MicroscopyEducation
Figure 2 : Fingerprint drawing blooms into a poster-size artwork by a middle school student.
essential for success in school and in life: looking closely, thinking and inferring by analogy, and learning to change scale in one’s thinking, hypothesizing, inventing, and problem solving in all subjects. In the process, students write-across-the-curriculum with high-level results. T ey develop motivational bridges to content areas, recall content more easily, and make sophisticated and scholarly investigation into content areas simpler. When Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg was asked “How does a scientist think?” he answered, “I don’t think there is one logic for science and another logic for the commonsense world. If there were, we would be in real trouble..... I’d say the ability to discover analogies, the ability to generalize, the ability to strip to the essential attributes of some actor in the process—the ability to imagine oneself inside of a biological or other situation—these are some of the pretty obvious talents.”[ 2 ]
Growth of the program . I started T e Private Eye Project
over twenty-fi ve years ago, introducing loupes and a novel “thinking by analogy” process to the world of education. Analogical thinking is at the heart of cognition. Naturalize it in the curriculum, and student achievement improves. Originally grant-funded and piloted in Seattle’s public schools, this independent program is currently being used in thousands of classrooms, homeschools, universities, and outreach programs in all fi ſt y states and has spread to educators in a half-dozen other countries. To date it has reached over three million students. Workshops and courses help school personnel integrate the program into their curricula ( Figure 4 ). At Portland State University, in Oregon, The Private Eye is a collaborating partner with the Portland Metro STEM Partnership. We are in our fourth year of offering professional development to teachers in a graduate-level course integrating STEM and the Next Generation Science Standards [ 3 ]. Carol Biskupic Knight, Director of the STEM Teachers Academy for The Portland Metro STEM Partnership, explains the collabo- ration: “The Private Eye Program stresses interdisciplinary and connected thinking. The three-dimensional instruction and learning called for in the Next Generation Science Standards is the premise of The Private Eye. Focused, coherent, and engaging instruction allows for problem
2015 May •
www.microscopy-today.com
Figure 3 : School girls in Haiti discover and draw their fi ngerprints.
Figure 4 : The Private Eye offers 1–5 day courses and workshops and follow-up courses and workshops. Seen here are teachers participating in a one-day Private Eye Workshop for K–12 hosted by the Oregon Coast STEM Hub at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology in Charleston, OR.
solving, decision making, explaining real world phenomena, and integrating new ideas.”
To learn more about the program, view the website
www.the-private-eye.com . This website has lists of materials needed, instructional strategies, standards correlations, and many rave reviews. There are also galleries of student work from grades 1 to 13 and examples of successful funding initiatives.
A Brief Tour of The Private Eye Process Science begins with close observation. So do art, fine writing, mathematics, and the social sciences. Slowing down, looking closely at the world (or some part of the world), noticing details and how they fit into some larger whole, and noting smaller patterns accumulating into larger
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