Geophysicist Philip Heron is on a mission to share the benefits of critical thinking through his program Think Like a Scientist, which he pioneered in the U.K. and has now brought to Canada, teaching the seven-week course not just in schools but surprisingly in prisons where it has been truly life-changing for participants. Dalton Harrison, who attended the first prison session, is now completing a master’s degree in criminology and says the program changed his life when Heron contacted him after release to give a talk at Durham University, standing in front of that lecture hall in a life he never dreamed was possible and making him want to continue in academia. Heron, who teaches at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus as his day job and runs the program during summers at Canadian prisons, designed Think Like a Scientist to teach the scientific method to people who don’t necessarily see themselves as students of science, focusing particularly on those who have been incarcerated. One of his key aims is helping people understand that failure in life, as in science, can be a pathway to success, teaching that scientists fail so often it’s commonplace and that we don’t just fail and stop but fail and move forward.
Heron deliberately avoids structuring his program like a traditional classroom because many people in prison have had negative experiences with traditional education methods due to learning differences, race, gender, class, or neurodiversity, instead encouraging conversation about topics like climate change, earthquakes, robotics, space missions, and the science of sleep. In his curriculum about space exploration, Heron shares a quote from Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques about managing mental health in space when conflict arises and there’s nowhere to go and you’re far from people you love, which makes the entire room respond that it’s just like prison and joke that they could be astronauts. Former student Phoenix Griffin, now out of prison and in her third year of university, says the biggest thing she took away was confidence to try new things and a new way of thinking where you learn from mistakes so getting it wrong is fine. The program proves that when you teach people to think like scientists and embrace failure as part of the process, you open new possibilities that can literally transform lives from incarceration to academic careers.
