First Lab - Covering up Mistakes with Another Mistake is a Severe Mistake

So, I decided to trust my mature grade 12 students and do a "free for all" lab.  Rather than giving step by step instructions, I gave them a question and let them make the procedure.  The theory goes that they learn more with less help.

"Help students by helping them less" Or more popularly, Dan Meyer's "Be less helpful".   There's a reason why teachers rarely do this.

Things go wrong.  Chaos ensues.  Confusion reigns.  It's messy learning.  Apparently, real learning occurs through mistakes.  Let's analyze these mistakes:

Mistake #1:  Broken Glass
To find the volume of the rock, some of my smarter students placed and slid rocks inside graduated cylinders. However, other students dropped rocks into the graduated cylinders.  It doesn't seem so bad unless I tell you that the graduated cylinders were made of glass.

A broken graduated cylinder is no problem.  Usually what happens is that the student tells the teacher.  The teacher turns this accident into a learning moment by getting the attention of the class and telling people not to drop rocks in glass.  The teacher can make sure the area is clean of all the glass and most importantly, the mistake won't be repeated again.  But nope, this process didn't occur because another mistake was made.

                                     I'm not going to cry over spilled milk.  Or broken glass. Photo Credit: Creative Commons

Mistake #2:  Covering up a Mistake
Not telling your teacher and pretending the graduated cylinder didn't break can make things worse. Other students can slice their finger open.  The unreported broken glass is left around the area and can hurt the 8 year old students that come here for Chinese school at night.  All of this could happen because someone wanted to save their ego and not face the consequence of a broken graduated cylinder.  Sigh.

Mistake #3:  Broken Glass Redux
For an airplane to crash, it's been analyzed in Gladwell's book Outliers that about seven seemingly small sequential wrong mistakes lead up to the huge accident.  Thank goodness we're only at mistake #3.  Because we as a class didn't get to reflect on our mistake, person #2 dropped another rock into a graduated cylinder, breaking a second graduated cylinder.  Or worse, the second set of broken glass occurred because of person #1.

Summary

What's interesting is that the root of the problem is me.

I realized this when cleaning up afterwards.  I was looking in my prized box of 75 rocks and minerals and realized that they were all placed upside down and out of order.  I spent an extra 15 minutes combing the area for any broken glass.  I cleaned up the water by the sink.

It's one thing to let the students make their own procedure.  It's quite another to not set the proper tone of the lab to be one of respect for the learning environment and its materials.

"Being less helpful" doesn't have to mean "be less respectful."