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Lynch School of Education Professor Michael Barnett will soon embark on a history-making trip to China, where he will introduce new instructional methods to the country’s high school teachers. It will mark the first time China, seeking to change its notoriously rigid test-taking mindset, has ever invited an American university to work with its K-12 educational curriculums.
“The goal is to get Chinese teachers to teach more like creative American teachers,” says Barnett, who heads up the program that caught the eye of China’s education leaders. “It’s about trying to engage students in creative problem-solving; getting them to do science experiments; getting the kids to think more, to solve a problem that doesn’t necessarily have a right solution, so you’re not just regurgitating ‘2+2=4.’”
“I really believe this program will help change our country,” says Chinese native Kelvin Cui, director of the US Office of China Secondary School Curriculum Coaching Magazine, the official education institution tasked with finding innovative programs to bring back to China. “I’ve researched this for a long time, and there wasn’t another college or university in the US that offered this kind of program. American schools have more experience and are more advanced and so we want to learn from them. We think Mike’s program is going be really beneficial.”
Barnett will be engaging Chinese students in learning hydroponics – the soilless process that enables plants to grow with water and mineral nutrients – as a tool to help youth in learning science using interdisciplinary approaches. He will create a pedagogical ramp in which teachers learn urban ecology science such as the ecological impact of tree cover, and the impact of urban noise on human and wildlife health.
While the science of these projects isn’t new, the way the former astrophysicist has been utilizing it is. For the past eight years, as part of the Lynch School’s College Bound program, Barnett has been recruiting mid-level, science-phobic students who might fall through the cracks. Through an interdisciplinary, coherent package – one that also presents problem-solving exercises – the students see how science can be fun and exciting.
Barnett’s program, which comes with curriculum and kits, has been implemented in about 500 schools across Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Ohio and California.
Later this month, Barnett will head to Beijing to present a keynote address on teaching problem-based and interdisciplinary science at the Practical Curriculum Studies Conference. This will be an opportunity for Chinese schools to learn about the curriculum and to sign up as early adopters of the curriculum that Barnett and his team have been developing during the past eight years.
“What we’re doing is really, really different from how science is normally taught,” says Barnett, a former Massachusetts Carnegie Foundation Professor of the Year. “Think back to high school: You did biology, then you did chemistry, then you did physics – but the subjects never chatted with each other.
“With our curriculum materials, you can do all of that at once. You have to worry about the light spectrum for plants and the sound spectrum for urban noise, there’s your physics; you have to worry about the content of your nutrients or what is in your soil if you are growing plants outside, there’s your chemistry; you have to worry about how the plants uptake their nutrients or pollutants in the soil or how biodiversity impacts the health of an urban ecosystem – there’s the plant science and biology aspects of it.
“You even get engineering when the kids have to build these kits or learn how to make tools to measure the height of trees.”
Since attracting the attention of Chinese representatives at an MIT event last fall, Barnett’s urban ecology and hydroponics programs have been put on China’s fast track. And the parameters are expanding: The initial plan was to train Chinese teachers, then to include the teaching of students. Now Barnett and his team will also help redesign China’s school science labs to encourage teachers to think about science as being more integrated rather than individual disciplines.
“China wants to push their teachers to get out of this ‘they know everything and they just tell the kids’ mode,” says Barnett. “They see it as there’s a reason why Apple and Google and all of those companies started in the US, and not China. The Chinese government, not surprisingly, wants the next Apple to be from China, but you need kids to have the opportunity to innovate, create, and learn from their mistakes.”
Cui says China’s government wants students to have more creative and critical thinking ability, not just be good at taking a test.
“We are looking for some creative hands-on activities and programs for the kids because we don’t have anything like this in China right now,” says Cui, who expects the program to start by having Chinese youth travel to Boston College this summer. “It’s not only a hands-on program for students, but it also will help our teachers learn and think about the difference between US and Chinese education. We have the hydroponic technology as well in China, but we’ve never thought about using it in this way that teaches kids how to learn the technology and how to combine the physics, chemistry, and biology all together. We want the teachers to pull this together and let the students feel what a real American-style class is like.
“They have to teach our Chinese teachers how to teach a student to show creativity. That’s what we don’t have right now.”
“China’s education leaders want us there to be able to push the teachers to push their kids to think about these non-solution problems because in understanding what the pathway and process was, you can learn a lot around science and how science is done,” says Barnett. “Once the teachers are comfortable with that, and the students get past their initial resistance, then I think there will be a great deal of excitement around this, with students saying, ‘Wow, you know, what if we actually change this? Or what happens if you take all of the nitrogen out of the water?’ Plus they can explore questions such as: ‘Is urban noise detrimental to my health?’ That’s where we want the kids to arrive, but I think it will take a little bit of time to get there.”
Barnett expects to educate about 50 Chinese high school teachers a year on the curriculum and hydroponics once the program is launched. The hope is that some Chinese students will be studying hydroponics alongside Boston Public School students this summer, followed by a return trip to China by Barnett and his team in August for follow-up training and workshops. Over time, teachers will become familiar with the hydroponics kits themselves, which fit in the trunk of a car.
This fall, Barnett and his team will return to China to learn more about the educational system and begin to explore the establishment of training hubs across the country. The first wave of Chinese teachers taught by Barnett and his team will train other teachers, enabling the program to expand exponentially.