Try Something New
Photos by Michael D. Spencer
Try Something New
Greg Benoit of BU’s Earl Center for Learning & Innovation on how to take risks in your teaching
It’s an escape the room-style challenge:
To find the missing student, you have to make it through a series of puzzles. Solve one and you can open a lockbox that’ll give you a clue to help figure out the next mystery. Crack them all and you’ll find the student.
You’ll need to stretch your math skills to succeed. Greg Benoit invented the lockbox game to teach his students how to apply systems of equations, those formulas packed with xs and ys. Students in a classroom are given a set of blocks marked with coordinate points, equations, clues to analyze, and a set of lockboxes holding more mysteries. It’s one of many creative teaching innovations Benoit’s come up with to keep his students engaged in learning.
Benoit helps lead BU Wheelock’s Earl Center for Learning & Innovation, which develops, pilots, and supports new approaches to teaching and the use of technology in the classroom.
“One of my research interests is gamification in mathematics, and how we apply game-based learning principles in our mathematics classrooms,” says Benoit, a lecturer in math education and former Boston Public Schools math teacher. “There’s something interesting about playing games, right? That can be very useful in a math setting.”
At the Earl Center, Benoit provides training and other opportunities for students, faculty, and alums to help them experiment and share ideas. Recent events for educators have included a STEM institute and an assistive technology training session. Current projects include a seed grant to support faculty research, including an augmented reality program that allows students to tackle real-world scenarios—such as reacting to a racist comment in a classroom—in a supervised lab setting. The center is also a resource for new classroom materials and technologies, covering kindergarten to college.
“As teachers, we have a habit of creating what we’ve experienced; the Earl Center is a place where you can experience something different,” says Benoit, who joined BU Wheelock in fall 2018.
BU Wheelock asked Benoit for his tips for educators ready to shake up their teaching practice.
1: Start Small
According to resource website busyteacher.org, American teachers spend eight hours a day teaching. Then another hour helping kids who need extra support. Then another three to five hours planning, grading, and talking with parents. When exactly are they supposed to experiment with a new activity or technology?
Benoit says innovation doesn’t have to be a burden. For instance, he’s started spending 10 minutes a week talking with his students about math, not just teaching them about it: What do they think of mathematics? What do they like or dislike? The conversation allows him to highlight gaps in their knowledge—and their confidence—then figure out ways to fill them.
“Starting small can help build momentum,” says Benoit.
He recommends the Innovators’ Compass (innovatorscompass.org), a tool for those who’d like to try something different, but aren’t sure where to start. It has five topics wannabee innovators can work through to spark new ideas—and find ways to put them into action.
“My thoughts can be boiled down to a simple equation: new variables equals new problems equals new solutions,” says Benoit. “The challenges facing educators today are significantly different than those educators have faced in the past: evolving technology, rapidly expanding research, and developing cultural awareness are all facets interacting with the field of education. With these new variables comes the need for new, innovative solutions.”
2: Technology ≠ Innovation
Kids love video games, and 3-D printers are fun, but groundbreaking education doesn’t necessarily happen in the most tricked-out classroom. Even a piece of paper can be innovative, says Benoit, offering a demonstration. On his office shelf is a two-foot-tall cardboard tower with a platform on top. He places a small cardboard truck at the base of the tower and a ping-pong ball on the platform. Using only a thin strip of paper, you have to get the ball into the truck—without touching the ball, tower, or vehicle.
He recently teamed up with EXPLO, an education innovation nonprofit, to lead this critical-thinking engineering problem with his colleagues at a faculty meeting. By the end, he says, the successful teams were jazzed: middle-aged professors whooping and high-fiving each other as the ball flowed down the ramps they’d built using their strip of paper. As a teacher, he’d created a memorable experience—not just a lesson—using a few rolls of paper.
“My goal as an educator isn’t to dump knowledge into you; you have a $1,000 phone, you can Google pretty much anything you want to know,” he says. “My job is to turn you into a problem solver.”
The careers of the future won’t be dependent on memorizing the quadratic formula, he says, but thinking about how the equation can be used. In the case of the tower problem, says Benoit, “understanding how the parent function can help you create the equation needed to build your system and how the domain/range can help you understand the height of each section and the distance of each section.”
Of course, you can still build inspiring lessons with technology. Benoit once had his own students use geometry—translation, dilation, and reflection—to design and 3-D print prototype furniture for people with disabilities. But it’s wrong to think technology is the only answer.
“It’s incorrect to think innovation is primarily based on technologies, to think that innovation lies within the equipment,” says Benoit. “Innovation lies within the person; how do we utilize it?”
3: Take a Free Online Course
For those who get stuck in a routine or can only think of all the reasons an idea won’t work, Benoit suggests taking a free online course in design thinking. It’s a problem-solving approach commonly used by engineers. They think of who might use a solution and how they might benefit, rather than the problem they’re solving or the impediments to success. This human-centered approach supposedly sparks more alternative ideas and encourages faster prototyping. Design thinking can inspire students, too.
“Design thinking is a tool that shows students thinking is not linear but iterative,” says Benoit. “The job of an educator is to help students become active participants in the world, but their world is changing. The majority of jobs students of today are going to be competing for have not yet been created.”
BU is a member of the edX platform, which offers free online courses on design thinking. You can also access BU’s courses on evidenced-based STEM teaching at edx.org/school/bux.
4: Take Risks
When Benoit was teaching ninth-grade math in Boston Public Schools, his principal invited a respected researcher to his school. The researcher suggested an initiative that would include changes to the math curriculum. Benoit thought the new guidelines were an insult to his students.
“It was supposed to be remediation and algebra recovery; it assumed they didn’t know how to add,” he says. “And I’m like, ‘No, we’re going to show them that you can do better.’”
He threw out the new guidelines and came up with his own plan. To empower his students, he had them lead the class, while he sat with their peers, gently guiding and asking pointed questions.
“I remember so much pressure being on me, because you can’t make a bold move like that and not have the spotlight on you.”
When the researcher came back to inspect his class, “the students killed it, they were on point.” Benoit, however, got a negative mark for not sticking to the new plan. But it inspired him to pursue a doctoral degree, so he could help lead change he believed in.
“Principals are judged on numbers,” says Benoit. When they see his presentations on an alternative teaching method or technology in Boston, they often respond: “This is great, this is cool; how is this going to help my kids on their MCAS,” the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System?
He admits it’s hard to test that impact. It’s one reason the Earl Center is supporting faculty research and sharing proven solutions with educators. But teachers and administrators also need to remember that standards aren’t the reason they got into the job, says Benoit. And they need to channel that into taking the occasional risk.
“When you think about high school or college, do you remember the lessons—or the experiences?” he asks of those moments when learning became fun and engaging. “The longer lasting of the two are the experiences.”
5: Find a Champion—and Be One
One reason schools roll along doing the same thing every day, according to Benoit, is because innovation isn’t anyone’s sole job. But there are people who can champion new ideas and support their implementation. It’s a role Benoit wants the Earl Center to take on, too.
“It’s like a central location for teachers to access innovation,” he says. “You might not have a 3-D printer, for example, and you might be confused as to how a 3-D printer actually works or its connection to your classroom. So come take a workshop.”
As the center develops more strategies and classroom activities, it will begin to open-source them, allowing teachers across the country to find proven innovations. Benoit says that’s something all educators can do, too: if you hit on a winning idea, share it and champion other people implementing it.
He hopes such advances encourage educators to stay connected to their passion for teaching.
“I think the system does a great job of beating it out of you,” says Benoit. “It becomes more of a routine: teachers lose their inspiration for action. I want to inspire a more ambitious type of teaching.”
EARL CENTER FOR LEARNING & INNOVATION
The Earl Center for Learning & Innovation was founded in 2013 with a gift from Sylvia (’54) and James Earl to provide faculty and students a place to learn new technologies and pedagogies that will improve student learning. The Earls also created the Sylvia Earl Technology Fund to support the center’s ongoing activities, such as the recent STEM institute and assistive technology training session. This fall, under the direction of Professor Beth Warren and in collaboration with new research faculty members Marie Olivares and Eli Tucker-Raymond, the center is launching a series of research studies and programs.