Teaching Seminar, fourth session

Note the new name for the academic-year evening professional development sessions.  We decided AYPD was cryptic and offered no sense of purpose.  We like the image of a “seminar” as an intense, in-depth, small-group discussion of a topic of interest.

For this session, we wanted to watch what I call the “Beer” episode, which is below.

Sam has presented this episode to other research groups as an example of unsuccessful Energy Theater.  She has had that characterization challenged rather strongly, so maybe it’s not that bad, but I was still nervous about showing an episode in which I pretty much dislike what happens.  The first hundred times I saw this episode, what I saw was “Blaine” (with the cup) rudely and repeatedly mowing down “Laura’s” efforts to actually engage in the assigned activity.  However, our group has done some work to see things more from Blaine’s perspective, and my interpretation  now is that Blaine is just trying to have a little fun with it.  This is not so bad; shouldn’t there be room for some playfulness, even some theatricality, in an activity called Energy Theater?  This episode was very early on in the 2009 course, so we were all really just working out what Energy Theater even is.

For the Teaching Seminar, Stamatis and I decided to frame the episode with the premise that science learning should be fun, and ask the teachers what one ought to do to make it more fun.  I enjoyed thinking about what people might say and what underlying beliefs about science the answers would reveal:  for example:

• “Lighten up!” - This is what I see Blaine trying to do.  I think it suggests an underlying belief that scientists have sticks up their butts. (What I wrote on the white board in my office was “excess rectitude,” which I am still giggling at.)
• “Get your hands dirty!” - This is how I characterized people’s feeling that what makes science fun is more “hands-on” activities.  I think it suggests an underlying belief that science tends to be too sterile and remote.
• “Be nice!” - This is mine.  I think that a major reason that science is not fun for many people is that we (unwittingly) make people miserable: we discourage them, we hurt their feelings, we make them anxious, and that is no fun.  I think the underlying belief suggested here is that science itself is fun, but the fun is blocked by our lousy interpersonal interactions.

In class, things didn’t really go in a direction that led to my sharing those ideas with the teachers.  Asked to white-board about what would make science learning more fun, they wrote things that sounded to me like they came from their professional training:  “hands-on,” “interactive,” “relevant,” “exciting.”  Stamatis (in what I thought was a terrific move) asked them to close their eyes and imagine a personal experience in which they had experienced deep learning and it had been fun.  This changed the tenor of their conversation totally; I heard more than one table talk about having a trusted colleague to work out ideas with, which seemed to me to go in the direction of my “be nice” in the sense that it was about the value of safe interpersonal interactions.

In watching the Beer episode, the teachers were (to me) remarkably positive about the whole thing.  Not only did they see Blaine having fun, they saw Laura having fun, which to me was almost unbelievable (I had thought Laura was clearly frustrated).  Laura wasn’t there, but I shared the episode with her remotely and asked her whether she was having fun during it.  She said (in an email), “It seemed like we were having more fun than I remembered.”  So she remembers it as not having been fun, but thinks she looks like she was having fun in the video?  Odd.

The teachers’ observations of the video were ... observations!  They noticed interesting things that happened.  They pointed out the timing of events, the wording, the body language.  They made reasonable evidence-based interpretations of the things they heard people saying and saw them doing.  I wish I remembered more of the substance of what they said - it’s been too long since the class, I should have written sooner.  I remember that they saw Blaine and Laura as changing their language as to what represented the energy: was it the people, or the beer that the people were drinking, or the flow, or ...?  And I remember that they wanted to talk a lot about “Cara’s” nonparticipation.  I was heartened that we had a discussion that was free of insults.  The flags have been taken up as a symbol; if people didn’t have a flag at hand they would wave a pretend flag at each other, especially in small groups, when they heard someone saying something judgmental.  Maybe that’s easier to do in a face-to-face interaction than in the “ref” position.