Empirical thinking is our best shot at finding a common understanding we can use to solve growing global challenges. I believe we all would benefit from living more scientifically, approaching questions empirically rather than ideologically or intuitively, especially in this moment of historic division.

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My teaching reflects these beliefs in that I focus on how to do science rather than what scientists have discovered. Science is a method, a way to learn empirically, but in my own education was taught too much as a body of knowledge. This approach makes it harder for aspiring scientists to learn how to do science and, I have found in my own classes, is less engaging. In teaching science as a process I focus on four critical skills:

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Computational thinking, the creation of problem-solving recipes, helps break seemingly insurmountable tasks into more manageable bite-sized pieces. It also helps develop a mechanistic mindset that can be used to reverse engineer processes from patterns. 

 

Failing has been one of the hardest things for me to teach. School, especially through high school, is about succeeding. The goal of teaching failure is not to promote failure, but to help young scientists successfully answer questions and create technologies when many of their first attempts fail.

 

Trade-offs are so important because induction, the reasoning about unobserved events and the logical heart of scientific explanation, does not prove anything. It is probabilistic. It requires skeptical interpretation of the trade-offs between competing hypotheses for how the world works. Learning to set aside a right or wrong mentality helps with science, but also citizenship.

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Writing is still the most important way we share ideas and knowledge. Many of the best scientists are, not coincidentally, also incredibly effective communicators. So much of the impact of our discoveries and creations comes from the ways we share them.

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The other piece of this approach is to contextualize more traditional information-centric components of a class with the perspectives of the scientists who discovered the material, often in a more narrative context. This historical context helps students imagine themselves as scientists, both building their scientific intuition and empowering them to believe they too can contribute to science. It also challenges us to think carefully about the ways it can be valuable or harmful to imagine living someone else's life. 

 

Speaking of living your life, I will always make time to discuss the logistics of a scientific life. Please do not hesitate to contact me.