Making Room for Creativity in Science Class

How many times have you had a student ask, “Will this be on the test?” I often did as a teacher. They fully expect the test questions to have one right answer, and I would often give them those answers over the course of a unit. Students might have to plug in different numbers, but there wasn’t a ton of critical thinking in the end.

I have wondered, “How could I have made more room for creativity in my science class?” I have a few ideas and welcome yours in the comments!

First, create a culture where students ask questions. When considering student questions, I think teachers worry about tangents that will distract from concepts they “need” to cover. At least, I worried about that. In my experience, when a unit focuses on students figuring out a key phenomenon, the questions they ask tend to be naturally answered in the planned unit anyway. The students, however, at least had a chance at creativity when asking them, and they buy in as they see them answered. For questions that aren’t part of the unit, let students go on a research tangent or test different variables, and give them credit for doing so. Of course, that sounds a bit like project-based learning, which is an obvious pathway here too and enables students to research/experiment based on their own interests. While I didn’t connect them as well I could have to their learning, I honestly loved crazy questions from students, so I appreciate the work of Randall Munroe in xkcd with "what if" questions like, “What if I had a mole of moles?”

Second, find ways to get rid of one right answer tasks. I thought web searches were going to destroy these questions, but now I see that AI is going to obliterate them. Teachers tell me they need to know whether students know definitions. The challenge is that they don’t remember them anyway. I had amazing students who would come back the next school year, and I’d ask, “What’s a proton?” They seriously had no idea. Testing definitions is pointless in the long run, and even in the short term, students often hide behind an illusion of understanding by being able to spout the right terms. They have to be asked to apply ideas to their worlds, to things that they’re interested in, and to current contexts. Plugging numbers into formulas is similarly problematic. Testing on conceptual understanding of what a formula means and how it’s used requires more critical thinking (and is more likely to support remembering it). To help make this change, students could even create the tasks (or questions) that they find meaningful.

Third, push for originality in scientific modeling. Modeling can also become a process of looking for what the teacher wants, but that defeats the whole purpose of modeling! We want students to make connections among ideas in their world and through the lens of their background understanding, not replicate diagrams from a book. In a workshop, I have used a phenomenon of cup phones several times and asked educators to model how they work, as well as why they work sometimes and not others. Once a teacher took the blank paper I handed out and folded it up like an accordion. When asked to share her model, she showed the folds bumping into each other and transferring energy. Brilliant! If I had specifically asked them to draw something or given a starting diagram to add to, I never would have seen that creativity shine.

Notably, I supported a research project where we asked students in grades K-8 to make a model of blowing a crumpled-up piece of paper across a desk. Younger students were more likely to include themselves in their model. Some 8th graders did too, but they were more likely to only draw a mouth or maybe a mouth to lungs system. We interpreted that as younger kids being more likely to see themselves as part of the scientific process, while older kids abstracted science to something outside of who they are. We should encourage kids to make the models personally relevant, meaning giving them phenomena where that will be possible, rather than stressing a system that doesn’t include them in the picture.

Finally, celebrate your students’ ideas! Whenever they get excited, get excited with them, even if it’s hard to do. I had a student who was excited to bring in articles that argued against human-caused climate change. It tended to make me grumpy, as they didn’t represent quality science. But, he wanted to talk science! I really should have celebrated his interest in pursuing science topics outside of school. I should have called my excitement out to the class! Because that’s what science should be, full of wonder and questions and creative expression, even in the face of the competing priorities and obligations of being a teacher.

Cultivating Genius: Adapting Lessons to Bring Out the Genius in All Students

I have a hard time connecting with some frameworks for equity-based teaching. Often, that’s because they don’t connect as well as I’d like to science teaching. The Cultivating Genius Framework from Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, on the other hand, provides a simple tool to reflect on lesson and unit design.

Her framework includes the following 5 elements, and I note how they’d work within science:

• Intellect: the disciplinary core ideas of science (DCIs) and ways of thinking of science (i.e., CCCs)
• Skills: the science and engineering practices (SEPs)
• Identity: connections to students’ interests and cultures, current events, and local contexts (some ideas in Appendix A of the WI Science Standards).
• Criticality: how is this science going to help change our community and the broader world?
• Joy: linking to the beauty and wonder of science, as well as the collaborative nature of it

So, what might this look like in practice to adapt existing materials? Let’s start from some high-quality and free materials, OpenSciEd, specifically the 7th grade unit on matter cycling and photosynthesis – “Where does our food come from and where does it go next?” In this unit students explore the growth of plants, creation of food, and decomposition of food materials.

Applying Dr. Muhammad’s framework:

This unit already effectively brings in the 3 dimensions of the WSS/NGSS = intellect and skills. Students develop a strong conceptual understanding of these topics and do science.

    Identity: The lesson starts out with maple syrup and students watch a video of tapping a maple tree. Instead, classes could go out and actually tap trees to connect to their local environment and native understanding of ecosystems and science, specifically noting the cultural connections. 

    Criticality: Later in the unit, students grow plants hydroponically. They could connect this work to growing healthy food for the school cafeteria (and eating it!) and consider issues such as the impact of food deserts in communities and over-consumption of processed foods.

    Joy: Students could take a walk in a local forest or other ecosystem to observe plant growth and decomposition. If the environment is a nearby local forest, they might do multiple measurements over time in the spring when plants are growing like crazy. A teacher could also add a group project related to local plants, food, decomposers, etc. that benefits a local food pantry.

There are so many possibilities for making our lessons better connect to the identity, joy, and critical perspectives of our students! The challenge, of course, is time. Like always, I’ll emphasize that it’s better to engage students deeply in their world than it is to cover more content. They will remember the ideas better and be able to better apply them to new situations. Their scientific literacy will also increase. If we want students to find joy in learning and be careful consumers of the (mis)information overload around them, some coverage must give way to more opportunities for locally-connected critical thinking.