Letting Them Learn For Themselves

I was visiting a preschool, and spending time with the children outside on the playground. An orange butterfly fluttered by, then landed on a small tree branch, just at the children’s eye level. Several children clustered around watching the butterfly as it first sat motionless on the branch, then fluttered to another branch, then settled on a yellow flower.

“What do you think the butterfly is doing?” I asked.

The children looked thoughtfully at the butterfly, then at me, then at their teacher.

“You know all about butterflies!” the teacher said, smiling. “Tell Shelli what you know about butterflies.”

One of the children broke into an excited smile. “Butterflies come from caterpillars. They’re caterpillars and the caterpillars turn into butterflies. There’s four stages. She held up her hand and  pointed to each finger as she spoke. “There’s an egg, then its a larvae and a pupa and then a butterfly.”

“And a larvae is another name for what?” prompted her teacher.

“A caterpillar!” the child exclaimed, beaming.

Meanwhile, the butterfly had flown away. And none of the children had answered the question “What do you think the butterfly is doing?” It was a simple question, one that each of them could have answered through their own observations, based on their own thoughts, conclusions, and ideas. But the opportunity to observe, evaluate, predict, and imagine was passed over in favor of reciting facts. Unfortunately, this is how science is so often taught – by teaching discrete pieces of knowledge or factoids for children to repeat back, or to represent in art projects where they carefully follow teacher’s directions to create a chart or diagram that shows what they “know” about butterflies, or trees, or the water cycle, or any other natural phenomenon.

Of course there’s room for teaching facts, even though many of those facts can wait until children are older, and have had the chance to first observe, predict, analyze and evaluate on their own. When we introduce facts, we’re taking away opportunities for children to develop their own ideas, because once you know the “right” answer, there’s no more room for your own theories. When we substitute teaching facts for observation, we’re teaching children to trust what they’ve been told, not what they see for themselves. The well intentioned teaching act of giving background knowledge also teaches them to trust other opinions, especially authority opinions, before considering their own. In a world filled with competing narratives and an ever-increasing difficulty in determining what is true and what is not, children need to develop critical thinking skills that they can use to process information, not only based on their trust of the source, but based on their own experiences, thoughts and observations. We need curriculum and schools that don’t just teach children to say the correct answer, but that give them an opportunity to discover why that answer is correct, and to evaluate any other possible answers as well.

One October in my 2-year-old classroom, we examined a pumpkin. I told the children we were going to cut it open, and asked what they thought would be inside. One of the children exclaimed, “A beautiful butterfly!” I didn’t tell him whether he was wrong or right. The only way to know for sure would be to open the pumpkin and see what was there for ourselves.

**Note: The butterfly anecdote described in this blog was not a verbatim exchange between me, a child, and teacher. This blog post is a composite of many similar conversations I’ve had with children, and that I’ve observed other teachers have with children, in which science “facts” replace personal experiences and reflections in conversation.

The pumpkin anecdote did happen as described. And much to the child’s disappointment, when we opened the pumpkin, a beautiful butterfly did not appear.