During November, we explore four mental models related to transformation and change. By the end of this month, you will have strengthened your innovator’s toolkit with these new principles and ideas. Today we look at the map is not the territory.
In this post, I share some guiding assessment questions and provocations about the value system that education is built on.
There is also a 10-page workbook to download to support your reflection and action planning on assessment and the impact you have on students.
The Most Complicated Object in the Universe
My teaching journey started when I was studying psychology. I chose teaching because of formative experiences in 1995 when studying how we think, develop and learn. Learning elements of developmental psychology was a catalyst to my career.
[sharable-quote tweet=”The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10,000 other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe. ~ Michio Kaku “]
The brain seemed an incredible mystery we were all attempting to unravel. As you reflect on your assessment practices, keep that complexity in your mind.
The Draw-a-person Assessment
The drawing test was devised in 1926 by Florence Goodenough, a psychologist from the University of Minnesota. It was developed as “a new approach to measuring young children’s intelligence, ” as her paper is titled.
Children have ten minutes to draw a person, and the results are scored according to strict guidelines. Goodenough argued the drawings were a proxy for intellectual development.
I recall conducting the Draw-a-person test with children at a local primary school or nursery. Deciphering the mark-making and the developmental cues was fascinating.
[sharable-quote tweet=”Teaching is at the intersection between an enduring mystery and a social imperative.” template=”dark”]
Stay Curious About Assessment and Learning
My interest in developmental psychology waned after years in the teaching profession. That is strange to write, as you might expect one to multiply the other.
Perhaps the mystery was overwhelming. Or the distractions incumbent to the teaching profession got in the way. Maybe it was the shiny gloss of technology?
Looking back on my teaching, I wish I had stayed curious for longer about the mysteries of how we learn and assessment questions.
First Principles Questions
Nowadays, I am motivated by the provocation and utility of first principles thinking. A mental model I would take back to 1998 and offer to myself.
We can all find great clarity from the fundamental truths and principles of what we might be exploring. To use first principles, ask questions like these:
What are the enduring truths about building positive relationships?
What are the first principles of a community?
And the central question:
What are the fundamental truths about learning?
Making Sense of What Works
The Draw-a-person test is an interesting exhibit in the story of how teaching is changing. Although widely used, it was also critiqued and fell out of favour as a measure of intellectual development.
I put this down to the scale of the mystery of our brain.
It may have fallen out of favour due to what I call the solution shard effect. This effect occurs when we explain part of a grand mystery.
To begin with, we present a possible truth – a solution shard (fragment). It is not the complete answer, and questions may remain. A part of the truth is presented and explored, and challenged.
However, when this fragment is refuted, it impacts the established elements of truth around it. The second-order effect is a ripple of doubt.
How does this relate to education?
The complexity of how we learn and what teaching should look like can be overwhelming. What we thought worked is no longer valid. Practices that were in favour and widely adopted now languish on the pseudo-science scrap heap.
You might reflect on some of these assessment questions
How do I distinguish what works for my students?
How can I possibly control so many different aspects of the learning experience?
The experience with my students is contrary to the research I have read; what does that mean?
[sharable-quote tweet=”If we solve in silos, there is the potential of adding more fragments to decipher, more heuristics to navigate and more contradictory options of what works.” template=”quote”]
In a way, the confusion, uncertainty and part-truths are not surprising. Teaching is at the intersection between an enduring mystery and a social imperative.
A further aspect of Florence Goodenough’s work that is relevant today is the need for broader measures of success and better assessment questions. She asked children to draw as a way of expressing their intelligence and development. It wasn’t just a number.
Jonah Lehrer explains in his article about Goodenough’s test:
there are countless ways to measure human intelligence, whatever that is. We’ve settled on a particular concept of intelligence defined by a short list of measurable mental talents. (Modern IQ tests tend to focus on abilities such as mental control, processing speed and quantitative reasoning.) But Goodenough’s tool is proof that the mystery of smarts has no single solution. The IQ test could have been a drawing test.
Even in the 1920s, Goodenough attempted to develop better assessment questions and methods for understanding young children’s growth and development. Although an enduring mystery, a century later, a growing number of educators, schools and systems are asking, “is there a better way to measure success?”
The challenge of figuring this out at a student and system level is significant. Again, if we solve in silos, there is the potential of adding more fragments to decipher, more heuristics to navigate and more contradictory options of what works.
Trainee Teachers
Imagine for a moment the experience of new trainee teachers. Do we want that experience to be coherent and clear of the swirling mix of ideas? Or is better teaching practice forged from seeking a pathway through the mire?
We need leadership from research organisations, schools and education systems. An example of this is the New Metrics for Success project from Melbourne University.
a collaborative research venture between The University of Melbourne and selected forward-thinking schools to work in partnership to address the meta-problems faced by Australian schools today and in the future.
I wonder what peer projects link to this work from Melbourne University that exists worldwide?
Your Assessment Questions and Talking Points
To support your thinking and dialogue, return to the question of “What are the fundamental truths about learning?”.
Five guiding assessment questions and provocations
Here are five key guiding questions and provocations to frame your next step:
What are the fundamental truths about learning that we know work here (in your context)?
For this student, what am I doing that is making the biggest difference to their learning growth?
What is one truth about learning that I don’t currently do frequently enough?
From the strategies I have tried, what are the patterns of impact and change?
How can I collaborate on “the truth for us”, the fundamental components of learning design?
Download my 10-page workbook to reflect on these assessment questions, plus 30 more provocations about assessment and new measures of success. Explore the provocations and consider some action planning to improve your teaching.
Right off the bat I just want to say, that this post will likely pose more questions than give you solid answers. In many ways though pursuing those questions on creativity and pondering on what they mean in our schools is a worthy call to action in itself.
Fascinated by anything related to the research on creativity, I stumbled on this post from Fast Company about some of the pointers we can get from science.
Admittedly there is some good stuff there amongst the usual mix of “daydreaming and trying new things is good”. What struck me was the parting shot about the resistance to unconventional ideas and the public reaction to non-conformist concepts.
Some of the best ideas are widely ridiculed before they’re revered.
My radar for this sort of stuff is heightened as I recently wrote about the bias against creative ideas we might hold if we are feeling high levels of uncertainty. Creativity bias as a real thing.
The article elaborated further, but started to stray to a slightly different path to close:
Research suggests that whatever nonconformist tendencies we may have as children are often driven out of us by the rote learning and direct instruction utilized in schools, which may counteract our more exploratory and creative modes of thinking and learning.
We are on different track now. These last comments are about the characteristics of those who are creative — not the ideas themselves. It also, obviously, draws in the impact of how we learn and the environmental influence of school — not the ideas themselves.
A final reference to the resistance to those “creative types” points the finger at teachers: “teachers have been found to display a clear preference for students who show less creativity.”
Which led me to a stream of questions:
How strong was the influence of school on how creative we are at school?
What long term impact does school have on our levels of creativity?
How can teacher education help deepen the understanding around what creativity is and how it might manifest in the classroom?
How creative is the teaching profession?
What are the ideal conditions in school for creativity to flourish?
The body of research referred to here does indeed reveal that:
One of the most consistent findings in educational research into creativity has been that teachers dislike personality traits associated with creativity. Research has indicated that teachers prefer traits that seem to run counter to creativity, such as conformity and unquestioning acceptance of authority.
The commentary on this sort of research points to the futility of the alternative. Suggesting that if we did have a group of 30 young expressive, creative thinkers it would be some version of chaos.
This (preference for non-creative students) shouldn’t be too surprising: Would you really want a little Picasso in your class? How about a baby Gertrude Stein? Or a teenage Eminem? The point is that the classroom isn’t designed for impulsive expression — that’s called talking out of turn. Instead, it’s all about obeying group dynamics and exerting focused attention. Those are important life skills, of course, but decades of psychological research suggest that such skills have little to do with creativity.
Just to answer the questions posed here: yes, yes and absolutely yes.
For me this all points to the education system and not the individual teacher who has become a product of that system.
Compliance and conformity only gets us so far and they certainly don’t rank highly in environments that encourage creativity and innovation.
I recently re-discovered and re-read this lovely essay on creativity by Issac Asimov, in which he suggests some ideas for creating the conditions for others to generate ideas which I have paraphrased below:
Daring cross-connection
Free of responsibility
Thoroughly relaxed
Deep knowledge
Discussing something of interest
Being by nature unconventional
Take a moment to consider each of these in relation to “school” and places of learning.
We suffer the fallout and collateral damage from too heavy a focus on explicit teaching, direct instruction, conformity and compliance, let’s throw in high stakes assessment whilst we are at it.
That damage is the marginalisation of the conditions for children to be strongly creative little souls and the conditions for innovative teaching.
In what ways might we expand these conditions from the margins? How might we establish a common understanding of the key environmental and cultural conditions for innovation and creativity? In what ways might we learn about creativity and use that to inform our teaching practice?
Dave Binks, a headteacher you would happily call a leader, was one of the first principals I worked with. He gave me the space and time to enjoy my teaching, to innovate and explore the untrodden path. To take risks and to fail.
Many years later I moved on and became a deputy headteacher myself and I really struggled. I had some of the hardest most challenging times in my working life. I struggled to find that balance between management and teaching and was having to compromise the quality of what I was doing – just to get it done!
I didn’t have access to the knowledge and ideas I needed in those moments when I needed it the most. How I wished I could have browsed Dave’s brain.
A Lack of Knowledge Urgency
We have a lack of knowledge urgency in our profession – we don’t feel the sting of wasted ideas or the importance of capturing and sharing our knowledge and experience, it simply is not in the front of our minds. There are over 430,000 teachers in the UK and in Australia just over 250,000 according to 2011 figures. But only a tiny fraction share ideas using Twitter.
On average in England over the last 25 years there have been around 15,000 teachers retiring from the profession every year. People like Dave who take their expertise and skill with them. That equates to nearly 525,000 years worth of teaching experience laying quiet and dormant on the back 9 of golf courses and between the aisles of garden centres. This saddens me.
This great body of latent knowledge going missing, but also the lack of urgency from current teachers to capture and share what they know. Let me give you an example of what I mean by knowledge urgency:
In 1972 the Imperial War Museum established the Department for Sound Records and began in earnest to archive and collate oral histories of those involved in conflicts and especially those involved in the First and Second world wars. It is a striking and extensive archive of over 56,000 hours worth of historical records. The urgency to capture this knowledge is clearly linked to the passing of the generations involved.
These pieces of knowledge are lengthy to produce and take time and deep thought to capture. Social technology has begun to reshape the timeframe needed to share our expertise all we need is a simple device and we can tweet and blog our experiences on the go.
Ross Selkirk Taylor was a British Army driver during the second world war and his pocket diary was his record of his experiences. Since then his grandson has begun tweeting his written diary entries, but in 1940 they were private to him and had no immediate impact on those around him. The postal service was often the sole means with which to share his experiences whilst away from home and that was heavily censored. The ranks of other army drivers could not learn from his published experiences and connect with him to learn. (Despite some hunting the original @DriverRoss account is no longer active.)
Twitter perfectly encapsulates the fragmentation of our knowledge and I think it has a direct impact on the frequency of sharing – the likelihood that people, teachers, openly share an idea or publish their thinking is increased if the scale is smaller.
Share What You Know
As teachers we need to be more open about our work and quickly realise that the whole profession can benefit from our collective expertise – we mustn’t become silos of knowledge ourselves. Nor do we want our knowledge and experience, our stories and ideas to lie dormant, our knowledge needs to live on and impact those around us, to be contextual and be flexible enough to improve the lives of as many people we can.
The phrase “Pearls of wisdom” is often attributed to this poem by James Russell Lowell.
These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred, Each softly lucent as a rounded moon; The diver Omar plucked them from their bed, Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.
I love the delicate description of the pearls of thought – “softly lucent as a rounded moon” – we need to ensure we treasure the jewels of knowledge we have – and continue to pluck them from their seabed and do more to share them with other teachers, display and publish them, string them on threads, and help everyone bathe in their moonlit glow.
I can still remember the excitement and noise behind me to this day. I was collecting my class of 32 Year 5 and 6 children from a morning break time during a rather charcoal-streaked-sky day in November. English Novembers are full of Autumnal colours and damp weather, this day was turning into just that, typical of that time of the year.
Perhaps the clamouring and excited voices were about the engaging lesson I had planned? Perhaps they were simply excited about learning with me? Maybe just pleased to see me? In all honesty I didn’t ask any of these questions, because I knew straight away what it was.
The morning had been great so far, I always decided to take each session as it comes but the day had started well. There was even some sunshine casting strained shadows across the car park as I arrived. The morning’s literacy session had been fun and we were enjoying the Shaun Tan work we had been exploring. Assembly, tick. Then break.
Those strained lengths of light that welcomed me to school had gone. Replaced with that charcoal sky. Something else I noticed was how wind had picked up, swirling in amongst the school buildings. The usual twisting leaf and crisp packet flurry buffeted against the Year 2 classrooms as the children went outside. I knew what was in store. I had seen this before and I knew my class.
A quick change of ends and resources prep for the next session, punctuated with a slurp of terrible coffee and I was ready to kick off again. Walking up the slope towards the waiting lines in the top playground I realised my predictions were happening as I suspected. The wind had changed everything and my class were completely different from when i had last seen them.
The calm start to the day had been replaced with exuberance and hyper-excited voices behind me as I led my class back towards the buildings. My mind began whirring as I knew that whatever I had planned needed changing, adapting. I always marvelled at how a change of weather could have such an effect on your class, something I learned the hard way back in my first year of teaching at university. Before everyone had a chance to wipe their feet I was set.
