Dan Lipin: Inculcating a Healthy Skepticism through Science Education

Dan Lipin is that rare breed of intellectual-cum-pied piper of children, a guy with a PhD who not only doesn’t want to teach at the collegiate level, he doesn’t want to teach high school kids. He loves teaching Middle School and he loves infusing it with adventure and discovery.

“I’ve always been nomadic,” he says. Born outside Seattle, he moved with his parents to Hong Kong at age four, and lived there until he left for university studies in chemical engineering at the University of Manchester in England.

His parents subsequently moved again and now split their time between Rome and Tel Aviv, he went on to do his own doctoral work at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at the University of Queensland, where he met his wife, Tal.
With such international roots, teaching in the United States was far from the likely path—except, perhaps, for this: Dan learned to love working with and teaching Middle School-age American kids in his time as a camper and then counselor at Camp Dudley, a boys’ sleepaway camp on Lake Champlain in upstate New York.

“On my first day at camp, I went down on the rocks and fished. I’d never fished before. I went every day, and eventually caught something. I took it right to the dining hall, and they said they’d cook it and serve it!” He admits that he now knows they didn’t actually cook it—and that’s okay. “The innocence of childhood is awesome,” he says, “and it’s okay to feed their fantasies.” In subsequent summers back at Camp Dudley as a counselor, he kept pushing his campers’ imaginations with games, competitions, challenges, and just plain creative nonsense to keep them on their toes.

Sometimes telling kids “the whole truth” is less useful than provoking them to negotiate uncertainty. He says, “If you ask any of my students, ‘Does Mr. Lipin lie to you,’ they’ll say YES!” And there is a method to his madness. In part, he says, “it’s great sometimes to make up zany answers to some of the questions kids always ask. ‘What are we going to do tomorrow?’ they ask. I’ll say ‘We’re going to go skydiving.’”

Clearly, that’s a lie. Or a fib. Or perhaps it’s a tantalizing challenge that keeps kids thinking critically.

This feeds a central pedagogical goal. Dan challenges his students to think like scientists, and to experience the world through two seemingly contradictory impulses: wonder and skepticism. He wants kids to understand that science is an effort to explain the world based theories, which are, in turn, supported by the best available evidence — but evidence can change over time as new facts emerge. And, he says, “Scientists can derive ANY theories they want with evidence. You have to be skeptical—you have to question EVERYTHING.”

There is no “belief” in science, he says. “If anyone tells you that something is ‘scientifically proven,’ they are lying to you. Nothing can be ‘proven.’ It’s just another theory that is supported by evidence, which at some point, new evidence might overturn.” He explains, “I lie to the kids because they need to always question scientific premises, and never just take something scientific as received fact.”

Each year, Dan teaches a unit he calls “Bad Science.” He shows the kids a soda bottle with ‘Lipinizer’ written on it in flashy letters, and tells them, “This will make you smarter.”

He grins, “They don’t believe me, of course, so I prove it. I give them a short 10 question math quiz, which they have to complete in three minutes.” The students take the quiz, grade themselves, and then Dan enters all the results into a spreadsheet. Then, he has each of them drink a little cup of Lipinizer and gives them another quiz—questions using the same numbers, re-arranged, as in the first one. Having already practiced similar questions, he reports, the kids score 15-20% better the second time through.
“People are so ready to believe what they want to believe,” Dan says. “After the second test, the students all want more Lipinizer!”
But then, he explains, “We ask questions about the experiment, and explore how easy it is to extrapolate meaning that has no basis in evidence.” The class pushes the exercise further, making marketing posters (“Try Lipinizer! Increase your intelligence by 30%!”) and then writing newspaper editorials that point out the flaws in the experiment. “We explore real life examples that similarly pretend to ‘prove’ things that don’t stand up to questioning, and the students say, ‘Should we just not believe ANYTHING?’ And I tell them, no...but you should be cynical about everything.”

Dan believes that building a healthy skepticism is essential to real learning, not only because it encourages students to question, but because they become invested in the intellectual enterprise that goes far beyond just memorizing “facts” to get through a test. Even classroom lab experiments are more about confirming trust in scientists, given that, as Dan points out, “most labs are designed to allow students to discover things that have already been discovered.” He believes scientists should be respected, yes, but challenged and asked to defend their work, and he tries to incorporate this questioning of received truth into his teaching.
Sometimes it’s the experiments that don’t come out as planned that teach best. Dan notes, “Recently, I did an experiment with my fifth graders...and it didn’t work. I tweaked it and tweaked it and it still didn’t work. Finally, I turned to the kids and said, ‘What’s wrong here?’ Three of them offered awesome ideas. After school, I went back to Home Depot for new supplies, set the whole experiment up again, and we tried again the next day—and it worked. It’s like an engineering feedback loop—you keep trying.”

More important, he wants to engage students in the larger story, the narrative underpinning a particular “fact.” For example, he explains, when his class began learning about evolution, the textbook just summed up evolution by pointing to key discoveries by Darwin and Mendel. Dan, however, took the students on a journey that traced the path of the puzzles and the series of accidents that led to the “Eureka” moment.

“Darwin climbed a hill on an island in the Pacific and stumbled across information that changed everything. He didn’t even realize that finches were different on the Galapagos until he got back from his journey. But with this, he realized that organisms change.”
Dan continues, “We look at the historical challenges Darwin faced, but I don’t tell the students the clues Darwin had not yet discovered. And this may lead them to ask, ‘If things change, HOW do they change?’ And then we talk about Mendel and gene inheritance, about the protein that affects hair color or other inherited factors. And then they ask, ‘Where do those new proteins come from?’ and so we discuss DNA, the code that shapes proteins, and we then learn about DNA mutations….”

It took the class two months to go from Darwin to DNA mutations, and along the way, students engaged in the whole story, all the “whys” and “hows” explored along the way. As a result, they acquire conceptual understanding that supports further problem solving, beyond just memorizing the “answers.”

Dan was among the first teachers at Hackley to implement the “flipped classroom” model—which, by providing the opening “lesson” in video form for “homework,” allows students to hear the “lecture” at their own pace, stopping and repeating as needed. Classroom time, then, is devoted to activities, questions and discussions based on what they learned online—a great way to affirm, clarify and expand that learning. Dan has since tweaked the “flipped” model; now it’s “Explore—Flip—Apply!” In other words, students experience the problem or challenge first, then go home and watch the video, the obstacles they need to confront clearly implanted in their minds. Then, back to the classroom the next day, to apply what they learned to solving the problem.
Dan says, “It’s like in that movie, The Karate Kid. The teacher stood aside while the bullies roughed up the kid, and only then stepped in to defeat the bullies. And the kid said, ‘I want what you have.’ You need to give kids a reason to learn what you have to offer. Present them with the challenge first, creating that tough place in which they have to try to figure things out, and they want to learn.”

It’s uncomfortable, he admits, but he says, “There’s a premise of trust. They realize it’s going to be okay in the end. They know I will be there to support them.” The many STEM (Science-Technology-Engineering-Math) challenges his classes take on affirm this lesson again and again. He says, “The first rocket they made didn’t go very high. The first bubbles were pretty useless. The first marshmallow launcher, the first paper airplane...not great. But the kids could keep trying until they got it.”

Dan arrived at Hackley, newly married and with a brand-new PhD, seven years ago, and after all his years of travel, Hackley has become home to him and his young family. Dan recalls that when he first got the job, he and Tal were living in Israel. “We had no money. We bought two one-way tickets to America. We had no credit history in the U.S., couldn’t rent, couldn’t buy.” As for most Hackley faculty, the cost of living in Westchester was prohibitive. “And then Phil Variano called and said Hackley had an apartment for us,” Dan says. “It made life...possible for us.”

Dan and Tal’s two little boys learned to walk doing laps around the Upper School corridors after dinner on campus, trailed by Dan. The family now lives on campus in Allen’s Alley, where the boys have a community of faculty children their age with whom they play—running around outdoors and in and out of each other’s homes. Having been the nomad, growing up in cities, Dan reflects, “I never thought I’d be this suburban dad.” Always the STEM guy, though, he found a way to inspire natural wonder in his students right here on campus, bringing them down to Allen’s Alley to conduct a tasty scientific experiment—tapping the maple trees behind his house, boiling the sap down to syrup in the classroom, and then eating waffles with syrup in class to see how their syrup compared with the Stop & Shop brand.

Dan laughs, “The classroom smelled like caramel popcorn for three days.”