Academic Honesty Council

Many years ago I used to grade while students took a test. But over the past few years I had to stop doing so because the only effective method of preventing cheating has been to watch students test for the majority of the exam. If students use watches, phones, their neighbor’s paper, or any other means I can tell when I watch them. It is a tiring game of cat and mouse and I dislike it very much. One thing that has worn on me recently as a teacher is the mounting pressures for students to find a way to get admitted into a University. That pressure is often an unhealthy one that stems from a variety of sources. And that pressure translates to the teacher. It becomes our job to be perfect, and sometimes better than perfect, or else did we really truly care about the student? If we let them down, we are a bad teacher and a bad person. 

If I didn’t say something often enough, or if I didn’t round a grade, or if I was absent too many times, or a million other things can all be the blame for why a student didn’t get a grade that’s going to keep them out of the college of their dreams. This hyperbole is infrequent relative to the number of students, but consistently present these days. And it’s exhausting. Along with that pressure on the teacher, there is another consequence. Students are being pushed to achieve these goals as a primary objective, not as a secondary. They aren’t trying to be good enough to get admission into a University, they are just trying to get the admission. This is a shame because I see too many students that are brilliant, but they get the idea that the only measure of importance is something that sometimes they end up discarding later in life. I’ve seen students stress so hard about going to the University of Michigan only to end up being admitted and choosing another path that worked better for them. This toxicity pervades the schools now. And it devalues learning and ethics. Cheating is a frequent result. 

Students cheat in a variety of forms. They seek out information about exams and quizzes. They do not consider this cheating, but rather strategic. They are taught that completion of assignments takes precedence over learning. They are taught that learning takes place outside of the classroom. So when they get to a test and struggle, it is easier for them to find a reason to cheat. I don’t have the solution to this problem. I’m against it, I will work against it, I wish more people would push back against it, but I don’t know that it can be eradicated. But we did something to share the burden on individual teachers and it is worth sharing. 

Academic Honesty Council

We formed an academic honesty council. When students are suspected or caught doing something that violates our terms of academic honesty they can be summoned to meet in front of a group of teachers. I was able to serve on our initial council. It was wonderful. The teacher who is directly involved was prohibited from the council. We took on part of their burden for them. When students cheat there is a mix of feelings for a teacher. There is a guilt that stems from the discussion above and there is also a feeling of hurt. On some level it is not possible to not take cheating personally. We put so much of ourselves into our teaching that when someone tries to circumvent the system it hurts. 

The council avoided both of these. It allowed us to examine what took place, listen to evidence, and have discussions with multiple teachers. From there we were able to work impartially to assign consequences that were fair, consistent and were productive. Because of the novelty of the council we had met previously with administration to seek advice on what to do in terms of enforcement, potential consequences, and seek general advice. This allowed us to work with students to learn from what happened and it avoided the isolation of being the only teacher involved. 

This can also help preserve the relationship between the teacher and student. A student caught cheating is having the investigation, verdict and punishment all coming from a teacher. And even teachers that try hard to be fair can be perceived as being inconsistent from a student’s perspective. Hard feelings toward that teacher can develop that can interfere with the student’s ability to learn in the future. 

The time that a teacher must dedicate to dealing with consequences is intensive. There are contacts to make, forms to fill, conferences to have and potentially even more. By having a council we absorbed some of that requirement. It allows the teacher to share the pertinent information that they have and the burden from there is split into multiple parties. 

Student Follow up

After our initial academic honesty council, we held a follow up meeting with the entire group of students in our cohort. Students shared a variety of thoughts that were noteworthy. Many felt resentment from their peers for cheating and sometimes just for being overly competitive. In my opinion, many students had diverging opinions on what is and isn’t cheating amongst themselves and relative to expectations of their teachers. Some students had honest questions about how teachers perceive cheating. Teaching can be overwhelming and sometimes it becomes necessary to seek out someone else to change things for the better. But I felt that this council as a good step in the right direction for a group of teachers to help improve things in a situation that could use more consistency and attention.

Five Good Reasons To Go Into Teaching

When I ask students I am surprised at how thoroughly students would be able to explain to me why teaching was not an option for them. It is not a decision that they have made lightly. They know the projections of pay, the direction of legislation and the costs that they would need to input. But there are also good reasons to go into teaching that they are not aware of. 

Unsettled research

The access teachers have had to cognitive science research and how learning works has been limited until recently. As we continue to improve our understanding of learning, the research connecting that cognitive research to teaching is stuck. Teaching must be complex enough to cause permanent change in the brain structure. Teaching must also be simple enough to not overwhelm the short term memory capacity. Many teachers and researchers embrace one of those ideals but not both. Thus a large conflict prevents us from pushing education research ahead. That will change in the near future and you would be able to be a part of that. Other fields have research that is so advanced and settled. Our knowledge of medicine, economics, philosophy, science and mathematics are advanced to a point where the specifics are so advanced that they contribute little. But education has so much room for growth and improvement. Soon our abilities to teach and learn those other fields will be limited to how quickly we can educate people to the point where they can understand the new research needs of them. 

Autonomy 

The most important factors in a career is not money. Study after study shows that having autonomy in your job is one of the biggest keys to being happy and feeling impactful. Next week I will be teaching about chemical reactions. The number of approaches and methods that I could use to do that is unlimited. I have so much control over what I choose to do. I can experiment and try something new. I can take ideas from other teachers. I can do what I did last time with minor changes. On Tuesday I will be doing a new lesson that I got the idea from a book that I am currently reading. At any given moment when inspiration hits I am able to put that idea into action. What other job has that at this level? 

Ability to learn with an audience to keep you accountable

There was a reading teacher next door to me who would put up posters where she would put the book covers of books she read. I started to do so and quickly found myself reading more and more books. I am currently reading my 54th book this year and I love it. But being a teacher is a huge reason why I love it. I get to share what I read and learn with my students. If I read an interesting book about rust, I am able to use that in a lesson with my class. Everything that I learn about I have an audience to reinforce my own learning as I share it. I’m not convinced that if I went into work and was restricted from sharing my learning that it would not carry the same meaning to me. Whether the topic is history, chemistry, geography, environmental science, cognition or something else; I can always connect those topics to my teaching. It enhances my teaching. 

The most difficult job

Teaching is the most difficult job that exists. The sheer volume of decisions that teachers make during a lesson is enormous. No matter how well you teach something there is always a way to improve your lesson because there are so many different options you have. Having the ability to deal with managing children in a way that optimizes their learning involves decisions about their cognition, their prior knowledge, their emotional health, the physical arrangement of the room and the lesson medium. Because of the overwhelming number of students (150-250) you must have plans for an incredible number of disruptions and adjustments to make. You have to introduce a new idea in a way that maximizes learning, provide practice that maximizes learning and give assessments that measure the learning that took place. All of that must be done to a large group of students with wildly different experiences and prior knowledge. Whether the goal is to maximize learning or to maximize homogeneity in knowledge is inconsistent depending on the objective, course and content piece. Behind all of these pieces is the content itself. I must understand all of the chemistry I am presenting which includes all of the chemistry that students perceive. I must understand and be prepared to respond to every conception that a student brings to the classroom along with what evidence and theory can advance those conceptions to better models. It is an unending journey towards a perfection that doesn’t exist even in theory. No other profession comes close to the combination of skills needed to maximize success. And that challenge is welcome. Teachers seek challenge. They want to be pushed to the limits of human ability. 

Online networks

When I was in high school teachers were isolated. They would seek community in lounges, but the atmosphere was potentially toxic. With social media teachers are able to connect with other teachers. We have access to the best of the best and can use each other to further our own abilities. The sharing and cooperation that results from social media has opened new doors to teachers from mentorship opportunities, to highlighting creativity, to challenging our own conceptions and ideas about teaching. These networks incentivize teachers to push beyond the typical boundaries of teaching that have existed in the past. Teachers can share improved models, dual coding and concrete examples for content. Teachers can share research, new pedagogy and more advanced curriculum. Teachers can learn from others about organization, technology, and creativity in lessons.

Cognitive Science of Energy in Science Education

The cognitive science behind teaching science shows that abstract ideas should be connected to concrete examples to maximize understanding. Energy is an abstract concept, yet little analysis of how to best connect energy to concrete examples exists. The experiences of teaching both chemistry and physics have provided me some insights into what teachers should do to help students understand scenarios that have traditionally been analyzed using energy. 

Motion, position and force are more concrete (less abstract) than energy. Whenever possible energy should be removed from the explanation or discussion and replaced with these. When students use energy with regards to kinetic or gravitational potential energy they have an easier time processing new information. Asking students which has a larger kinetic energy when comparing an object at different speeds is easily transferable between the abstract energy and the concrete speed. The other two forms of energy that are easily visible for students are spring energy and gravitational potential energy. 

Showing students a relaxed spring and a compressed spring allows them to easily identify that the compressed spring has more energy. Holding a marker a meter off the ground and two meters off the ground easily allows them to identify that the two meter mark has more potential energy. The reason why this is easily analyzed by students is that they easily connect to the concrete. The students can see that upon release, more motion results from the compressed spring and the elevated marker. Note that for both instances the concrete image of fast moving objects is easily accessible. In Figure 1 below, it is obvious that when released object B will be moving faster right before it hits the ground than object A.

Figure 1: Two objects where object B is twice the distance from the ground that object A is

When is it not clear?

Energy remains obscure with charged particles and electrical energy. A simple explanation is that charged particles have two competing abstract ideas visible to students. When a proton and electron are close together the students understand that there is a larger force between them than when they have a large separation. But these particles have less energy than particles that are separated. To reconcile these two competing ideas it can be helpful to track the relative speeds. If an electron and proton are separated by a distance and released, they will move towards each other and collide (ignoring quantum physics). If the electron and proton are now separated to twice the distance, they will approach and collide, but at a higher speed than before. When they reach the original separation they will have that kinetic energy gained plus the same potential energy as before. 

Figure 2: Top two charges start separated by a distance d. Middle two charges start separated by a distance 2d. Bottom two charges started at a distance 2d but have moved to a distance of d and are now moving with a relative speed. 

It takes time for students to connect the ideas present in Figure 1 above. Often in chemistry we exacerbate this by labeling the potential energy without specifying whether it is potential or kinetic. The middle set of charges has more energy than the top set of charges. This is difficult for students because they see the forces as being larger for the top set and have experienced the stronger attraction when playing with magnets. 

This is not as problematic with gravitational potential energy because the force of gravity is relatively constant because of the small change in distance relative to the large separation from the center of the earth. Students also have substantially more sensory experience with gravitational interactions then electric. 

Energy by definition should be linked to a force. Energy and work have circular definitions, but the mathematical origins of energy are an integral of a force over a pathway. For example, gravitational potential energy (mgh) is derived from the integration of weight (mg) for the pathway of separation between the two objects. This conflicts with the presentation of energy in science classrooms frequently. Chemical energy, sound energy, “heat” energy and many other forms of energy are not directly linked to a fundamental force. Chemical energy for example is based on electrical forces. “Heat” energy or thermal energy is based on kinetic energies of particles. 

By introducing energy in terms of conservation of these forms that do not have a direct link to a force, we obfuscate the underlying abstract definition of what energy is. This conflict allows students (and teachers) to maintain a wide variety of mental models of what energy is. The current push for developing models of energy in the NGSS is insufficient to undermine and may actually reinforce the problem. 

Figure 3: NGSS that deal with energy, taken from https://www.nextgenscience.org/topic-arrangement/4energy on 1/9/2020

In Figure 3 we see the idea of conservation as fundamental to 4-PS3-2, 4-PS3-4 and 4-ESS3-1. 4-PS3-1 shows some promise but also undercuts that potential by making this a mathematical connection instead of dealing with the conflicts discussed above. None of these set up for students to challenge the underlying struggle of unpacking why electrical energy increases as separation between charges gets larger. 

How should teachers attack this misconception?

An abstract idea is understood better when multiple concrete examples are used. A strategy that I have found helpful for this is to limit energy in education. Every scenario that is explained using energy can also be explained using force, position and motion instead. By eliminating energy from the explanation you require a concrete connection to be the impetus for understanding. This is challenging and often unique. Could you explain how digestion works without using energy in your explanation? Could you talk about how light and electrons interact without using energy? Can we differentiate a nuclear power plant and a coal one without energy? The answer to this is always yes, but it requires practice. 

Chemical Reactions 

Energy in chemical reactions can be presented in many formats. One common format is using reaction energy diagrams. A reaction energy diagram is extremely abstract. The abstraction can be reduced using simple diagrams for a reaction. With a very generic reaction energy diagram teachers can communicate simple abstract ideas to students without the student being forced to develop a concrete example. Teachers can highlight that the potential energy of the chemical system has increased as the reaction proceeds in Figure 4. 

Figure 4: A generic endothermic reaction energy diagram.

Figure 5 is an improvement because it allows students to develop the idea that transition states are unstable. This makes some intuitive sense to the student that the more common representation of a bond is stable. But in order to really advance the model for students one must address the underlying potential misconceptions. This is to be done by marking down how the forces, positions and motions all relate to one another.

Figure 5: Particle representations that show the reaction transitional state where bonds have broken but not yet reformed. 

From the initial reactant state to the transition state, B moves away from A. A and B are attracted to each other so the forces are inwards while the motion of A and B is outward. In order for A and B to move apart while forces pull them together, they have to slow down. If you are moving left, and being pulled right, your speed lessens. What we’re describing here is a transition from kinetic to potential energy. When a collision occurs that causes a large relative motion between A and B, A and B can separate. But to do so they slow down. If a small collision occurs, A and B will start to separate but will revert back to their bonded state before completing the separation. 

When C and B approach each other the force is again inwards. But now B and C are approaching each other. Their motion and their forces are aligned and so their speeds increase. As the bond forms their speeds increase and later that increase in motion could be transferred back to the surroundings through collisions (heat). Note how by analyzing this without energy the student is not going to develop the biology misconception that breaking bonds releases energy. Students often see the transition from ATP to ADP as a bond breaking that releases energy and retain this idea in chemistry and physics. When ATP turns into ADP it is not a single bond change that occurs. Here the students can logically process that the particles are going to slow down as bonds break and speed up as bonds form. Now when a reaction is endothermic they can infer that the bonds were harder to break. When a reaction is exothermic the initial bonds were easier to break and the particles sped up more than they slowed down. A video breakdown of this schematic can be found here. 

Digestion

Why do you eat food? Because it gives you energy. How does photosynthesis work? Plants turn light into energy. The questions and answers that surround digestion are filled with abstract hand waving. I am not a biology expert so if my explanations are flawed, please try and focus on the development rather than the specifics. 

When you consume food your body changes that food into smaller pieces and distributes those pieces throughout your body. Much of that food turns into a sugar called glucose. Cells use glucose by burning it. The glucose reacts with oxygen and as this happens the products of the reaction move faster than the initial speeds of the glucose and oxygen. That motion is used to push other chemicals together in a way that forms something called ATP from ADP. The ATP and ADP can be used to cause muscle contraction because the charges of the ATP and ADP cause muscle fibers to grab hold, pull on muscle fibers, release and reset. These actions results from the changes in charge distribution within the ADP and ATP that result from the reactions of the glucose changing. 

If the initial warning wasn’t sufficient, the preceding paragraph makes clear that I have a limited understanding of the cycles used as well as the chemicals involved as intermediates. But in reading this many questions that could undermine my ignorance become clear. How does the burning of glucose in cells differ from the combustion that occurs in air? When the conversion forms an unstable intermediate, how does charge distribution play a role? How does the cell distribute these unstable intermediates without a reversion to a more stable set of chemicals? What in the structure of myosin and actin leads to a binding interaction and how is that interaction disrupted? What about its structure makes ATP so effective at distributing charge that causes other molecules to move? Many of these questions have an underlying theme. Charge is being used to push or pull and motion is being used to initiate those pushes and pulls. A biochemistry expert should be able to detail how the chemicals at each stage of digestion leads to the desired result and they should be able to do so without using energy. 

Photosynthesis is very similar but light presents a new struggle. How do we describe light without using energy? Light originates when charged particles change. The exact changes are difficult to describe because charged particles are too small to observe in the same way we view macroscopic objects. We could say that when charged particles change how they move light is produced, but that is probably not completely true and not completely false either. Light originates from a charged particle (electron, nucleus, etc.) and terminates when the light causes a different charged particle to change its state. 

When light hits a chemical, the light can interact with the electrons in that chemical. The resulting changes for the electron that absorbs the light can result in new positions and motions for the electron that change the attractive forces within the molecule. This can lead to attractions being disrupted. The resulting unstable intermediates and transition states can lead to collisions where other molecules are pulled on. Photosynthesis is where light hits a chlorophyll pigment that causes changes to the electronic structure. The changes to the chlorophyll have various pathways that end up using that change to pull particles where the eventual result is combining carbon dioxide and water into sugars. Sometimes the chlorophyll can remove electrons from water molecules that then turn into protons and oxygen. The protons (H+ ions) can build up forming a charge gradient along a wall. Again the details are bit beyond my expertise level but hopefully you can begin to see how an expert would be able to replace the term energy within each of these steps with the result in terms of charge distribution, motion and position. 

Power Plants

When we say that we have an energy crisis, what do we actually mean? What specific things do we mean that we could replace the term energy with? The often mean electricity. We could also be talking about fuels or stuff that burns. 

Nearly all power plants function with the same underlying principles. You have to make a turbine spin fast. When the spinning is connected with a magnet inside a coil of wires you get electricity. The big differences in how the spinning is produced is the primary difference between electricity production. Fossil fuels (coal, oil, methane) are burned underneath a vessel filled with water. As the water turns into steam, the steam particles collide with the blades of a turbine causing it to spin. A nuclear power plant functions in the exact same manner but instead the uranium rods are inserted into the water to heat the water instead of burning fuel. Hydroelectricity uses water to push on turbine blades. Wind turbines are arranged where wind is likely to push more in one direction than another. 

Note how whenever we eliminate the word energy from explanations the details become more concrete. The uranium fuel rods provide energy that heats the water. The uranium particles in the fuel rods split into pieces that move fast. As they fly through the water they drag water particles causing the water to speed up. Fossil fuels provide energy to heat the water. Fossil fuels react with oxygen and after the reaction the products move at higher speeds. When these fast moving particles collide with the vessel containing the water the collisions tend to transfer motion to the water particles. 

Conclusions

Energy allows us a lot of mental and mathematical shortcuts in science that are valuable. Explaining and understanding quantum mechanics without energy is a burden that would exclude many from the field. But there is a cost to using energy. Using energy as an explanation results in less understanding and that cost is too great in science education. Strategies to make energy less abstract include:

1. Explain processes without using the term energy. Use force, motion and position to help guide the explanations.

2. When using energy, it should tie directly to a force (gravity, electric, magnetic, nuclear). Avoid terms like sound energy, heat energy and chemical energy.

3. When something is too complicated to explain without energy, try and split the process into fragments. What do I have at the beginning, middle and end. Can I explain any of these transitions without energy? 

4. Explanations in chemistry must address the misconception that forces and energy are interchangeable for charged particles. Large separations have small forces and high energies.5. Particle level representations can help expose incomplete details.

6. Anticipate having students that ask “How do you know that the energy changes that way?” prior to the lesson and work on answering that question.

7. Be wary of changing forms of energy. Changing forms is useful for calculation simplification but is highly disruptive to student understanding. 

8. When avoiding energy, it is critical to reduce the number of tier 2 and tier 3 vocabulary terms to avoid cognitive overload. Keep everything else simple. 

9. Biology is the hardest subject to do this in. Sometimes though the energy components do not contribute anything of value. ATP changing to ADP allows muscles to contract. Do I need to use energy in that observation? Does it enhance the understanding?

Practice is required to improve at avoiding energy in science education. When teachers feel inadequate to continue they should write down questions they have to see if there is a potential resolution. Teachers should be wary of science education techniques that organize energy into models. This often takes the abstract concept of energy and avoids the ability to make it concrete.