be necessary to repair or rebuild the communications gear. Ideally, the question about the swimming pool indicates a realization that water can be used to carry the vibrations of sound in the vacuum of space that surrounds them. This is actually an important insight and shows that the student has made sense of the facts about sound and incorporated them into his own personal experiences to demonstrate an innovative solution to the problem. How he might actually pack a swimming pool can be left to the real rocket scientists at NASA. Not every performance of understanding easily lends itself to a perilous situation outside the friendly confines of our atmosphere or on another world. Fortunately there are many worlds, both visible and hidden, here on Earth to explore, and the TfU Framework encourages teachers and students “to go beyond the information given to create something new by reshaping, expanding, extrapolating from, applying and building on what they already know” (Blythe, 1998, p. 56). During the unit on living cells, fourth graders are introduced to many facts about these vital building blocks of life including the important concept that structure is related to function. Outside of biology, a good example of this is that busses do not look like racecars because the two vehicles are designed for different jobs. For a paleontologist, sharp pointy teeth in a fossil jaw are a good indication that the animal was a carnivore, whereas flat teeth suggest an herbivore. The relationship between how something is built and the job it can do is a powerful tool and not only helps the MTA select vehicles to transport passengers up Madison Avenue, but also helps us learn about the lifestyle of an animal that has been dead for millions of years. Even within the microscopic world of cells, a good design is critical to efficient functioning and, ultimately, to survival. While students can memorize and repeat this, an activity designed to explore and learn from this connection would be even better. Lea Spahija, Ed Carr, and I reviewed the Fourth Grade cell unit during the 2010–2011 school year and developed a
project loosely based on a design-yourown-animal project. Typically these types of projects require students to select characteristics by chance or by choice for an animal that will help it survive in a particular environment. The project we developed enables fourth graders to create a new type of imaginary cell. Beginning with a functioning cell, the boys roll dice to decide on the cell’s shape, such as spherical and flexible like a blood cell or long and thin like a nerve cell, as well as additional special features such as a tail for movement, or extra mitochondria for added energy, or a chloroplast to allow it to use sunlight to make its own food like a plant cell. Reviewing the facts about how each of these structures functions is a valuable part of the process, but the boys go beyond that to explore novel design combinations such as blood cells that can move by using a tail, or muscle cells that can make their own food. These are quite literally reshapings of cells, and describing how these cells might actually work builds on what the boys know while forcing them to use their imaginations to go beyond the facts and explain their new creations. Before actually facing the rigors of whatever they choose to pursue, our boys may not be able to grasp the complexity of what they will encounter when they head out beyond our classrooms, nor do they know exactly what will be “on the test” as they explore their environment, whether near or far, but hopefully Saint David’s boys will have acquired the knowledge to be able to make connections, think creatively, and reach solutions for the problems they encounter. This can be a stretch, but as Robert Browning first said, and has been repeated many times by the likes of long-time Saint David’s teachers such as Bill Ryan and Ray Feerick, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” Using the TfU Framework to push the boys’ thought beyond rote learning toward drawing connections between the subject matter and their actual lives is a challenging but worthwhile goal. In the end, and more simply put, it makes learning fun and engaging; something Saint David’s teachers have been doing for as long as I can remember.? M Alumnus James Hughes ’78 teaches Fourth Grade mathematics and science and is a Head Coach at Saint David’s.
References
Blythe, T. (1998). The Teaching for Understanding Guide. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Johansen, M. J., & Johnson, B. (Eds.). (1987). Study Science E. New York, NY: Scholastic.
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