Three Steps for Strengthening Communication and Resilience in Science Class

Debbie Barkley held her string tightly and directed the teachers around her to tug theirs downward as they maneuvered a rubber band around the sides of a red Solo cup. “This is so frustrating,” Barkley said when one of the cups fell over, not for the first time. “My fifth graders would be yelling at each other at this point.” A few minutes later, when the group succeeded in stacking several cups in a prescribed arrangement, teacher Ami Patel-Hopkins, exclaimed, “Oh, I love my group!”

That range of emotions is what Kathleen Tsai, a chemistry teacher who facilitated the exercise, expected. “It’s frustrating but then you have a sense of fulfillment,” she said during a group reflection at EduCon 2020, a school innovation conference. “The amount of frustration I feel when I do this is the same as my students feel when they’re doing algebra. I’m sweating when I’m stacking cups; they’re sweating when they’re doing homework.”

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