10.09.07

Featured Teacher: Greg Craven

If you know a high school teacher who really knows how to motivate students to learn about science, email us why they should become our next Featured Teacher.

Greg Craven is a high school science teacher, a husband, and a father of two, not necessarily in that order.  In his eight years of teaching high school, he's taught Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, Math, and Freshman Science.  Having traveled extensively earlier in life, he enjoys trying to bring in real-world examples and perspectives as he teaches in a medium-sized rural school in Oregon.

 

In My Own Words 

I'd like to make a provocative suggestion.  We should all "teach the controversy" about global climate change in our classrooms.

 

Scientific thinking at its core is about evaluating competing claims, so using our science classrooms to endow our graduates with critical thinking skills would not only enrich their science education, but would serve them throughout their lives.  Global climate change--an issue in scientific agreement  but popular debate  is an excellent context in which to teach critical thinking skills.  Of course, it is also a useful vehicle for teaching the science concepts already in our curricula, and I'll provide more direction for that at the end of this piece.

 

Our students are exposed on one hand to "An Inconvenient Truth," and on the other hand to "The Great Global Warming Swindle." How are they to discern what is credible, and what is not, particularly with Google available to serve up good-sounding "evidence" for most any position?  We would be remiss if we simply taught our students the mechanics of climate change, yet abandoned them to the machinations of PR firms and think tanks as they grapple with the popular debate about climate change.

 

Of course, as educators we naturally shy away from anything that might smack of advocacy, for fear of appearing to abuse our position of authority with the students.  However, as science instructors, we must remember that we are and must be advocates.  We are advocates for scientific thought, for critical thinking, and we owe it to our students and our scientific discipline to equip them properly.

 

The popular debate on climate change has stayed alive well beyond the scientific one because the public has a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science.  They expect science--that most precise of all human endeavors--to provide "the correct" answer, not realizing that uncertainty is inherent in every scientific conclusion.  The result is, when good scientists take pains to state the uncertainties in an issue that has political impact, the media (and any opposition) highlight that uncertainty, and the public thus decides to wait until the issue is "settled."  Unfortunately, nothing in science is ever "settled"--at least, not for certain.  We're still probing the law of gravity for Pete's sake!

 

As science educators, we are probably the only people in most of our students' lives who have a good understanding of the tentative nature of science, making us uniquely positioned to disabuse them of the natural tendency to wait for certainty before deciding an issue.

 

To that end, I would suggest incorporating into the curriculum some explicit tools for evaluating the strength of claims, such as:  the "baloney detection kit" of logical fallacies in Carl Sagan's book The Demon-Haunted World, practice in basic (i.e. don't worry about the greek terms) syllogisms  (see also "Further Links"), applying the principle of falsifiability (email me at gregcraven1000@hotmail.com for a copy of this worksheet) to evaluate whether a claim is even worth considering , the nature of uncertainty in science, the central place of peer-review and reproducibility in the scientific process, the insidiousness of bias [email me for a copy of the document "Activities in Bias"], and the importance of self-criticism and actively seeking out counter arguments (see "Further Links"). 

 

Then the students could be provided the opportunity to apply those skills to the popular debate about climate change in a couple different ways.  I've had my Physics students do a complete "Critiquing Claims" research project [email for my document "Critiquing Claims Project"], but there are other possibilities that take less time.

 

Perhaps show both "An Inconvenient Truth" and "The Great Global Warming Swindle" and have the students do research on the criticisms of each film.  They would then express their own conclusions (with an estimate of their confidence) on how the two films compare in terms of presenting a credible assessment of the science of climate change.

 

Alternately, since the internet is such a dominant source of our students' information, have your students explore the plethora of websites making contradictory claims on both sides of the popular debate.  Students could be assigned both a point of view ("skeptic" or "warmer") and common points in the debate (such as "It's a natural cycle," "The sun's variability is responsible for the observed warming," "Mars is warming, too, you know," et al.).  They would then research their side, and present a brief case in front of the class.  In their research, they should anticipate the counter arguments to their claims, and address those preemptively.  A group discussion at the end of the unit would allow students to balance all the evidence, draw conclusions as a class, and then assign a level of confidence to those conclusions. 

 

If you wish to present a sort of meta-argument to your students (debating about the debate), you can have your students analyze some of the arguments in this video.  It presents a warmer's view, but is unique in that it argues that the debate can be decided without accepting either the warmers' or the skeptics' arguments.

 

I must emphasize, however, that before we ask students to delve into any controversial issue, it is paramount that we make them aware of the power of bias [email me for my document "Activities in Bias"].  They need to be explicitly warned of the danger of confirmation bias, where we pay more attention to the evidence that supports what we are already inclined to believe, and less attention to the evidence which contradicts it.  This is a well-established psychological phenomenon, and sometimes leaves the individual with even more deeply entrenched misconceptions.  Provide students with "Aha" moments [email me for the "Providing 'Aha' Moments" section in my document "Activities in Bias"] about the strength and stealth of bias, and give frequent reminders to be vigilant for one's own assumptions.

 

Perhaps the end result that we should be shooting for in all this is for our students to come away with a humility that their understanding (or anyone else's, for that matter) of an issue may not be complete.  We would like them to be skeptical, but humble.  To ask questions, but recognize that their critical thought is still developing.  Passing through the door to my room, students must walk under R. Buckminster Fuller's warning that  "Everything you learned in school as 'obvious' becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe."

 

"This is all fine and good," you may be thinking, "but I already don't have enough time to cover the topics I need to teach in my course."  Luckily, climate change is an issue complex enough to be germane to most any science subject, so no matter what you teach, incorporating climate change without displacing other topics shouldn't be too difficult.  And I would argue that the payoff is worth it.  I believe Alfred North Whitehead summed up our greatest purpose when he observed that teaching is like trying to constantly plaster up wallpaper that continuously peels off:  at the end of the day, it's not which bits of wallpaper remain that count, it's how the act has changed the shape of the room.

 

So, in a world increasingly impacted by the choices made around science, the question is not "How can we--with so many other demands on our time--afford to incorporate critical thinking into our classroom?"  Rather, the question is:  how can we afford not to?

 

 Teaching Climate Change

 Aside from its potential for building critical thought, climate change is rich contextual ground for teaching a wide variety of concepts in science and math.  It can be used either for introducing the concepts, or as a "capstone" experience wherein the students apply the concepts they've already learned.  Here are a just a few of the possible concepts to teach through the topic of climate change:

 

conservation of mass (carbon cycle)

conservation of energy (greenhouse effect, alternative energies)

equilibrium (rates of incoming and outgoing energy for the planet, ocean/atmospheric exchange of CO2)

interaction of electromagnetic (EM) radiation with matter (CO2 is more opaque to infrared than visible wavelengths)

frequency and resonance (model of whether EM frequencies are absorbed or transmitted by matter)

percent composition (CO2 in atmosphere)

geologic time scale (carbon cycle, comparing rate of geologic carbon sequestration with rate of release by human activity)

ecosystems (many rich areas of cause/effect and interrelationships in response to climate change)

species adaptation (response to climate and ecosystem change)

complex systems (feedback loops, thresholds, extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, divergent behavior)

mathematical modeling (climate models)

 

 

Further Links

 

Syllogisms and Reasoning:

Critical Thinking -- Module on Scientific Reasoning

Critical Thinking Tutorial

Wikipedia - Article on "Argument"

Wikipedia - Article on "Reasoning"

 

The Basics of Global Climate Change:

National Geographic -- "What Is Global Warming?"

Pew Center on Global Climate Change

American Institute of Physics -- "The Discovery of Global Warming"

 

"Skeptics" make their point:

"Climate Audit" by Steve McIntyre

CO2 Science

Coyote Blog -- A Layman's Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming

The Heartland Institute -- Global Warming Facts

 

"Warmers" make their point

Gristmill -- How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic

Real Climate

Logical Science

Environmental Science & Technology Online

 

Wikipedia Entries Giving an Overview

(useful not as the final say, but as a starting point and a collection of links to further info)

Wikipedia -- Global Warming Controversy

Wikipedia -- Scientfic Opinion on Climate Change

Global Warming Art -- Statements on Climate Change

 

Classroom Curricula on Global Climate Change

Curriculum Guide for the Climate Impact Maps

"An Inconvenient Truth" In the Classroom

Teacher's Guide to High Quality Educational Materials on Climate Change and Global Warming

 

 

More About Greg Craven

My path to teaching was varied and interesting, which has greatly informed the way I approach the classroom.  I firmly believe that my most important role as an educator is to help prepare students to become thoughtful, engaged citizens, both for their personal benefit, and for the benefit of the larger society.  I pursue that through teaching science.

 

By doing some sincere wandering during my 20's, I've had the great good fortune to have discussed philosophy with the Dalai Lama, cloning with Francis Collins, science and ethics with Joseph Rotblat, the future with Freeman Dyson, and global climate change with anybody who will listen.  I've lived in rural India for a year, helped lead a student group through the Pacific Rim, done my time on farms, and worked for Student Pugwash USA, which seeks to promote social responsibility in science and technology.

 

As you might expect, this permeates a lot of what we do in my classroom.  The focus is often on developing the habits of thought of the scientist, and an exploration of the nature of knowing:  how is it we know what we think we know?  What are the interplays between observation and inference, bias, patterns and models, predictions and proof?  My hidden agenda is for the students to become better thinkers, and to do that by thinking about science.

 

My favorite analogy about teaching comes from Alfred North Whitehead:  teaching students is like constantly plastering up wallpaper that continually peels off.  At the end of the day, the point is not which bits of wallpaper happen to remain, but how the act of the papering has changed the shape of the room.

 

Back before kids, I had hobbies like hang gliding, international travel, backpacking, guitar, and reading.  Now all I want to do is play with my two young daughters.

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