Princeton professor urges Montgomery school board to stress discovery

"The goal is to make children lifelong learners," says Daniel Rubenstein

By: Jake Uitti
   MONTGOMERY — In order for students to move into the 21st century successfully, they need to be taught the process of learning and exploration, and not just fact regurgitation, the township Board of Education was told Tuesday in an address by Daniel Rubenstein, a Princeton University professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.
   "The only way to get long-lasting systemic reform is if the entire community comes together and teaches the children as one unit," Professor Rubenstein said. "The goal is to make children lifelong learners."
   The process, he said, is paramount — perhaps more so than the outcome.
   "We must teach people to ask simple questions, to complete an investigation, answer the question and then present their results to others," he said, adding that children should present their findings to their peers, not just a teacher.
   "The pressure from their peers is critical," he said.
   Professor Rubenstein explained that all too often, teachers instruct students through cause and effect, adding textbooks tend to offer "canned" explanations. Textbooks, he said, often take away "discovery," noting, "There is nothing in the text saying the scientist asked this question, got to those dead ends, and then finally found the answer here."
   There is a skill to questioning, he said. There is a skill to the ability of picking and probing at other people’s results. It is this process that must be understood, he said, in order for students to become better learners.
   Professor Rubenstein said he has come up with a "Four-P" system: perception, problem-posing, problem-solving and persuasion.
   "Children are curious," he said, and that curiosity perceives a pattern that doesn’t make sense to them, leading the children to ask "why?"
   After that "why?" he continued, children should pose a problem. They need to have a disciplined way of focusing the initial question into a particular problem posing, or a model.
   "If you pose it a certain way, it has a ‘what if,’" he said. Children have to make a prediction and then see if their prediction was accurate, and why it was or was not.
   In order to get students to use the Four-P’s, parents and teachers need to "empower and engage" their students by "encouraging fascination" and teaching children to ask questions, he said.
   What stands in the way of this taking place, he said, is all of the teaching to the tests. He likened teaching to the tests to running on a treadmill.
   "Teaching to the tests narrows the curriculum," he added. "Instead, we need to teach our children the basic rules and foundations. Those are the things they will remember forever."
   Professor Rubenstein proposed a plan for the district, saying schools "need real professional development." He said paying teachers for an extra month in the summer would be a benefit — though costly. Then they could go to conferences and learn how to identify appropriate standards, to rethink how they assess their students.
   Teachers need to identify more engaging ways to teach the materials so that students can still learn how to do well on the tests, while also understanding how to learn and be lifelong learners, he said.
   "The culture you create, the values that guide you, are the bedrock that is going to make this work."
   Professor Rubenstein’s speech will be re-broadcast on the district’s Channel 14, board President David Pettit said.
   In other business, Mr. Pettit began Tuesday’s board meeting with its second moment of silence in as many meetings for a fallen member of the school family.
   Mr. Pettit led the observance for Sheryl Carraher, a former Montgomery High School Choir director, who died Sunday at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital.
   Ms. Carraher had been a teacher in the district for 10 years, Mr. Pettit said.
   "She was truly loved, she’ll be very missed," said Mr. Pettit.