Oh Yes, You Should Tell Them What to See

So, this supposedly profound thought makes it rounds on social media at the start of every semester. 

"The best teachers tell you where to look, but they don't tell you what to see."

Quotes should be considered in the context of an entire speech or written work. A quote I like might be in the middle of a hateful paragraph, making it less likable.  I quote I don't like might be mitigated if there was a foundation laid before it that makes the sentence more credible.  

I also want to take into consideration the other thoughts of the author before quoting them. For example, I don't want to quote Steve Jobs about how to treat employees, given his legendarily poor treatment of those at Apple. I don't want to forward a quote about leadership, only to find out it was said by Mussolini.  So, I thought I would look up the source of this teacher quote before criticizing it.  It's attributed to someone named Alexandra Trenfor. Try Googling her name, though.  All you find are links to the quote. She cannot be found, and the larger work cannot be found.  It's as though she arose from the mist to say this and then receded into it again.  

Since I can't find out if this sentence that I roll my eyes at might be mitigated by what surrounded it, I'm left with the sentence at face value.

This quote is stupid.  

In spite of it internet popularity and the applause it might get if you end a keynote speech with it, it is just wrong. Students look at thousands of things per day.  If I happen to point to one of them and say, "look at this thing," I have only begun my job.  The rest of my job as a teacher is, in fact, to teach them what to see.

I taught science for 25 years.  When I took students into the lab to carry out experiments, they were also meant to draw conclusions about the underlying features of what they were observing.  But as soon as I started to ask questions, it became evident that they had not seen the right things.

For example, I had a lab in which 8th grade students ran electricity through salt water, separating chlorine from sodium.  What they saw was bubbles coming from one wire and metal build up on the other.  If they left it running for a few minutes, they would also see the water turn green.  

When I looked at their observations list, they said things like, "One wire smoked."  No, no it didn't.  I actually needed to tell them what to see.  The didn't even notice the build up on the other wire because it was pretty subtle.  I needed to tell them what to see.

Even if the "smoke" had been an accurate observation, what would it have taught them about chemistry?  Electricity makes them smoke?  Well, that's just not true.  Leaving it a bit longer, would they have learned prolonged electrical exposure turns water green?  Because that isn't true either.  

As humans, we tend to look at surface features, which reveal little information.  "Tree leaves are green in spring and change color in the fall" is something I can see for myself, but I need a teacher to show me how to "see" chlorophyll. 

Observation alone leads to misconceptions and VERY wrong conclusions.  Ancient Greeks, for example, didn't have any understanding of projectile motion. They observed that when threw something at an upward angle, it eventually came back down.  They saw that, but the conclusion they drew was that the act of throwing imparted a substance into the object (they called it impetus) and that it fell when it ran out of that substance.  They observed sunrise and sunset and concluded that the sun moved; we now know that is caused by the earth's rotation. They attributed medical problems to fluid imbalances, which led to practices like leeching.

I'm not saying they were stupid. Considering their lack of background knowledge, equipment, or expectation of testing hypotheses, they made fairly logical conclusions.  But logical and accurate are not the same thing.  At some point, we realized that what we were seeing wasn't revealing the underlying architecture of what was happening.  Someone had to teach us how and what to see when it wasn't immediately on the surface. Why, when we have better methods and more knowledge, would we want to withhold that from our students and make them, effectively, ancient Greeks?  Why wouldn't we want them to build on all that came before instead of having to rebuild it?

So, I have my kids in the lab, seeing bubbles and color changes.  I have to ask questions to reveal exactly what they are seeing and then, crucially, tell them what else to see.  "What is in those bubbles, " I ask.  Almost every first answer was wrong, the most common being "electricity." I tell them that bubble always contain a gas and ask again.  Their answer was always one of three at that point - air, carbon dioxide, or oxygen.  Why?  Because those are the gases they hear about the most.  I remind them that this is salt water and ask what salt is made of in order to get them to recognize after much probing that the answer is chlorine. Especially science minded kids will sometimes say, "Is that why the water turns green?" but most have to be told that.  Then, we move to the other wire.  "Do you see this metal build up?  What might that be?"  You might think that we worked hard enough to get to the answer of chlorine that they MIGHT recognize that stuff on the other wire was the other element in salt, but if you think that, you would be wrong.  Their answer, almost always, was copper or iron.  Why?  Those are the metals they hear about most.  Then, came the big question - "Why does this happen?"  The first answer was always that water always conducts electricity. The second answer was always that sodium is a metal and metals conduct electricity.  

These wrong answers were given even though I had taught them that water is a very poor conductor and showed them videos about electrolytes when we talked about the dissolving of ionic bonds.  If I hadn't asked these probing questions so I could identify and correct their misconceptions, they would have left less educated than when they came in. If I had left them to see for themselves, they would have walked away believing that electricity makes wires smoke, turns water green, and builds up copper on a copper wire. 

We HAVE TO tell them what to see.

Renowned education researcher, Carl Hendrick, wrote this in a recent substack article:

"Examples without labels are merely noise. You must explicitly tell students what to pay attention to in each example. Don't assume they'll notice the right feature; direct their attention deliberately."

In other words, tell them what to see.  

Do it boldly and without apology, no matter what the disembodied name on the internet meme says.