In my first year of teaching high school biology I discovered a large pile of scientific magazines. I hired students to examine, cross-index and enter hundreds of articles into a simple system of punched cards. By running a knitting needle through a hole representing a topic of interest, and lifting, cards on the topic fell out. Sorting on other criteria reduced the set, and information on the cards helped students select articles to read. (A computer-based system would be easy to develop now, but summarizing articles would remain labour-intensive.)

I developed the system that year and used it the next year in my tenth grade survey course and my eleventh and twelfth grade research course. Each week, the tenth graders read and reported on any article in addition to their other work, and the research students read and reported on two. The system was fast, easy and ran by itself with no supervision from me. Once we began, students filed their reports each week without reminding, and they enjoyed it.

The research course was very successful. I rarely lectured and used few structured exercises after the first month, yet there were always many kinds of activities in the classroom.
I helped when necessary, but tried to stay out of the students’ way and let them do their research. Sometimes they spent several days in succession without interacting directly with me at all. All teams did excellent original research, several got publishable results and one student later completed a PhD on the project he began in the eleventh grade. Later I learned that not only were the research students not disadvantaged by their year of research, but they enjoyed strong advantages as undergraduates, even in traditional courses.

Sound conduction.

One day, two research students sat in a corner, talking. Periodically they argued, but they were fully engaged and I didn’t disturb them. The next day they asked to go to the nurse’s office; they needed a quiet place to do an experiment. Without probing, I let them go. On the third day they approached me again. They had read an article on the conduction of sound by bone, and after designing and performing their own experiment to test the main point of the article, they decided that the article was wrong.

The article contended that sound reaches the nerve endings in our inner ears not only through our ears, but through our bones as well. It offered a demonstration. Hum quietly and listen. Then plug your ears with your fingers and hum again: it should be louder.

The boys agreed with the result, but disagreed that it proves bone conducts sound to our ears. It was consistent with that interpretation, they argued, but it was also consistent with the null hypothesis that bone does not conduct sound. They concluded that the demonstration was inconclusive, and met that night to design an experiment that they performed in the nurse’s office the second day.

In their experiment, a “hummer” plugged a “listener’s” ears and then hummed. They reasoned that if sound is conducted by bone, then it would grow as loud under this condition as it had in the other experiment. Alternatively, if it grew quieter this would refute the hypothesis.
In the nurse’s office they repeated both conditions many times, taking careful notes. In every case, the sound grew louder under the first condition and quieter under the second. Correctly, given a hidden, implicit and incorrect assumption they had made in reading the article, they concluded incorrectly that the authors’ interpretation was wrong and sound is not conducted by bone.

The boys’ conclusion was wrong. But there was something right about what they did to reach it. Most of their deductive logic was solid, and their experimental design, the care that they took in executing it and their interpretation of their data were flawless.

Unfortunately or not, they made a mistake in one of the most difficult things that scientists must learn to do in their work: to know when we assume things. They assumed that the authors meant that our shoulder, arm and finger bones conduct sound to our ears when we plug them, and their experiment indeed refuted that, but the authors were writing about skull bones! But for that critical assumption in a critical place, the boys were impeccable creative scientists and I was proud of them.

When they realized their hidden assumption, they reinterpreted the data and had a good laugh with no loss of face. The next day they proudly presented the story to the rest of their class, to my other research class and to a tenth grade class. Then they wrote it up as a scientific investigation. Everyone had a good time: the boys gained fame and prestige for their courage and creativity, and everyone learned important things about science (including that it is an exciting and dangerous enterprise), language and assumptions. I think we spent the time well.

Creative Problem Solving

The example illustrates a way of teaching and learning that must become common in Singaporean schools and universities, in my view, if students are to become the creative problem solvers that the national policy envisions. What does it illustrate?

• We learn to work creatively by confronting real problems that matter to us personally.

  This a profound truth expressed throughout the vast literature on creativity. We can help in many ways, but we cannot supply the imagination that humans are born with, imagination that our families and teachers traditionally suppress. In this case the boys discovered the problem for themselves—“forced” by the weekly reading assignment—and worked independently to solve it. My only input was to help them uncover their hidden assumption and gain rather than lose face from their error.

  There are many ways to organize experiences like this for students, so the lesson is not that they must work independently at all stages. But it must be their research whether they discover it or not. They must own it emotionally, become engaged in it actively, and work—without interference from more experienced people—either independently or cooperatively with other students during the creative stages of logical development, experimental design and execution, and interpretation.

  The key is to encourage process over product in the short term, but insist on high standards of product in the end. For many reasons this is a major challenge for most teachers, but the payoff is deeper, longer-lasting learning.

• Teachers must make it safe to make mistakes, and encourage high standards.

  These are not in conflict in principle, but often are in practice. Traditional ways of teaching, especially in universities, sacrifice the freedom to err for high standards, paradoxically inhibiting development of creative problem-solving skills. In terms of the dynamics of human development, the core issue is emotional, not directly intellectual, and it is the single most critical issue that I identified at NUS.

  Science students at NUS do not trust their teachers enough to risk thinking critically in class. They understand that to think creatively is to risk error, and they’d rather not. However, most of them were happy to risk with a safe, gentle stranger who knew what he was doing. Your students’ minds are fine, although they are not practiced in thinking with them. Until they feel safe enough to do it with you, there will be something seriously wrong with their learning environment and you will be unable to help them learn to think effectively. Trust and respect are central in education; they far overshadow nearly everything else.

  Students don’t merely feel unsafe; they are unsafe—sometimes inexcusably so. I saw NUS professors interrupt students aggressively to correct incorrect assumptions, in one case embarrassing them severely. The professor gained great face (although not in my eyes), and the students lost more. Professors everywhere and at every level must stop actively discouraging their students from thinking. We are right to insist on high standards, but absolutely wrong in failing to encourage processes that generate mistakes.

• Mistakes are worth bragging about.

  3M Corporation advertises throughout the company the most magnificent failures of its employees; it rewards them financially and with time released from normal duties to try new things. This is a way to encourage creative imagination, and it works.

  Last term I asked a group of NUS undergraduates whether it could work in Singapore to make heroes of students who fail in creative efforts. They found the idea intriguing, and concluded that the peer recognition would be an important factor. They cautioned, however, that both parents and teachers would have to be brainwashed to understand the value of the idea, or they would torpedo it.

• A teacher’s job is not to teach.

  A teacher’s responsibility is for students to learn. These are not the same. I have come to believe that for professors to shift from thinking of themselves as conveyors of information to facilitators of learning is the single most important shift they can make.

This story illustrates one of many approaches to teaching for creativity in science. Simply, this approach minimizes my direct interference with students’ learning, while at the same time providing rich opportunities for them to discover. It does not preclude guiding students when necessary, but is not based on that presumption.

Perhaps most importantly, the story reminds me that although I am responsible for everything that occurs in my classroom, I do not and cannot plan all of it in detail. I planned the reading/writing assignment believing that “good things would result”, but
I had no clear expectations. The specific keys to this and many other examples are to provide freedom for students to discover things, to respect their efforts and to protect them from suffering loss of face, either at my hands or those of their peers.

Lee Gass is an associate professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia.