects in her career, so she gets plenty of practice dealing with autonomy and belonging with different groups.

I met my husband when we were both engineers designing an airplane. As two members of a group of engineers designing this plane, we were both fascinated by all the complex challenges involved in designing it. We were focused first on the designed object, the airplane. At the time, I was a co-op student still in engineering school, so this was my first professional experience on a project. He was assigned to be my mentor. We spent months at work together discussing and developing models and blueprints with others in our group. Not only did our group work together to solve design problems, but we socialized together, too. Our group formed a softball team and played in the company league. Our group went out for dinner after work. My future husband and I built trust and respect as we worked on that airplane together. Once I went back to engineering school and we didn’t see each other at work anymore, we began seeing each other socially. Our social relationship was easy because we already knew we collaborated well together, had temperaments that balanced each other, and held similar values. Friendship and trust grew into love, and we were married less than two years later. That was 30 years ago.

Our experiences as engineers helped us build our happy, peaceful family. We learned early in our relationship how to encourage and honor our separate, autonomous selves within the warm and loving togetherness of marriage. We brought two sons into our family and helped them find their autonomy and sense of belonging both within and outside of our family. As they leave our home and make their own families, we are redefining autonomy and belonging for our growing family. All of us continue to collaborate in redesigning our lives to meet our basic human needs for autonomy and belonging. After all, it’s what we engineers (and these engineers’ children) are trained to do.

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Reaching the Whole Child with STEM Education

Posted by Dr. Ann P. McMahon on February 5, 2011

Remember the three core emotional needs we all have? Love, belonging, and a sense of power over circumstances. Research also says three factors motivate people to innovate more than anything else: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Can we use school science and engineering to foster all six of these? For complex tasks that involve conceptual, creative work, Dan Pink says the research is clear about those three motivating factors. For simple, rule-based tasks the carrot-and-stick approach works just fine: you do this and you get that. (Click to see Dan’s delightful RSA animated talk and other RSA animations). How can we use this knowledge to motivate students’ STEM learning and teachers’ STEM teaching as well as meet their emotional needs?

I mentioned here that the new draft of the National Science Education Standards places unprecedented emphasis on teaching K-12 students the engineering process. Some of my colleagues in K-12 science education don’t like that engineering has been added to an already full slate of science understandings that teachers must teach. Some say that students should learn engineering in the context of learning science. I say it makes more sense to teach students science in the context of engineering. I’m going to explain why through the lenses of what we know about people’s basic emotional needs and what motivates people. And I’ll show how an engineering context makes for good science teaching, too.

There’s a fundamental difference between science and engineering. School science and most professional science deal with objects and phenomena that exist. School engineering and professional engineering deal with objects, phenomena or processes that do not yet exist. This is an important distinction because it places school engineering in the realm of the complex, conceptual and creative learning tasks Dan Pink mentions. Engineering is a process that results in something new, even if the process begins with something that already exists. Scientists’ creation of new science knowledge is also a complex process that requires conceptualization and creativity. The motivators for these tasks are autonomy, mastery and purpose.

But school science packages existing science knowledge and the scientific method in a simpler, rule-based way: if you do X, you’ll observe Y and conclude Z. It’s the sense-making discussion after observations are made – the social learning – that leads to students’ grasp of the big ideas in science, and the big ideas are already established, too. And research shows that the sense-making discussions necessary to cement student learning don’t always happen. I think that all students need to have rich sensory experiences with natural and human-made objects and phenomena that lead to key understandings in science. All of us were taught the scientific method somewhere in our K-12 education. We learned science facts, too. We need to know these things to become scientifically literate citizens. But what’s the motivation to engage and learn when science is presented in such a simple context?

To explore the idea of embedding school science in an engineering context, let’s compare the scientific method with the engineering process.

Notice that the engineering process is need or problem driven and the scientific method is question driven. The scientific method fits naturally into several steps in the engineering process where questions drive one step into the next: research, selection, testing and evaluation, and redesign. For example, if my need or problem is to design a compact and attractive device for growing tomatoes all year long in a home, first I need to know how tomato plants grow. That leads to a need to know the life cycle of plants, a science unit that is taught in most elementary schools. For that same design, I’ll need to know the physical properties of the materials I want to use to help my tomato plants grow – soil, chemical nutrients (including water), containers, light sources, holding structure for plant containers. I’ll need to use my math skills to measure the growing plants, construct any containers or structure to hold containers, calculate the cost of my solution, measure light and water to the plants, and many other elements of my solution. I might use the scientific method to compare two or more preliminary solutions, growing plants each way to test their effectiveness and ease of use. I’ll have to test my final design to make sure it meets all the requirements of the problem or need. I must use my language arts skills to communicate my solution to others. I might write a report that describes my design and what it can do. I might also write marketing materials that would entice people to buy my device. The engineering context motivates a need to know many science, math social studies and language arts concepts and skills.

I’m not the first person to come up with the idea of embedding science, math, language arts and social studies into real world design challenges. Lots of research exists on problem-based learning. Many teachers use this approach to engage their students. It’s a demanding way to teach because there are no predetermined answers to complex design challenges; students and teachers must be creative, adaptive and innovative. Teachers must have enough science knowledge to guide students’ design and troubleshooting processes, which means that the teacher must be able to deal with complex problems creatively. Students’ and teachers’ thinking is raised to higher levels in the school engineering process than in the typical school science process. It doesn’t make sense to embed the school engineering process into the school scientific method because the school scientific method is a rule-based tool that serves the larger, more complex and adaptive engineering purpose. But the problem based approach doesn’t lend itself to the teach-to-the-schedule-and-test-based accountability system that has all students doing the same thing at the same time to prepare them to score well on a high stakes test. In order to make the problem-based approach work, the educational paradigm must shift.

The thinking-based reasons for embedding the school science process into a school engineering context are compelling. I think it’s even more compelling that the engineering context can contain all three core emotional needs and help students experience all three motivational factors, too. We’ve already shown how the problem based nature of the engineering challenge requires students to think more creatively than the typical, rule-based school scientific method. Now let’s add the social and emotional advantages to the cognitive ones. It’s possible to find meaningful engineering design challenges that give students a sense of purpose (a motivating factor) and a sense of belonging to a group (a core emotional need) that’s focused on meeting the challenge. If the group works well together and capitalizes on the talents of each member, each member can feel a sense of mastery and autonomy (motivating factors) as well as power over her contribution (a core emotional need) to the solution. The sense of being loved (a core emotional need) translates into feeling valued by peers for one’s unique talents and abilities. My elementary teacher friends might remind me that expecting such collaborative behaviors from children is asking a lot. It’s even asking a lot of many adults. That’s only because our existing school accountability culture values and tests cognitive learning as an individual activity and not a social one. Guidelines for social and emotional learning emphasize empathy and collaboration beginning in preschool, identifying more advanced empathic and collaborative behaviors as children grow.

I was introduced to collaborative learning and project work in engineering school. Until then, my success in school was measured by my ability to learn on my own and show that on the kinds of tests and measures that led to my admission to a highly competitive university. My experience in engineering school was a mixture of learning on my own, learning in social groups outside of class, and learning collaboratively in small groups within a course. I earned grades for my individual work in some courses and I earned shared grades with my partners for our group work in other courses. My social learning was the most fun, though. There were very few women in my engineering program, so we formed a study group soon after meeting. We supported each other, did well as a result, and many of us remain friends to this day. Back then, we created a shared sense of purpose around mastering engineering knowledge and skills well enough to succeed on our own in industry (notice the three motivating factors). In that process, we grew to value each other’s unique contributions to the success of our group as students and as friends (notice the three core emotional needs).

Professional engineers and scientists rarely work alone. I’ve written about this here. They must work with others near them in their physical workplace as well as in global, virtual workplaces created by technology. The ability to collaborate and solve problems with others is not only a core professional skill, but a core life skill as well. Each of us learns to collaborate and solve problems by engaging in relationships – through social and emotional learning. Our patterns for relating to others get established very early in life. Children need continuous practice relating to others to expand their repertoire of relationship skills. In the process, they can meet their three core emotional needs and feel motivated to win the future through STEM experiences that inspire them to innovate.

Let me know what you think. What collaborative experiences did you have in school? Were the three core emotional needs (love, belonging, and a sense of power over circumstances) and the three motivating factors (autonomy, mastery, and purpose) present in your experiences? Would your school STEM experiences have been more satisfying if they had been more collaborative? Do you think that learning science, math, language arts and social studies in an engineering context can prepare our children to be the innovators of tomorrow?

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Are You Calm Enough to be Curious?

Posted by Dr. Ann P. McMahon on January 29, 2011

What are you insatiably curious about? What fascinates you? I bet you can think of more than one thing. That’s because it’s our nature to be curious. We’re born that way. Our brains are hardwired for exploration of the world around us. As babies we craned our necks and pushed our little arms and legs against mother to see the view beyond her arms and over her shoulder. As toddlers we rushed out from mother to experience our world on two wobbly legs, returning to her when we needed emotional refueling. Our innate curiosity compelled us to venture ever farther away from where we began life. Our temperament influenced the way we did this, but the developmental juggernaut of curiosity has carried us to where we are today. Along the way, we’ve been shaped by our experience of the world – our encounters with the natural and human-made world and the relationships we’ve had with others.  But did you know we need to feel safe and calm to be curious?

No doubt we’ve had experiences in our lives that evoked a wide variety of emotions. Events that evoke curiosity engage a different part of the brain than those that evoke fear. When we’re afraid, we perceive and react differently than when we’re calm. Fear impedes cognition and stifles curiosity. Neuroscientist Bruce Perry describes what happens:

“When we are under threat, our minds and bodies will respond in an adaptive fashion, making changes in our state of arousal (mental state), our style of thinking (cognition) and in our body’s physiology (e.g., increased heart rate, muscle tone, rate of respiration). To understand how we respond to threat it is important to appreciate that as we move along the arousal continuum — from calm to arousal to alarm, fear and terror — different areas of our brain control and orchestrate our mental and physical functioning. The more threatened we become, the more ‘primitive’ (or regressed) our style of thinking and behaving becomes.”

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux studies how the brain processes fear (our response to a threat that is present and immediate) and anxiety (our response to a threat that doesn’t exist yet). Our brains are wired to store our fear responses so that we respond the same way in a similar situation – an evolutionary adaptation that is meant to keep us alive. This automatic fear response can cause problems if the situation is supposed to be a nonthreatening part of everyday life, because we can think our way into an emotion, but our thoughts can’t control our emotional response.

It’s important for children to have positive emotional experiences with school and learning. Everyone who works in a school and school district can foster a child’s curiosity by contributing in their own way to creating an emotionally safe, calm and respectful environment in which students can learn. Social emotional learning standards and programs exist that can help schools learn to do this. It’s a complex and demanding change to make, but one that supports every child’s developmental need to explore the world beyond mother. I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life creating and delivering top-notch science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education programs to students and teachers in all kinds of learning environments. I’ve come to realize that no matter how exciting and meaningful and supported the learning experience is designed to be, a child cannot reap the cognitive benefits of it unless she feels calm enough to be curious. Brain research tells us this, and creating safe and calm conditions for each child’s learning is essential if we really want to leave no child behind.

Next…the difference between school science and school engineering

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Solving Lives: Managing Uncertainty and Ambiguity

Posted by Dr. Ann P. McMahon on January 23, 2011

How do you deal with uncertainty and ambiguity in your life? We can’t avoid them. They’re part of being human. If we’re fortunate, we’ve had enough positive experiences with important others early in life that we perceive the world as a safe and welcoming place. We hold representations of people we love and have loved inside us – our family members, friends, teachers and others. We draw on our attachments to these people – our internal representations of them – for support and comfort when we try something new or take a risk. In this way, our attachments to important others help us flow with the uncertainty and ambiguity of everyday life.

When engineers are presented with a problem, they rarely have complete clarity about the problem or all of the information necessary to solve it. Smart engineering teams spend considerable time at the beginning of a project gathering as much information as possible in order to define the problem and create a shared representation of it inside each team member and for others to see in the form of words, pictures and/or mathematical equations and graphs. Team members draw on each other’s skills and ideas as each of them reduces for herself and for the group the ambiguity about what is needed. Once the group has tackled ambiguity and defined the problem, team members brainstorm possible solutions. Then each one of them uses systematic methods to reduce uncertainty about each possible solution enough so that the team members can agree on a best solution to try.

Engineers can never eliminate uncertainty in a solution, but they can systematically reduce it to tolerable levels. My insightful friend with several engineers in her life notices that we use this approach to solve and re-solve our lives as we live them. These can be adaptive skills for work and life.

I have worked in enough high needs schools to know that many students come to preschool and elementary school without secure attachments to important others who provide the child with an internal sense of stability. For these children, managing the uncertainty and ambiguity that goes along with school-based learning can be overwhelming, and that overwhelmed feeling can inhibit their performance in school. Teachers and administrators who are sensitive both to children’s emotional needs and cognitive needs can provide all students practice dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty by adopting engineering team challenges as part of the school’s curriculum. Interesting and meaningful challenges invite all students to engage in a variety of roles, and the systematic nature of the engineering process enables the teacher to contain the uncertainty and ambiguity of the tasks to levels tolerable for students. In this way, cognitive and emotional learning can happen together.

Next…
Fear and curiosity…like oil and water in the brain

Coming up…
The difference between school science and school engineering
Engineering in the strength-based classroom

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Engineering, Emotion and Education

Posted by Dr. Ann P. McMahon on January 21, 2011

Hello and welcome to my blog. I’m at the beginning of another iteration of my work life, and I’d like to share this exciting time with you. Here’s a synopsis of where I’ve been so far: ten years as an aerospace engineer, four years as a provider of informal science education to preschool and early elementary school children, ten years as a teacher and K-12 science coordinator for private and public schools, then five years as a university-based provider of science outreach services and support to K-12 schools.

I’ve left my world of work to write my Ph.D. dissertation. My dissertation topic – the jargon-lite version – is “the mental models elementary school teachers have of what engineers do.” I chose this topic because of a combination of a happy reconnection with someone from my engineering past (you’ll have to return to read that story) and my own experiences over the years talking with elementary school teachers about what I used to do as an engineer. In addition to my own curiosity about the topic, I have a pragmatic motivation. It’s likely that our new national science education standards will contain design/engineering standards that elementary teachers will have to teach. We owe it to teachers to help them teach engineering with curriculum and professional development designed to bridge the gap between the teaching and engineering professions. I’m passionate about this. As any competent engineer will tell you, how you frame a problem determines the nature of the solution. In order to bridge the gap between the two professions, we must first understand it. My dissertation work will help us understand that gap.

I’m equally passionate about combining social and emotional learning opportunities with K-12 engineering education. Engineers have been networking their knowledge and learning in the service of design and innovation long before the internet and Web 2.0 applications existed. It’s what we’ve been trained to do and is an integral part of engineering practice. Granted, knowledge sharing among engineers is decidedly more technical than social, but engineering knowledge is socially constructed nonetheless. Engineering education offers a natural context for social and emotional learning in the K-12 classroom. What do I mean by social and emotional learning? That takes me right back to the preschool/early childhood iteration of my career.

Every one of us, young or old, wants to feel valued, like we belong to a community, and like we have some power over our circumstances. These are basic emotional needs. When engineers are creating a new object or redesigning an existing one, they form teams of people who contribute differently to the engineering process. Each member of the design team is valued for her unique perspective and contribution to the team’s process. They form a shared identity around the object they are designing (i.e. the widget group). Their collaborative efforts bring something entirely new into existence, which can evoke powerful feelings of agency.

Next…

Solving Lives: Managing Uncertainty and Ambiguity

Coming soon…
The difference between school science and school engineering
Engineering in the strength-based classroom

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