Tag: learning

Challenge the borders of your thinking

Creativity, LearningPublished onUpdated on1 Comment on Challenge the borders of your thinking

I know that a network map of the brain is a thing. I wonder if there is a way you could map your conceptual understanding beyond a simple mind map.

Stick with me as I explore this idea of a “map of our thinking” out loud, it has been something I have long pondered and used in discussions with others. I would primarily refer to it when talking about how provocation changes our thinking.

  • Say we could create a spatial representation of what we know about a topic.
  • It might take up a certain area and have borders.
  • It might be something we can draw.
  • Perhaps there are neighbouring relevant topics.
  • Let’s say the size is relative to our understanding, the bigger the area the more we understand about that topic.
  • We might also be able to quantify the amount of knowledge there is for any given topic, leading to a point of reference of what potential understanding there still is to discover.
  • This map is not necessarily about the connections like a mind map, but more about the aggregate “space” the discovered or known concepts take up.
  • There would be an edge. A thinking border.
  • There would be unknown territory still to be discovered.

So what happens when the borders change.

I have always wondered about the power of using provocation to challenge our thinking. To challenge the borders of what we know. I imagine a provocation being something like a newly discovered perspective on an issue or a series of facts previously not seen. All manner of things can serve as a provocation. They would break that thinking border and create a new space on the map, forcing us to draw a new edge of our thinking. That newly identified space and albeit uncharted thinking would then need some exploring, some thinking and processing. But it would soon be subsumed within the wider map of what we know about that topic.

De Bono refers to how provocations can create movement in our thinking if they are used to challenge a set of ideas. Perhaps the borders of our conceptual understanding become equally fluid when we are faced with different provocations. Perhaps those borders shift and expand, contract and become redrawn as we continue to learn.

You Should Design Learning to Privilege Experience Over Analysis

LearningPublished onUpdated on3 Comments on You Should Design Learning to Privilege Experience Over Analysis

In many ways this is a pre-cursor to some future posts about empathy. Imagine it is like a supply mission ahead of the main mission.[1]

I have long been interested in shining a light on the emotional journey of learning. At the centre stands the need for greater understanding and development of empathy. This challenge is meant on many levels, including the design of learning and the overall ambition and vision a school has.

I came across this recent piece[2] about the development of policy related to climate change. The paper is an effort to put research about human psychology into action when it comes to new policy creation. The first issue it raises squarely references the need for us to pay better attention to the way we engage others:

The Human Brain Privileges Experience Over Analysis…In short, how we feel about a given situation often has a potent influence on our decisions about how to respond (Slovic & Peters, 2006)[3].

Of course the context here is slightly different, however the same psychological findings are true when we consider the design of learning. Experiential learning is one well worn path to more engaged learners. However learner design for greater empathy is typically not.

What does this actually mean for the way I design learning?

We should continue to design learning so that it can be, “translated into relatable and concrete personal experiences.” This is that well worn path I mentioned. Increasing the empathy quotient in your class is a different ask, often changing as a result of what we just discussed. Design and co-construct periods of learning that your students connect deeply with. The research tells us that we humans will filter for those personal connections and remain much more engaged once we do. We need to turn up the dial of activities that develop the skill of empathy through relatable and concrete personal experiences.

You never really know a man until you understand things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.[4]

  1. I have been reading The Martian.  ↩
  2. van der Linden, Sander, Edward Maibach, and Anthony Leiserowitz. “Improving Public Engagement With Climate Change Five “Best Practice” Insights From Psychological Science.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 10.6 (2015): 758–763.  ↩
  3. The full reference from the paper: Slovic P., Peters E. (2006). Risk perception and affect. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15, 322–325  ↩
  4. Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1960  ↩

6 Emotional Barriers to Generating Ideas and How to Overcome Them

LearningPublished on13 Comments on 6 Emotional Barriers to Generating Ideas and How to Overcome Them

So it would seem that I have stumbled on to a little running theme in the last few blog posts about coming up with ideas. No reason to kick that habit just yet as it is one of the most intriguing of subjects. In this post I want to share some of the emotional barriers to idea generation.

In one of my favourite books: Conceptual Blockbusting, James Adams[1] outlines a range of these emotional blocks to the creative process. Behaviours and habits that can stultify our efforts.

  1. A fear to make mistakes, to fail, to risk.
  2. Preference for judging ideas rather than generating them.
  3. No tolerance for ambiguity or chaos.
  4. A lack of challenge – not engaging enough.
  5. Excessive zeal – too much speed, pace and haste.[2]
  6. An inability to relax and to incubate ideas.

Which ones do you recognise in your colleagues or students, or even sometimes in your own behaviour?

emoblocks

Most of these are of course directly linked. For example when you have a low tolerance for any sort of uncertainty you are risk averse and have a heightened fear of making mistakes. If there is too much pace, either by design or by accident, then you are less likely to relax and incubate ideas. None of these descriptions are ideal for the idea generation process. None of these are ideal for creative learning.

Let’s flip them around so that they become positive descriptions of a learning environment and see how they sound.

  1. “Make excellent mistakes.”[3]
  2. Nurture nascent ideas.
  3. Encourage uncertainty and ambiguity.
  4. Develop the mindset needed for idea generation.
  5. Provide a real, challenging and engaging purpose or context.
  6. Provide the time and space for learners to incubate their ideas.[4]:

reverseblocks

They sound like some useful guidelines to stick to. Again they have the same causal links as before. The mindset of idea generation is divergent = increasing ambiguity = the chance to make a better type of mistake. Slow the pace down = increased opportunity to ponder and cogitate a little. You get the idea.

A big take away here is that much of this is bound by the explicit development of the mindset that is needed at this part of the process. This shouldn’t be something that is secret or assumed. Learning about and enacting the most appropriate mindset is crucial for successful idea generation. Divergent thinking all the way.[5]

Another interesting element is the importance of challenge. Adams refers to a lack of engagement that is caused by this, but it does not simply mean it is not hard enough. Challenge comes in different guises and a lack of engagement can also be caused by pseudo problems or fake scenarios that are meaningless to students. If it is not engaging enough idea generation will stall. Seek out real contexts to engage your students so that ideation is purposeful.

Let me know what you make of some of these barriers and our look at the positive side of the concepts too. It would be great to hear from you, learn about what resonates with you and what you recognise in your own practice or experience.

  1. Adams, James L., Conceptual Blockbusting, W.W.Norton & Company.13, (1976)  ↩

  2. “No! Unfortunate that you rushed to face him… that incomplete was your training.”  ↩

  3. Thanks to Daniel Pink for this useful imperative.  ↩

  4. I will spend some time in the future writing about the pace of the ideation process, in fact all of the creative process.  ↩

  5. You can read more about divergent thinking and the different thinking states, in my blog post: The Ebb and Flow between Divergent and Convergent Thinking.  ↩

This Simple Yet Wonderful Metaphor Will Steer You Towards Action

LearningPublished on38 Comments on This Simple Yet Wonderful Metaphor Will Steer You Towards Action

You will see over the next few months a range of posts about Legacy. The impact that children can have on the world around them is a topic that intrigues me. I will be sharing my emerging understanding of what Legacy means to me and the relevance to education and society more widely. I suppose this is the first of those posts.

Buckminster Fuller

Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American author and designer, architect and systems theorist. As an inventor and visionary he dedicated his life to making the world work for all of humanity. Something that is remarkable about his life was his staunch belief in the generalist approach. “Fuller did not limit himself to one field but worked as a ‘comprehensive anticipatory design scientist’ to solve global problems surrounding housing, shelter, transportation, education, energy, ecological destruction, and poverty.”

Creating silos in schools, through subjects or career pathways, is not likely to foster the thinkers we need. Fuller grappled with complex problems in a holistic manner. He chose to be interested in many areas of study encircling the problem. I always find stories of multidisciplinary teams or mindsets hugely encouraging. These are stories we need to pay more attention to in education.

Trimtab

During an interview for Playboy back in the early 1970s Fuller outlined a simple metaphor for the impact we can all have on the world.

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Elizabeth — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, “Call me Trim Tab.”

There is great ambition in these words, a message of hope that the individual within a system can make change. Fuller believed we can start with the self, to make changes and build momentum there. The ripples of our impact will soon happen.

I’m positive that what you do with yourself, just the little things you do yourself, these are the things that count. To be a real trim tab, you’ve got to start with yourself, and soon you’ll feel that low pressure, and suddenly things begin to work in a beautiful way.

Learning Legacy

This will form the basis of a longer post in the future, but it is worth mentioning here in the context of Fuller’s challenge for us all. I believe we need to spend more time considering the design of ambitious learning. To help the youngsters we work with develop the capacities aligned with Fuller’s metaphor. To design the opportunities in school for learners to push out against the world and maybe make it a little better.

In many ways this ambition is subdued by the knowledge that through learning we are developing the individual child. But it is the more outward looking, more ambitious holistic design of learning that maybe needs more attention.

What do you mean? I hear you ask. I suppose I think of the examples of school based work that I have been lucky enough to take a small part in over the last few years. Instead of just pretending to do a TEDx event, a primary school we worked with ran the first official event of its kind run by 7, 8 and 9 years olds. Instead of just creating new ideas for the Space Gallery at the British Science Museum one school invited the Education Officers to visit and pitched them.

The list goes on of little Trim Tabs in our schools.

Start Small

Where do you go from here? Learning projects or units of work do not always have the opportunity to have a vast, far reaching impact, so just remember it all begins with yourself.

  • As educators we can make small changes in how we think about learning.
  • We can consider how ambitious we have been in our design of learning.
  • We can foster a creative mindset that starts to believe in the impact we all can have – especially our students.
  • Whilst we might not be able to change the system, we can help our students see that little changes count.

Learning in Perpetual Beta

28 Days of Writing, Learning, MindsetPublished onUpdated on1 Comment on Learning in Perpetual Beta

 

For today’s post I thought I would explore a little more deeply the themes and overlapping thinking surrounding my previous post about a Mindset of Failing. In particular I’d like to unpack this concept that learning is and always should remain in perpetual beta.

It is actually a considerable challenge to get perspective on the completeness of our work with students. I am not referring to when projects end or when we have finished that piece of artwork with them – the year long (sometimes much longer) development of learning relationships is often hard to wrap ourselves around. Since leaving the classroom I have experienced quite finite projects that have a short timeline and stuff you have to get done. I still find this refreshing.

Perpetual Beta = Prototyping Disposition

vIn an earlier post this month I referred to the mindset we need to take towards the things we create and the way we learn. It is not just about junk modelling or computer aided design or 3D printing or physical building – a disposition towards prototyping means we:

  • Are committed to the expertise and ideas we might gain from others and don’t just simply rely on our own perspective.
  • Believe in the value of feedback and how critique can move our ideas forward.
  • Engineer as many opportunities for feedback as we can as, early as we can.
  • Are willing to share what we create when it is extremely, painfully incomplete.

When a piece of software is being developed it has various stages it goes through, depending on the scale of the product of course. Beta is a time for testing, as defined below:

Beta, named after the second letter of the Greek alphabet, is the software development phase following alpha. It generally begins when the software is feature complete. Software in the beta phase will generally have many more bugs in it than completed software, as well as speed/performance issues and may still cause crashes or data loss. The focus of beta testing is reducing impacts to users, often incorporating usability testing. The process of delivering a beta version to the users is called beta release and this is typically the first time that the software is available outside of the organization that developed it.

Perpetual beta is when this state is extended, sometimes indefinitely, a web service or software product remains in constant development with feedback and testing driving new feature releases. A product remains in perpetual beta.

What does learning in perpetual beta mean?

The links here with the way we think about learning and feedback in particular are quite strong. In my post about the Mindset of Failing I pondered on the mental resilience of tennis players compared to other athletes. Losing points is regular and failing is part of the back and forth of a tennis match, very different to other sports. The post was commented on by Pam Hernandez who remarked that:

This made me think about how we traditionally provide feedback on student learning which is not unlike the analogy to football. I’m thinking American football in this case and getting an A on assignment is much like scoring a touchdown. It’s not uncommon to see teachers use sports analogies and comment “Homerun” or “Touchdown” on good work. I like the idea of rewarding effort along the way and making it okay to make mistakes along the way and be rewarded for the learning. It’s a different mindset for parents, teachers and students. (Pam Hernandez)

And it is here that we have the biggest opportunity to shift the way people are thinking about failure and failing. It is no small feat mind you. There are cultural and ethical stances people have that influence their perception of mistakes and failure in learning. We need to help the whole learning community appreciate this positive prototyping disposition. Learning in perpetual beta is all about continuous improvement with an emphasis on engineering as many opportunities for feedback as we can.

Take a look through some of these other posts from my this blog about assessment and feedback and plan to take some action:

Pic: failure is cool by Steffi Reichert