A dichotomous key is a useful tool that practically anyone can use for identifying plants. “Is the bark smooth? If so, go to step 5. Are the leaves serrated? If so, go to step 8. Your tree must be is a beech tree.” Of course, in a plant identification class, using this step by step plant identification key would be considered cheating. A good horticulturalist should have these steps memorized then, right? Actually, no.
The woody landscape plants identification lab is a class I’ve taught for six semesters now. As the course name infers, students learn identification features (e.g., leaf shape, bark color, fruit size, etc.) of plants typically used in landscape design. As part of their evaluation, students are required to correctly identify these plants by their common and botanical names, on the spot, as we walk through campus. Without a doubt, students’ greatest struggle at the start of this class is that they try to get by with memorizing a few ID features for each plant and forget to look at the big picture—to literally step back and consider context. This is what I call the mindless, “dichotomous key approach,” and it doesn’t work; nature doesn’t have a mold. For example, after having incorrectly identified a plant, a student will comment, “but that tree isn’t supposed to be crooked like that.” My reply is something along the lines of “…and that tree didn’t expect to get hit by lightning.”
Ellen J. Langer (2000) defines mindfulness as “a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context.” She asserts that how we teach may be more valuable than the material we are actually teaching. After having read Langer’s article, I had a teaching epiphany. My students don’t need a longer list of differentiating anatomical features to improve their ability to identify plants. They really just need to remember to think. From here on, my teaching strategy for this course will be geared more toward how to think about plant identification, rather than what to remember.
Have any of you had a similar experience in your field?
Literature Cited:
Langer, E.J. 2000. Mindful Learning. Current Directions in Psychological Science 9(6):220-223.
I think this is really interesting, changing one’s teaching philosophy due to a reading or a situation. For me, as I worked as a teaching assistant for long time even before starting my graduate studies, I totally agree with you. I was giving tutorials, that follow a lecture, to students in some courses for some years. I realized that, I was developing the way I deliver information to students year after another based on feedback or learning about other ways that can be more helpful. I was teaching computer engineering courses, which in nature do not require a lot of memorization, rather they depend on thinking and practical working. However, I think, as you decided, that all students need to think more than they memorize.
This is all that we can really hope to do. Year after year, little by little, we can try to improve our teaching until it is as good as those in the articles we read.
Interesting point! Well, I personally think that it is our job (as teachers) to teach them how to think about the big picture. In your case it seems like identifying a tree is like fitting a puzzle together since they already know all the specifications of various trees and need to put all these specifications together to identify a tree. Maybe if they get a tree wrong a good exercise would be to ask them to write these ID features down and try to again to find the IDs that match this tree. Of course they should know the tree types that exist with the combinations of these IDs. My point is that, it is not the students, but it’s how we are designing the problem that makes them loose the big picture and want to get away with just memorizing a few IDs etc.
Kudos for your epiphany! In my field of marriage and family therapy, we study specific modalities and techniques plus what specific leaders and pioneers developed. At the master’s clinical level, the emphasis is usually more on learning someone else’s approach so that your professors feel comforted that you can actually do therapy. However, there is a given sense that we as PhD students are learning this material in order to be the next pioneers, to develop our own ways of thinking, and to evolve the field. Compared with the master’s program in which we studied secondary sources, here we are learning straight from the leaders by reading original material.
You have inspired a future blog post about my related nature spirituality in which we are encouraged to develop our own personal relationship with each plant and tree rather than merely accepting someone else’s conception of it. Other’s views are seen as informative, but not necessarily the last word on the subject.
In my field (econ), we often have to maximize functions. This can often be done with calculus, and early on we learn how to use calculus to do so. However, sometimes we can’t use calculus and sometimes the answer to the question is very easy if you just think about the function. I had a professor once who loved giving us problems like these, and I noticed that it was often the students who had the best math skills who had the most trouble with these other problems. I think it relates to the problem you have with your students. It forced me to think much more mindfully when I couldn’t just fall back on going through the motions to answer problems, and I am sure that if you take the approach you plan on, it will benefit your students as well!
Thanks for sharing your epiphany :)
I agree with all the comments, we do need to teach our students on how to think and how to include context into the big picture. I’m sure every field is being affected by the globalized world, where context and adaptation are key strategies to be successful. For example in engineering, we need to consider that our students will probably be working on industries that don’t exist when they are in college, they probably will be operating devices that haven’t been created yet, they will be using technological platforms that don’t exist. So the most important thing is to teach them how to think, and how to transfer the skills and competencies that they have right now into real world situations that are probably unknown at the time.
Technology can make breakthrough changes that can impact our classes immediately. For example, what if someone develops an app so you can use your phone to identify the trees that you are looking. I know it’s not going to be a substitute for the knowledge you get in college in your field, but something to deal with for sure.
Homero
I have certainly seen this already in my class, where I teach design and computer modeling of metal castings. There is a certain feature called a riser that is commonly added to castings in order to ensure that they turn out properly, without internal defects. The slower the riser cools and solidifies, the better. Naturally the best shape to do this is a sphere, which minimizes surface area (and thus cooling rate). However, there are a number of physical constraints that are commonly encountered which prevent the use of a sphere, so a cylinder is the most common riser shape. I gave my class a group design problem where they were free of any physical constraints, but they still ended up using a cylindrical riser, because they were taught that it was the “only” shape it could be. Their mode of thinking was still too fixed and rigid to realize that they could use a better shape–they worked from habit and reflex instead of thinking about the big picture.
I don’t know which I’m enjoying more, your post or the comments on it! I’ll second Homero’s congratulations on your epiphany and am pretty sure I’m going to use a variation of “that tree didn’t expect to get hit by lightening” in my own class soon. Thanks so much for this.