Seasons

Learning about why the Earth has seasons has definitely thrown up some of my favourite student misconceptions. Last year, I had the student who earnestly tried to argue that seasons are caused because the sun goes round the Earth and it's closer in summer. This year, it was the student who said it was because the plants needed summer to grow and so seasons started because of the plants.

Personally, I have a special love for the equinoxes and solstices, and celebrate them each year. As a teacher, I have a few odd seasons in my head too. For example, late September to November is Red Pen Season, when I eat, sleep and breathe revision and marking. It's not my favourite season.

I know that some of my students have this sort of headcanon for thinking about the world in a way that is not strictly scientific or 'true' for some values of true. It's real or sensible to them in their own perspective, though, and I think that's a valuable thing to have. I think it leads to the sort of quirky creativity that helps people get their head around things, and it's not something we should try to stamp out.

So I guess I am thinking about where to draw the line between completely, utterly, bizarrely wrong beliefs and eccentric and personal interpretations of the world around you. I think, for me, it's the recognition that my personal interpretation is just that, and not mistaking it for a universal perspective.

Causing mayhem - cognitive conflict

In senior Physics, at least, I rarely have trouble causing cognitive conflict. My students are in an almost perpetual state of cognitive conflict. They barely have a few moments of blissful security before I start asking questions that get them to look at how their existing understanding is too simple and full of misunderstandings.

In junior Science, however, getting students to that point of cognitive conflict can be difficult to achieve. There is nothing so disheartening as discovering that your students have absorbed all the new learning, but not jettisoned all their old beliefs. Students are capable of holding seven contradictory thoughts before breakfast, let alone their contradictory thoughts about the structure of plastics.

I have been working hard to get students to recognise that they are in cognitive conflict, not just be in cognitive conflict, do a bit of mental gymnastics, and assimilate the contradictions into a dual view of the world.

This isn't new, I know, but I have just come across it again recently. When I am working with students at a high level - getting students to predict, or make generalisations, or evaluate ideas - then students can't help but change ideas. It's something to do with the extended abstract thinking, at that top level of SOLO taxonomy, that makes contradictions untenable.

I use SOLO taxonomy in a relatively limited way in my junior classes. They are definitely embedded in the learning outcomes, and our whole department is working on increasing metacognition in our students. Now that I've thought about this link between cognitive conflict, high level thinking on the SOLO taxonomy and real change in thinking, I am going to have to think more about how to extend this.

Reflection! Fun times.