Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

--Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Introduction

I currently teach science to students aged 11-14 at the United Nations International School in New York City.  I am also the science curriculum coordinator, a role that allows me to oversee the development and implementation of our science curriculum in the middle school.  One of my main goals as a teacher is being able to create a learning environment where students are able to develop into independent and creative thinkers.

Background

I have always been interested in the sciences. As a child, I spent countless hours wandering through the forest that surrounded my family home in Kingsville, Ontario, Canada, collecting samples of rocks, insects and other interesting things that I could find.  My parents would take the entire family on long camping trips in the summer time to national and provincial parks within the province.  Besides camping in our small trailer, these trips always included long hikes where we were able to explore cliffs, waterfalls, wetlands, caves and other parts of the park.  These experiences strengthened my love for ecology and geology.

My father is a mechanical engineer whose hobby is building and flying homebuilt airplanes. When I was around 10 years old, he decided to restore his Bellanca Champ single-engine airplane.  Night after night, we would head out into the garage to work on various parts of the project: wings, elevators and rudders, fuselage, cockpit and engine. It was during these sessions that I developed an appreciation for all things mechanical.  Unfortunately, I didn't possess the same engineering brain that my father and younger brother naturally have, but these experiences taught me the value of precision, accuracy, problem solving, and most of all, hard work.

My mother is a retired middle school teacher who, according to her former students and colleagues, was an immensely talented educator.  After spending the entire day teaching lessons at school, she still made time to conduct lessons with us in the home.  Our nightly classes involved topics in math, history, geography and many others.  As a young adolescent, I sometimes grew tired of the  frequent grammar lessons, but I am forever grateful for her high English standards!  Most importantly, my mother taught me that teaching is both an art and a science.  On one hand, a teacher is a performance artist who has the ability to instill passion in their students by their enthusiasm, confidence and skill.   On the other hand, a teacher is also a scientist who must approach each lesson with a deep understanding of the subject, the students and how the ideas will relate to the wider world. 

My Teachers and Mentors

In addition to my mother, I have been inspired by a number of other teachers in my life. I'd especially like to mention the professors whom I worked with as a student in the Biology and Pharmacology Program at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.  This innovative program was built around the Problem-Based Learning (PBL) model and has since been copied by the Harvard Medical School.  Each PBL class was made up of six students and one professor and typically lasted three hours. Unlike most university classes, where the professor gives a lecture to a passive audience, each of our classes was planned, taught and evaluated by the students themselves. 

In many ways, each lesson followed a script like the hit TV show “House”.  The professor would present us with a single piece of paper that outlined a patient’s symptoms and a modicum of background information.  It was up to us to choose the best way to solve the problem.  What usually happened was that we would first collectively determine what we knew and what we didn’t know.  From there, we would divide ourselves into smaller teams and go down to the medical library to research a certain part of the problem.  The team would reconvene after a short while and we would teach each other what we had found out.  Once all of the new information was presented, we would determine if our findings allowed us to come to a conclusion.  If we were unable to do so, the team would repeat the process until we were fully satisfied.  One of the most interesting thing about those classes was that the professor rarely told us if we correctly solved the problem.  I distinctly remember the first time we asked our professor if we were right.  He slowly took off his glasses, smirked and said, “Who am I to tell you that? I am only your teacher.” 

Surprisingly, it was my positive experiences in the Biology and Pharmacology program that stopped me from becoming a pharmacologist.  With each passing course, I came to the realization that I was becoming far more interested in the way the content was being taught than the content itself; it was the methodologies of the program that I was passionate about.  In my final semester, I requested a meeting with the program director.  I began our meeting by praising the professors, the students and the PBL philosophy.  I then proceeded to drop out of the program so that I could pursue a career in education.  

My Teaching Philosophy

As a teacher of middle school students, I realize that I won’t be able to perfectly duplicate those Biology and Pharmacology lessons from my university days.  There are practical limitations of class size, resources and time.  There are also pedagogical limitations due to the fact that my students are young adolescents and not university seniors!  However, I believe that children of all ages are fully capable of the type of flexible, creative and collaborative thinking that my pharmacology professors tried to develop in us.

To promotoethis kind of learner in the classroom, I try to incorporate as many PBL techniques into my lessons as I realistically can.  For example, I often present “real life” problems that are complex, ambiguous and have no easy answers.  One method I use is starting lessons with a scenario or demo of something unusual or counterintuitive.  Another method I use is introducting real or invented case studies that replicate the kinds of challenges faced by scientists in the field.  Both methods require students to call on what they already know or what they think they know. By focusing on their prior learning, students can test their assumptions and modify them when there is a conflict with new information.  My ultimate goal is to introduce content through the process of problem solving, rather than problem solving after the introduction of content.

Science is less a subject than a way of thinking.  In my view, one of the best things about science is that it can be messy, complicated, strange, challenging, fun, and exciting.  What I see in elementary school science lesson is very young students approaching each topic with an incredible sense of wonder; every lesson offers something brand new for them to discover.  The key to preserving that sense of wonder in older students is by presenting science as only one way of exploring the mysteries of life; mysteries where the teacher does not always have the answer.

- Douglas Enns