Fostering a dispositional perspective of curiosity

When we are young, we are naturally curious. We ask many, many questions. As we encounter the world, our consciousness is bombarded by a plethora of opportunities for curiosity. And at this early stage of exploring and discovering the world we inhabit, there is no filter between our sense of curiosity and our expression of it. If we are curious, we will be asking questions and heaven help anyone close enough to be a potential source of answers.

Harvard’s Project Zero asks us to consider a triadic-model of dispositions where there is the required capacity, the necessary motivation and a sensitivity to the utility of a particular set of behaviours. When all three are present, we can say that the individual has a disposition towards behaviour of a particular nature. In the case of our curious youth, we see evidence of a sensitivity to curiosity and a motivation towards actions that appease their curiosity; however, there is an ill-formed capability for effective actions in response to their wonderings.

Traditionally, good thinking has been defined as a matter of cognitive ability or skill. Hence the term, "thinking skills." Certainly, good thinkers have skills. But they also have more. Passions, attitudes, values, and habits of mind all play key roles in thinking, and, in large part, it is these elements that determine whether learners use their thinking skills when it counts. In short, good thinkers have the right "thinking dispositions." - Project Zero - Patterns of Thinking

When we are young, our capacity to take actions to satisfy our sense of curiosity is limited. We can ask questions, but we cannot yet devise a plan of our own to find an answer. Nor are we adept at framing our questions in ways that move us towards a fruitful inquiry. At this stage in our learning journey, we rely upon others to do the work of inquiry for us. Our sense of curiosity gives us the motivation to be inquisitive, but we lack the capability to act upon this.

How others respond to our youthful expressions of curiosity can have significant consequences for how we engage in inquiry as we mature. When we are handed an answer, our sense of curiosity is appeased, to a degree, but our desire to inquire, explore and question is not. This is why the follow-up response to a perfectly complete answer is likely to be “but why?”. By asking “why?” we are revealing not only our curiosity for the particular object or phenomena that is the subject of our inquiry but also a desire to engage with the processes of inquiry as we imagine them to be. Asking questions becomes a goal in itself when we are young. Our propensity to ask questions is likely to invoke frustration from those who become the target of our curiosity. It is not surprising then that the objective of the unfortunate adult is a rapid termination of our inquiry rather than a quest to expand and extend our line of thought. The net result is that we develop a belief that curiosity results in questions that have a correct answer and that inquiry involves asking these, mostly closed, questions to the right adult who might provide us with that single correct answer.

As we get older, our capacity to find answers of our own is increasing. We can be curious and act upon it. Inquiry becomes something we do in response to our sense of curiosity. Curiosity is the catalyst for inquiry, and our expanding capacity to inquire enables us to become constructors of knowledge. Knowledge transforms from something that we are given by others to become something that we can create. We incorporate inquiry into our patterns of play. We devise experiments, investigate, look closely, sniff things, taste things (often things we shouldn’t) and explore. All of this culminates with us theorising about why the world is the way it is, and although our conclusions are often false, they are ours. Inquiry is something we do because it satisfies a powerful desire to not only know but to construct knowledge and achieve an understanding. We retain our motivation for curiosity and our sensitivity to its utility and our capacity to engage in inquiry as a response to our curiosity is developing even if it lacks any formal structures that might lead us to defensible conclusions.

As we grow, our sense of curiosity is filtered. We continue to encounter many things that we wonder about, but some connect with ideas or concepts that we have an intense interest in and others do not. At the same time, we begin to recognise that there are things that can lead to an engaging inquiry and things that do not. Our capacity and our desire to inquire become additional filters for what sparks our curiosity.

At school, our relationship to both curiosity and inquiry changes. Choices that were once ours are now made by someone else. What we are expected to inquire about is chosen for us. The topics of our investigations, experimentations and wonderings are dictated by the pages of a curriculum that we have no say in. We are taught how to inquire, how to question and how to communicate our results. We learn again that there are right answers and wrong answers. If we return to our triadic model, we see that our capacity for inquiry has been expanded as we added new skills and methods, but our motivation and sensitivity towards curiosity has declined. Inquiry becomes an item on our timetable rather than a self-initiated response to our sense of curiosity. We should not be surprised then that we lose our sensitivity to opportunities for inquisitive exploration along with our motivation for the same.

In times of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, our capacity to deal with the unknown becomes increasingly critical. The traditional model of schooling might, if successful, encourage a desire in some students to become consumers of knowledge. Where knowledge is certain, models of schooling that focus on the transfer of content might be valid. Where knowledge is uncertain, an inquisitive, curious disposition is paramount. We need not only the skills to know what to do when we don't know what to do but also a sensitivity to such times and the motivation to respond appropriately. As Webb & Kirby share "Having additional opportunities to ‘not-know’ becomes a mode of being open, attentive and prepared to respond, and offers possibilities for children to shift into ‘being’ participants rather than simply recipients of adult-generated knowledge." (Web & Kirby - Covid-19 and schooling for uncertainty)

The trend here is a move away from agentic curiosity towards performative inquiry. Where once we engaged in inquiry as an expression of our sense curiosity and agency, we now perform the processes of inquiry on cue. In place of inquiry as exploration of our wonderings and path to our construction of knowledge, it becomes an act of compliance scripted others. This pattern of declining agency extends to learning in general as both the content and means of learning are increasingly managed for us.

In a recent webinar, David Perkins reminded his audience that learning should be about more than the transfer of knowledge. Our learning journeys should include time for our self-initiated exploration of questions and wonderings that stir our hearts. Learning that matters includes room for what inspires us, what intrigues us and makes us wonder how can that be and what might be if. More than a foundation for the practicalities of life, education should develop our capacity and motivation to transform our sense of curiosity into action. In this way, we are learning how to wonder and what to do with our wonderings. We are developing a disposition towards curiosity where we have the capacity to wonder about our world, a sensitivity for the opportunity for wondering and the motivation to not only wonder but to act towards the satisfaction of our curiosity.

For schools, the challenge is to do more than teach our students how to construct an inquiry in response to the curriculum mandates. If we teach our children the mechanics of inquiry but fail to connect the dots between these new skills and the learner’s sense of curiosity, we have failed. Suppose we encourage our children to be curious problem seekers, sensitive to opportunities for wonderment and empower them with the capacity to design and implement purposeful inquiries. In that case, we might also ignite a passion for lifelong learning.

By Nigel Coutts

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Moving beyond doing inquiry towards embracing an inquiry stance.

Conduct a search using your favourite search engine, and you will find a plethora of sites offering their unique take on Inquiry-Based Learning. Each will describe their philosophical basis, the benefits of a constructivist approach and subsequent pedagogical moves. The unique element posed by each will be the labels attached to steps students are to take as they engage in the inquiry approach. You will find flowcharts, diagrams and a range of mnemonics to ensure that students apply the prescribed recipe as it should be. This richness of options can be overwhelming, and teachers and schools could spend a great deal of time debating the merits of each. But is this time well spent or might our efforts be best placed elsewhere?

Having a model of inquiry that makes sense to a school’s broader context makes sense. If staff own the process and believe in its merits, it is likely to have a more enduring impact. If the language used when discussing the inquiry process aligns with other language moves made across the learning environment, then students will benefit from the consistency of approach. What is more important than the model of inquiry deployed, however, is the mindset or stance taken by teachers towards inquiry.

When we first explore an inquiry approach, there will likely be times when our students are doing inquiry. We plan a project that employs an inquiry cycle. Our students are rigorously introduced to the steps and then march through the process in lockstep fashion. Once the inquiry is done, we assess the content that students have absorbed and then move on to the next unit. Doing inquiry in this way is a nice way to start a journey towards inquiry-based learning, but if we stick with this sort of inquiry by numbers approach, we will miss out on the true benefits.

But, when we adopt an inquiry stance towards learning, we start to see things differently. Taking an inquiry stance towards learning involves a shift in mindset and practice for both student and teacher. It allows us to move beyond doing inquiry towards being inquisitive.

In many ways for our students, adopting an inquiry mindset involves a reigniting the sense of curiosity and wonder that was the norm in their pre-school learning. The student who has embraced an inquisitive stance will want to know why things are the way they are. They will need to understand why that mathematical equation works, why those chemicals react as they do and how those historical moments connect. They will question knowledge with healthy scepticism. The inquisitive student will want to understand not only what they are learning, but how they learn. They will be reflective, self-navigating practitioners who are deliberately metacognitive.

The teacher who embraces an inquiry stance will do much more than teach through an inquiry method. Yes, they will create opportunities for their students to engage in inquiry, and they will teach and scaffold these inquiries as required. But, the inquiry stance will be evident in everything they do. Their inquisitive stance will be apparent in the way they observe their learners in the act of learning. They will create opportunities to be researchers of their students and will want to understand how their students’ skills knowledge and dispositions are developing. They will ask questions about the curriculum and seek opportunities to broaden their understanding of what they are teaching and why. They will seek to make visible the impact that their pedagogy is having, interrogate the language moves they make and analyse the learning opportunities they create. They will seek feedback from their students and peers, knowing that this will enable them to better understand how they might grow.

Adopting an inquiry-based approach can bring engaging opportunities to a lesson, but embracing an inquiry stance can enhance every learning moment.

By Nigel Coutts

The Power of Making Thinking Visible with Ron Ritchhart & Mark Church

On Saturday PZ Sydney Network hosted Ron Ritchhart and Mark Church for a conversation about their new book, “The Power of Making Thinking Visible”. What follows is a summary of some of the key messages from this conversation. You can watch the whole conversation above. For more learning opportunities like this visit the PZ Sydney Network or follow @pzsydnetwork on Twitter.

Making Thinking Visible is a stance, not just a set of routines. The books evolved from noticing the actions teachers take as a consequence of their stance on thinking. Teachers who value thinking, who push for thinking from their students were noticed to make particular teaching moves on a routine basis. These moves were a reflection of their stance, the tangible evidence that thinking was valued and nurtured. As we think about the culture of our classroom we should consider the nature of our stance. Do we routinely send a message that we value thinking? Are the messages consistent with our stated stance and would others recognise our purported stance in the teaching moves we make?

Key Question 1 - What kind of thinking is necessary in this situation? How do we backwards engineer the scaffolds which will support the thinking that students are noted to require for success in their learning. 

Key Question 2 - What are the thinking moves that we want to grow our students into to empower them as thinkers. 

Making thinking Visible requires a decision making process. It is a process that takes us beyond randomly selecting a thinking routine and hoping it might have the desired impact. It takes us beyond conversations about what content we are going to teach or what activities our students will do. It brings to our planning process a deliberate attention to the thinking moves we want to make routine for our students. It looks something like this:

• What thinking do I hope to make routine here? 

• Why that thinking in this context? 

• How might I support my students to make this thinking move? 

• How do I make this thinking move routine?

• How do I empower my students to make this move routinely?

Thinking routines are the tools and the structures which make the thinking we desire possible. Thinking routines make visible and concrete the things that good students are doing automatically. For example, good readers are already making connections as they read; connections within the text and connections beyond the text. When we use thinking routines we make the use of such skills explicit, we are naming and noticing effective practices and encouraging others to do the same. The thinking moves evolved from a process of noticing and naming the types of thinking that effective learners were already doing. Once we identify these moves we can consider how we bring these into the realm of our teaching. If I know good readers make connections, how might I make this thinking move accessible to all my students and how might I refine and strengthen this move even for those who are already making it.

We are more likely to focus on thinking when we consider the BIG Ideas that we want our student to grapple with rather than focusing on the content. It is easy to make plans for how we will deliver content, but when we ponder BIG Ideas we are encouraged to consider what thinking moves are required to make sense of these.

If I don’t consider the type of thinking that I want my students to engage in, it is easier to develop activities that do not require thinking. If we believe all learning is a consequence of thinking, we need to also identify the type of thinking that we want our students to understand. 

Key Question 3 - What do I want my students to understand? What type of thinking does this understanding require?

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The Power of Documentation

Documentation is a teaching strategy that emerges from the Reggio Emilia approach. In this the teacher makes time and space to notice and document the learning that is occurring in their classrooms. This documentation acts as a catalyst for elective practice with the teacher constantly asking questions about their learners progress and the impact of their choices on this learning. The documentation is as much a part of the future learning of the students as it is about recording what has occurred. We use documentation to give agency or ownership of the learning to the learner, not to record evidence of learning or the absence there of in a spreadsheet. With this in mind, Visible Thinking builds on this as it connects to the teachers’s stance towards thinking. The following questions might be asked to guide this process:

• What do we need to note in this moment so it doesn’t get lost, so we can have a ’to be continued moment’? 

• How might we use documentation to capture where we have been and where we are going.?

And on a personal and collective level documentation and the process of capturing evidence of our thinking support distributed intelligence. The notion of distributed intelligence is that our thinking process can be extended beyond our brains through our use of tools such as drawing, writing and other modes of capturing our thoughts. Our processes of documenting our thinking by other means such as these reduces our cognitive load and allows us to make better use of our cognitive resources.

A Vital Understanding - Thinking routines are not going to elevate the quality of weak or low order content. Deep thinking requires rich content. Content that requires the learner to grapple with complexity and ambiguity when married with the right thinking routine takes the learning deeper.

And linked to this - The routine is only as powerful as one’s purpose. If our purpose is to get the routine done or to do a routine, we lose any power that it might have. 

SO. . . Don’t abandon your use of a routine because it didn’t work. Explore why. Was it that you were not clear on its purpose? Was it paired with content that demanded thinking? Did you give it the time it required? Did students understand your intent? Might the routine need to be used multiple times so that it becomes routine?

A Routine that encourage deep thinking when paired with the right content  . . .

The Three Whys and the Four Ifs?

• Why does this issue matter to me? 

• Why does this issue matter to my community? 

• Why does this issue matter to the world?

  • If I took this issue seriously . . . what might the consequence be?

  • If my community took this issue seriously . . . what might the consequence be?

  • If the world took this issue seriously . . . what might the consequence be?

  • If I do noting what might the consequence be?

Key Question 4 - How do we open minds to the thinking routines? - If we think about the routine and its match to our learning environment, we may be drawn away from a particular routine because we don’t imagine it fits our learners or our context. We may think it doesn’t suit our discipline or learners of the age we teach. But, when we begin by considering the thinking moves, we can see their relevance. As an example; Colour, Symbol, Image may not seem to fit inside a chemistry lab, but one of the thinking moves it supports, ‘synthesising’, probably does. If we want our students to synthesise their ideas, we might scaffold this with Colour, Symbol, Image. 

The danger of turning Watering Holes into Campfires - Our use of thinking routines should create spectacular opportunities for collaborative learning conversations with and between our students. Their use creates a metaphorical “Watering Hole” where many minds come together to share ideas. At the watering hole, no voice is dominant. Contrast this with the metaphor of the “Campfire”. Again we have a gathering of minds, but here there is a dominant speaker or presenter. These metaphorical spaces have evolved from a range of thinkers who examined a mix of spaces which occur across learning environments. Watering Holes, where all members of a community share ideas, Campfires, where one or two people share information with a group, and Cave Spaces, where we work and learn independently all have value. The message here is to not transform what we had planned as a watering hole into a campfire by allowing our teacher voice to dominate or shape the thinking. 

A final note of caution - Consider "The unwitting undermining I do in my own classroom”. Try to identify the actions you take which undermine your intent to encourage, empower and foster thinking. Look for the actions you inadvertently send which are counter to the messaging you hope to be sending your learners.  

With greatest thanks to Ron Ritchhart and Mark Church. for the inspiration.

By Nigel Coutts

Are we there yet? Are we there?

Originally published in Connect Magazine

This much-maligned question seems so appropriate for education's recent history. All that was normal, everything that was routine, all of our structures, have been turned upside down and hurled into the wind of COVID19. From having spoken of a future dominated by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA), we have found ourselves living in it. Innovation and creativity became the new normal as we "Apollo 13" schooling into a model that met the demands of emergency remote learning. The pressure, the workload, the demands on our time and the cognitive load have all been immense, and so it seems fitting to ask "Are we there yet?". 

And, just when we think we are getting our heads around this remote learning business, things are changing again. We are going back into face-to-face teaching, albeit under conditions dominated by social distancing, temperature checks and personal protective equipment. Another new normal is on the horizon. But, as Winston Churchill might have stated, this is not the end, this is not the beginning of the end, it might be the end of the beginning, we just don't know. VUCA continues to dominate, and these are indeed post-normal times. 

Amidst all our current scrambling, particular patterns have emerged. In the absence of face-to-face dialogue with students, aspects of teaching that might otherwise be minimised or hidden have bubbled to the fore. In the initial rush to emergency remote online learning, a plethora of worksheets and online learning tools became the norm. The focus was on giving the students something to do, something that allowed them to spend time each day on school like learning while they remained safe at home. And then came the videos - teachers recording lessons to be absorbed by learners. Teaching regressed to a time when the flow of learning was unidirectional (from teacher to student) and focused on low-order skills and knowledge recall. It was a little like watching HAL, the supercomputer of Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A space odyssey" sing Daisy. For many, this was a troubling time, and they knew that much of what was good about contemporary education was missing. 

As the time of remote learning continued fresh questions and wonderings began to emerge. The pattern shifted as teachers began to wonder how might we ensure that the remote learning we are tasking our children with is engaging, empowering and thought-provoking. There were efforts to bring dialogue into our online learning environments, and students and teachers once again shared ideas and built connections. Questions such as "How do we translate the dominant patterns of dialogue and deep thinking into remote learning?" and "How do I continue to teach for understanding, and make the thinking of my students visible in this new time?" were pondered. 

Now, as we move back into face-to-face teaching, we have the opportunity to reflect on this time and to consider what might have worked and what we might need to tweak. It is said that absence makes the heart grow fonder. If this is so, what have teachers and students missed most from the version of school that was the norm before COVID19 became a thing? And, how might we restart the education system in ways that better focus us on the things which matter most?

As we look back at the early days of remote learning, we notice two things were absent. When we examine what we tried to add back into the mix as the days stretched into weeks, these two things again stand out as missing. Given the close relationship and codependence between the two, it is not surprising that once one went missing, the other did too. What might these things be? - Student agency and deep and varied thinking. 

Student agency and thinking are natural bedfellows, but they are not always immediately linked. Student agency is often associated with opportunities for student voice or choice. In many ways, this makes sense and schools should foster opportunities for these things, but agency is more than just a nice way of making decisions about canteen menus. Once we look at how schools might promote agency as a disposition with lifelong value, then we begin to see agency in a different light; one that requires thinking. 

Bandura's definition of agency fits well with most contemporary understandings of the term. According to Bandura (2001) "The core features of agency enable people to play a part in their self-development, adaptation, and self-renewal with changing times." This points to agency having an impact beyond what is achieved when a school listens to student opinion. Indeed the power of agency is most needed when individuals confront challenging times as explained by Little, Snyder and Wehmeyer (2006).

"In facing these challenges, an agentic individual is the primary origin of his or her actions, has high aspirations, perseveres in the face of obstacles, sees more and varied options, learns from failures, has a strong sense of well-being, and so on. A non-agentic individual, on the other hand, is primarily the pawn of unknown extra-personal influences, has low aspirations, is hindered with problem-solving blinders, and often feels both helpless and hopeless."

What is clear here is that agency should be a vital measure of the success that our education systems have. Beyond allowing students to play a part in their education, developing student agency will prepare them for life beyond school as empowered citizens able to shape their world. 

The link between thinking and agency should become apparent when we consider a definition of agency that values its place as a lifelong disposition. "As such, agency, like character, can be understood as a disposition—seeing oneself as an agent of change within the designed environs of one's world." (Clapp et al. 2017) As Ritchhart notes, ""agency," is the ability to make choices and direct activity based on one's own resourcefulness and enterprise. This entails thinking about the world not as something that unfolds separate and apart from us but as a field of action that we can potentially direct and influence". (Ritchhart. 2015) This requires us to think about the world in a particular manner; one that allows us to imagine the part we may play in shaping it. It also requires that students are engaging mindfully with the curriculum, that they are investigating ideas and concepts that matter and that as they do so, they are required to think. "Learning happens when students engage with ideas, when they ask questions, explore, and construct meaning with our guidance and support. . . . Exploring meaningful and important concepts that are connected to the world often means students want to take action. Providing opportunities and structures for them to do so encourages students' agency and power while making the learning relevant." (Ritchhart & Church, 2020) In this, we see the connection between deep-learning and engagement with learning that matters with learner agency. This is the type of learning that we and our students missed when we moved to emergency remote learning, and it is this that we want to ensure is emphasised as we return to face-to-face. 

What this type of learning requires is beautifully captured by Mike Medvinsky of Michigan. Mike is a coach in Project Zero's "Creating Cultures of Thinking" course and teacher of Music Production at University-Liggett School. He shares his approach to promoting student agency through a culture of thinking as follows:

I truly believe that the one's who are doing the thinking and the talking are the people who are doing the learning. And when I am the one who is talking the whole time and explaining things I'm the one doing the thinking and learning. It's truly important that I set the stage, lay the groundwork for the experience and the learners then take the initiative to do the thinking, do the learning, do the talking, share their ideas, reframe their thinking and continue this journey in our learning experience. So the more that I can take a supportive role, rather than a lead role, the learners become the active agents of their own learning. . . When a learner is truly owning their thinking, it becomes meaningful and relevant to them. When they're sitting in a class where they're just getting information and regurgitating it onto a test its not going to be anything that is an enduring understanding. (Mike Medvinsky. Secondary Music Production. University-Liggett School, Michigan)

The sort of thinking that Mike describes does not occur without the right context and culture. Unless thinking is noticed, named and valued, it won't thrive. Indeed, all of the dispositions we may aspire to develop in our children such as curiosity, imagination, creativity, empathy, critical thinking and indeed agency cannot be taught in isolation as skills to be mastered. We do not benefit from learning about dispositions. "Dispositions must be enculturated - that is, learned through immersion in a culture." (Ritchhart. 2015) A key component in getting the culture right is the act of making thinking visible. When we make thinking visible, we are able to create opportunities to notice and name the thinking that we and our students are engaging in and when we do this we encourage more of it such that thinking becomes routine. This process is well served through the use of thinking routines, and the use of such routines can unlock student agency as Erik Lindemann describes "The routines build learners' capacity to engage with complexity while inspiring exploration. As my students begin internalizing and applying these thinking tools, I become a consultant in their ongoing investigations. Curiosity and excitement fuel deeper learning as my students take the lead," (Cited in Ritchhart 2020)

So, Are we there yet?

What weeks of emergency remote learning revealed is that even where we claim to value agency and a culture of thinking, the reality might need some tweaking. Do we routinely begin the process of planning for learning with these things in front of mind? Are we asking questions that guide us towards enculturating thinking such as "What thinking might my students require here?" or "What type of thinking might my students most benefit from experiencing now?". Are we seeking to enculturate agency by seeking opportunities for student-led inquiry and subsequent action? Or, do we begin our planning process by asking "What will I have my students do today?" or "What must I explain to them in this lesson?". When we look back at the learning we planned as an emergency response to COVID19, which of these questions are revealed as our go-to response, and how might we change this narrative?

By Nigel Coutts

Clapp, E., Ross, J., Oxman Ryan, J. & Tishman, S. (2017) "Maker-centered learning: empowering young people to shape their worlds”, San Francisco, Josey Bass

Bandura, A. (2001) "Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Perspective". Annual Review of Psychology 52:1-26

Little, Todd D., C. R. Snyder, and Michael Wehmeyer. (2006). “The Agentic Self: On the Nature and Origins of Personal Agency Across the Lifespan.” In D. K. Mroczek & T. D. Little (Eds) The Handbook of Personal Development, 61-79. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Ritchhart, R. (2015) Creating cultures of thinking: The eight forces we must truly master to transform our schools. San Francisco: Josey-Bass.

Ritchhart, R. & Church, M (2020) . The Power of Making Thinking Visible.  Hoboken NJ: Josey-Bass.

Getting started with Deep-Learning - Part B

With our goal of deep-learning in mind where do we begin and what learning opportunities might result in this? Having clarified our key terms of understanding, learning and deep, we can turn to a set of questions which might be of use as we plan the learning our students will engage in along their way. 

What do my students need to understand here?

This is one of the most powerful questions we can ask when we are unpacking our curriculum. To be sure there is much that we might want our students to know and do, but there are also fundamental understandings that our students must understand. Take fractions in mathematics as an example. We might want our students to know about the parts of fractions, the numerator and denominator. We might want them to know how to find pairs of equivalent fractions, how to compare fractions, how to add, subtract, multiply and divide fractions. These are without a doubt important, but unless students understand what a fraction is nothing else we teach them will make any sense. Students must understand that a fraction is one number, not two and that it represents a relationship between the numerator and the denominator. 

In their recently published research, Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine seek to explore the characteristics of teachers who encourage deep learning. From their search for Deeper Learning in American high schools, they found that there was a remarkably common set of beliefs amongst teachers who were successful in teaching for deep understanding. Such teachers had a high level of pedagogical knowledge and a preferred approach to teaching. They were deliberate and consistent in their approach and believed in the methods they used. They had a stance towards teaching as an act of igniting a spark, encouraging curiosity and interest more so than filling a bucket with knowledge. They could describe seminal experiences which had shaped their approach as teachers. Defining moments of understanding from which they came to see the role they might play if they adopted a particular stance. They had these characteristics, and they perceived the discipline they taught not as a body of knowledge to be learned but as a way of making sense of the world.

To a person, they saw their disciplines as open-ended rather than close-ended fields, meaning that they saw their fields as places where people had constructed provisional knowledge, rather than as places where there was a finished set of answers that needed to be passed on or “professed” to others. . . If teachers saw their fields as fixed or inherited bodies of knowledge, teaching as transmission seemed like a logical and efficient approach. . . . Conversely, if the fields were understood as places where different people would develop different interpretations, experiments, and approaches to problems, it seemed natural to invite students into this process of inquiry, connecting them to the generations of scholars and seekers of knowledge who had come before.

These teachers understood the true nature of their discipline. They saw themselves as members of a profession that was alive and to which they might contribute new knowledge. Their most valuable knowledge is an understanding of the epistemological foundation of the discipline. They may also possess sound discipline-specific knowledge, but they know that possessing this alone is not sufficient. A scientist is not defined by their recall of the periodic table but by the manner in which they approach puzzles and ambiguity. An author may require a sound knowledge of grammar, but they are defined by their approach to communication as a creative act between their language choices and their audience. Each discipline has its unique epistemological foundation, and deep learning is achieved when teachers invite their students to become participants in this.

Every discipline has fundamental understandings which must be mastered. Each key learning area within our curriculum, similarly, has fundamental understandings attached. Our first task as we plan for deep-learning is to identify and make sense of these fundamental understandings. The following extract from the rationale of the New South Wales History K-10 Syllabus reveals the presence of these understandings within the curriculum:

History is a disciplined process of inquiry into the past that helps to explain how people, events and forces from the past have shaped our world. It allows students to locate and understand themselves and others in the continuum of human experience up to the present. History provides opportunities for students to explore human actions and achievements in a range of historical contexts.

If this is what we hope our children will come to understand about History, how do we ensure this is what is achieved? How do we avoid a scenario in which History is viewed by students as a subject that requires them to memorise sequences of events for a past that is disconnected from their daily lives? Such thoughtfully crafted statements, combined with our beliefs about the value of what we teach deserve our close attention. Asking, "What do my students need to understand here?” should be the start of our planning journey. 

What does this understanding look like? 

It is all well and good to say that we want our students to understand something, but if we are not clear on what this looks like, we will have a hard time taking their learning in this direction. Going back to the example of an understanding of a fraction, how will I represent this understanding in ways that focus on the essential understanding that a fraction is one number, a relationship between numerator and denominator? If I show students fractions written on a whiteboard and explain to them that the top is called the numerator and the bottom is the denominator, it is unlikely that they will understand the fraction as a single number. If I teach them to recall that the Denominator is the bottom number because denominator and down start with the same letter, have I helped the situation at all? Instead, I need to invite my students to explore various physical representations of a fraction, to compare them, to see how one fraction can be represented in many ways with various materials and to associate the written representation with what they see in the physical world. 

Sometimes we need to Zoom In and Out as we examine the understandings we aim for and what they might look like. As a teacher of Geography, for example, I might agree with the curriculum that "Geography is the study of places and the relationships between people and their environments.”. When I drill down into the content and the particular outcomes to be addressed, this understanding can become fragmented and lost. Students in Years 3 & 4 in NSW are required to engage with four Outcomes which contribute to a stage appropriate understanding of the contribution of Geography. They are as follows:

• GE2-1 examines features and characteristics of places and environments
  GE2-2 describes the ways people, places and environments interact

• GE2-3 examines differing perceptions about the management of places and environments

• GE2-4 acquires and communicates geographical information using geographical tools for inquire

Zooming in to just the first outcome sees students looking closely at places and environments and describing in geographical language what they see. Digging deeper, students would need to have an understanding of what we mean by places and environments, and they would require a vocabulary for their description of features and characteristics. As teachers, we might imagine that we are teaching future geographers as we provide them with lists of words to paste diligently onto photos of remote locations with exciting geographical features. To the students, Geography has become another set of facts to be remembered for an upcoming exam. We have too quickly Zoomed into a level where the content hides the understanding. 

Zoom back and consider the outcomes together, and we see the need to clarify both what we want students to understand and what it might look like. I begin to see a set of questions that a geographer might ask emerge, and these can powerfully frame our approach to the discipline. What is special about this place or environment? How do people interact with it, and how do the features we observe shape these interactions? How is this place managed and who thinks this is a good plan? What resources will we use as we examine this place and how people interact with it? When we ask these questions and engage our learners with them, we are inviting them not to study geographical content but to think and act like Geographers. If in our minds, we have an informed imagining of what a Geographer does, then we can use this mental model as a guide while we plan learning experiences.

What experiences will build this understanding?

This question is aimed at moving us beyond thinking about what our students will do. If I want my students to understand fractions, then I must give them opportunities to examine multiple representations of fractions. If I want them to be able to notice patterns in collections of objects or numbers, I need them to examine closely collections with obvious patterns so that when they confront less obvious examples, they are armed with a clear image of what a pattern is and what one is not. If I want them to think like Historians or Geographers or Scientists, I need to engage them the types of experiences which are common for such practitioners. I am unlikely to encourage students to think like scientists if their experience of the discipline revolves around following recipes. If the only experiments my students conduct involve following directions off the board, I should not be surprised if they do not understand the value of a well-written hypothesis. 

Looking back at the Geographical outcomes discussed above, what experiences might build the desired understanding? A worksheet or textbook probably won’t work. It might put a lot of Geographical information in front of their eyes, but little to no understanding is likely to result. A field study with the purpose of conducting a geographical study of a place or environment and its interactions with people that leads to a report to an agency on the patterns of land use evident has real meaning and requires students to think like geographers. Such an experience would require students to gather information using geographical tools and vocabulary, and in doing so, they would appreciate the utility of such tools. 

Asking these three questions as we begin the planning process can have a profound effect in moving us towards teaching for deep-learning. Routinely asking "What do my students need to understand here?, What does this understanding look like?, and What experiences will build this understanding? as we plan and then deliver, learning maintains our focus on the fundamental understandings. These questions move our thinking away from a laundry list of content to be covered. When we focus on these questions, our teaching targets the learning that matters most and in doing so, we find pathways towards a less bloated curriculum.

By Nigel Coutts 

Mehta, J. & Fine, S. (2019) In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School Harvard University Press.

Getting started with teaching for deep learning.

There is an understandable interest in deep-learning, after all, who wants their students to have a superficial understanding of the content. Read the marketing of almost any school and you are likely to find some statement about the deep-learning that is achieved as a result of their excellent teaching and learning platform. Likewise, ask any teacher about their philosophy of teaching and you will hear how they engage their students with learning that promotes a deep-understanding. 

The trouble is, when you look at what is happening, there are often degrees of inconsistency between the stated aims and the reality of what is achieved on a day to day basis. Teaching for this sort of deep-learning is challenging and doing so routinely can be exhausting. 

Research by Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine in schools across the United States of America confirm that even in schools with a reputation for deep learning, the reality of the experience often falls short. This research led to the publication of “In Search of Deeper Learning” in which the authors note that few schools manage to achieve deep learning across all of their programmes. To be sure, there were pockets of excellence, and much to be celebrated, but very few schools came close to systematically embracing deep-learning. 

Most classrooms were spaces to sit passively and listen. Most academic work instructed students to recall, or minimally apply, what they had been told. When we asked students the purpose of what they were doing, the most common responses were “I dunno—it’s in the textbook,” and “maybe it’ll help me in college.” (Mehta & Fine. 2019)

With this in mind, what strategies might we routinely adopt so that deep-learning can be achieved and sustained? How do we get started and what pedagogies are likely to have the desired effect while avoiding fatigue for teachers and students?

We begin with the planning process. Deep-learning is not going to be achieved if we rely on the curriculum or packets of resources as a guide. Instead, we begin with a set of questions that allow us as teachers to clarify what it is that we want our students to understand as a results of their learning. 

There are some crucial concepts to be unpacked here and when we begin the process of teaching for deep-learning it is important that we clarify what these concepts mean to us. Perhaps the most important concept to be unpacked is understanding. Like most terms in common use, we feel we have a sense of what the word understanding means up to the point where we share our definition with a colleague and find that our’s does not align well with their’s. 

How we define understanding is a crucial point when our goal is deep-learning. Indeed, our goal is likely to be understanding. Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy of thinking skills is commonly used to identify what are referenced as high-order-thinking skills. In Bloom’s taxonomy, understanding is a low order skill, one rung on the ladder above remembering. It requires the learner to comprehend what they have remembered and be able to explain it to another person. By contrast, in teaching for understanding or understanding by design terms, understanding requires a capacity to use what one knows and can do in unique context. In this definition, understanding would combine the ability to apply, analyse, synthesise and evaluate knowledge, concepts, ideas, skills and capabilities. 

The critical distinction is that in a deep-learning model, understanding involves the capacity to do useful things with one’s knowledge and skills; a performative perspective of understanding. According to Blythe and associates,  (1998) “The performance perspective says, in brief, that understanding is a matter of being able to do a variety of thought-provoking things with a topic, such as explaining, finding evidence and examples, generalizing, applying, analogizing, and representing the topic in new ways.”

The idea of learning is similarly open to interpretation. In this instance we are describing an active process that the learner is heavily engaged in and ultimately responsible for. This goes far beyond what might be achieved through mere exposure to content regardless of how well it might be delivered.

“Meaningful learning cannot be delivered to high school students like pizza to be consumed or videos to be observed. Lasting learning develops largely through the labor of the student, who must be enticed to participate in a continuous cycle of studying, producing, correcting mistakes, and starting over again.“  (Newman. 1992 p.3)

The other key term to be unpacked here is “deep”. What might be special about deep learning?  According to Mehta & Fine (2019), “Research suggests that deep learners have schemas that enable them to see how discrete pieces of knowledge in a domain are connected; rather than seeing isolated facts, they see patterns and connections because they understand the underlying structures of the domain they are exploring.” Deep learning goes beyond perceiving the world as a collection of facts to be understood in isolation but requires the capacity and a disposition to bring ideas together in novel ways. Deep learning is the difference between seeing a painting of a hay bale and the capacity to extrapolate from that same image as a lucid commentary on the evolving relationship between artist, environment and society. 

The discussion of these terms offered above is intended only to offer a possible interpretation. The crucial part of defining terms of such importance as these is the process rather than the product. While it might be convenient to find and publish to stakeholders a definition of key terms, engaging teachers in the process of making meaning is likely to be more productive. A crucial process in any change effort is the building of ownership of it by those ultimately charged with implementing it. With this in mind, engaging stakeholders in the process of defining these terms can be a significant role in building support. The collective understanding of these key terms that is developed through the initial phase of moving towards teaching for “deep-learning” will allow them to fulfil their place as the ultimate goal of subsequent teaching and learning.

In the next article we will explore essential questions to be asked as we begin to strategise for deep-learning. 

By Nigel Coutts

Blythe, T. (1998) "The teaching for understanding guide”, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Mehta, J. & Fine, S. (2019) In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School Harvard University Press.

Newmann, F. (1992)  “Introduction,” in Fred Newmann, ed., Student Engagement and Achievement in American Secondary Schools (New York: Teachers College Press.

Maximising student questions in the time of COVID19

In this time of COVID19 and remote learning or emergency distance learning the value of encouraging students to investigate their questions should not be forgotten.

We learn via the questions that we ask and we expand our collective understanding of the worlds in which we live through the questions that we discover. Human knowledge is a historic journey of wonderings that have sparked imaginations and a desire to understand. If there is one thing that separates humans from other species it is our deep-seated desire to understand why things are the way that they are, natural curiosity coupled with the capacity and tools to seek answers.

Our natural curiosity is, however, a fragile thing. Much has been written about the decline of our propensity to ask questions with some sources stating that we peak at age four (Right Question Institute). In 'A More Beautiful Question’ Warren Berger explores this in detail and shows that a confluence of factors including immersion in an environment that feeds learners with facts, a focus on right answers not questions and even low tolerance of questions from educators are at play. Look at the curriculum of any major educational system and you find the knowledge that students are expected to learn as a result of their schooling. From curriculum content come lessons aimed at translating that prescribed subject matter into learner knowledge and the scope for questions is curtailed. Time-poor teachers have little time to cover questions not directly related to the curriculum and even questions related to the content are unlikely to be given much importance as the course materials will by design ensure students encounter the answers whether they are asked or not. 

Curiosity is poorly served by answers. This is a crucial point to understand in this time of remote learning. Undoubtedly our students’ minds will be full of questions at the moment. Questions about the nature of the pandemic, questions about their future, questions about the changes occurring in society and questions about their safety. Beyond this, they will continue to have questions connected to the learning they are engaged in. How we respond to these questions set the tone for how our children will relate to and connect with knowledge. If we provide them with neatly packaged answers they are likely to believe that knowledge is something which is given to you by a more knowledgable other. If we respond instead with questions, prompts and nudges that encourage inquiry we set the conditions for a mindset in which knowledge is gained through a process of exploration, inquiry and investigation. When we encourage our children to self-navigate their way towards answers we enable them as agentic thinkers and set them up as life-long learners.

Great teachers are highly skilled in the arts of facilitating inquiry. They use their knowledge of their learners, their understanding of the subject matter and effective questioning to transform a student’s question into a fruitful investigation. From actively listening to the student’s question they plan their next step. They ask “What makes you think?”, acknowledge the child’s question, share an interest in the search for an answer, suggest a possible starting point. They form a partnership in a search for understanding and through this, the child learns how to learn rather than a quick answer.

The enemy of this style of learning is always time. The temptation to quickly answer the question is compelling for many reasons including some linked to the ego of the respondent, but the most significant obstacle is typically a lack of time. The process of supporting a learner move from nascent question to the framing of a powerful question for inquiry (an essential question of guiding question) and then onwards through the process of investigation and the formation of a conclusion is lengthy. The challenge of time is likely to be even more pressing for parents who are finding themselves picking up the role of the teacher during this time of emergency remote learning. 

'It's the questions we can’t answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer all he gains is a little fact but give him a question and he’ll look for his own answers. That way, when he finds the answers they’ll be precious to him, the harder the question, the harder we hunt, the harder we hunt the more we learn, an impossible question . . .’  - 'King Killer Chronicles’ by Patrick Rothfuss

The idea of a teacher responding to a students inquiry with a question is one that might be quite foreign to many of our parents. It is likely that their experience of schooling involved the teacher as a source of knowledge. The teacher knew things that they needed to learn and the role of the student was to absorb this wisdom. Teaching was and is seen by many as an act of communication of knowledge from one mind to another. Even if the parent might communicate an understanding that this is no longer the case they may have limited experience with education as a conversation between two inquiring minds. Between a lack of time, a belief that their role as an adjunct educator is to answer questions and limited knowledge of how to foster curiosity with effective questions all means that we may find students missing opportunities for inquisitive exploration. 

Engaging in some creative questioning at home can lead to some wonderful dinner time conversations. "Creative Questions” is a thinking routine for developing ideas and for training your mind to think differently. Instead of responding to a simple question with an answer, the use of some powerful questions can transform the question into an inquiry. Questions like this might help:

• What makes you say that? or What makes you think that? or How do you know that?

• What are you trying to do? State your objectives using absolutely no jargon.  

• What is the problem?  Why is it hard?

• What questions does that raise?

• What evidence do you have?

• What is missing?

• Where do you go from here?

• What part of the problem is left?

• What are you certain about? Why?

• What would it be like if . . .

• How would it be different if . . .

• Suppose that . . .

• What would change if . . .

• How would it look different if . . .

This situation is likely to be exacerbated if the learning that we are planning for our students is largely bound to content knowledge. If we are sending home packets of worksheets full of closed questions where there is one correct answer and one well-established method for finding it we create little room for anyone to engage in meaningful inquiry. Now, as always, is a great time for open-ended questions with multiple possible answers and a broad spectrum of approaches to finding a solution. This is also the perfect time to allow students to investigate their questions. In times of such great uncertainty, allocating parts of their week to self-initiated inquiry might be the perfect way to win back a sense of agency. 

What manner of questions should we encourage our students to ask? If we are to encourage out of the box thinking and innovative ideas we must provide opportunities for students to ask questions that connect their interests and passions. If our students are always asking the questions we have imagined for them, or worse still that the textbook writer imagined, when do they get to imagine their own questions? Dr. Richard Curwin explores this in a blog post titled ‘Questions Before Answers: What drives a great lesson?’ Curwin explains the need for lessons centred on a question so engaging to students that it gets under their skin and compels them to inquire. I will argue that the most compelling questions are the great questions our students bring with them.

Consider a typical lesson as a dialogue and then look at this dialogue from the perspective of the teacher and the student. Often it goes something like this: The teacher begins the class either stating or implying that “At the end of this hour you will know . . . or ‘at the end of this hour, you will have discovered x, y & z’. The student hears this and thinks politely to themselves ‘why don’t you just tell me now’ or ‘if I can learn this in an hour how important can it be’ or ponders that favourite of all questions for students to ask ‘why do I have to learn this’.

At the end of the lesson the student does indeed know the new fact or idea, they can parrot back an answer so they must. The teacher is happy and the lesson is deemed a success. At the end of the day the student goes home and answers the question 'what did you do in school today?', they answer ‘not much’ for them the lesson was a failure. Why?  For the student there was no learning, they acquired a new fact but that fact had no value because it was never linked to a question that mattered to them. It was not their question, it did not engage their interest and they just had to play the game to get to the end of the lesson where the fact would be revealed. They knew that the teacher knew the answer, many of the students probably already knew the answer, they certainly could have Googled it, and if they cared they probably would have.

Sometimes we do need to be the person asking the questions, sometimes we need to be the person transferring information; however, the quality of our questions, their power to engage and challenge thinking, combined with the opportunities we provide our students to ask the questions that matter to them are likely to be the times when the most powerful learning occurs.

By Nigel Coutts

Slow Looking at Home or Doing More with Less

It seems that thanks to COVID19, educators, parents and students are in a rush. It seems the rush started moments after the decision was made to promote social distancing by offering remote learning. From quality learning in classrooms focused on deep learning we shifted into top gear. Packets of work were prepared, online tools rapidly expanded, new options for content delivery were examined and quickly deployed. We wanted to make sure that our students would be kept busy. Parents wanted their children to be busy. 

In a very short period of time, great things have been achieved. The profession has shown itself to be full of creativity. Learning has continued. But maybe now is the time to reduce the pace. Learning is, after all, a marathon, not a sprint. Now we are beyond the initial phases of the transformation to online learning we can settle into a pace that is better suited for the long haul.

This will involve doing more with less. Packets of work invite a fast pace. This is the mode of learning many parents and teachers will remember well from their days of schooling. We all thought that the smart kids finished first even if this was never directly communicated to us. The goal was to get the work done, finish the worksheet and move on to the next. In most contemporary classrooms this is no longer the norm. Deep learning comes from a slower pace. It requires time for ideas to evolve. Questions and wonderings need to be shared and the process of learning is valued more so than the end product. Even once a question is answered we will want to investigate its origins and germination so that we may learn to replicate the process from which it resulted.

Doing more with less might also be everyone’s saviour in terms of managing the demands of an online workflow. In the typical busyness of the school day, time is the thing we are lacking most. In online learning, at least in these early days, it seems our objective has been to ensure every moment of the day is filled with something and this is requiring teachers to generate a huge quantity of content that parents are called on to deliver. 

Against this trend towards doing more, in less time and at a faster pace is a trend towards slowing down and giving our minds time to catch up. 

Once we realise that as described by Chris Lewis we are moving too fast to think, we can start looking for an alternate course of action. The obvious answer is to slow down, to pause, switch off and take the time we need to reset but doing this requires deliberate action. We begin the process by recognising that taking our time, slowing down and being deliberate in the processes of thinking is a pathway towards becoming more productive, more creative and more attuned to the world around us. In what seems like a contradiction in terms, the best strategy for coping with the rapid pace of our lives is not to speed up but to slow down. 

In “Slow Looking” by Shari Tishman the reader finds an approach to slowing doing and taking the time needed to appreciate the finer details in the world around us. 

"Slow looking is a healthy response to complexity because it creates a space for the multiple dimensions of things to be perceived and appreciated. But it is a response that, while rooted in natural instinct, requires intention to sustain."

For educators, the practice of slow looking will align well with strategies from the Visible Thinking movement. If you have used strategies such as “Looking Ten Times Two” or “Look and Look Again” you have experienced slow looking. By deploying strategies which require us to switch modes and adopt a more contemplative stance backed by deliberate efforts to notice things on multiple levels, we open our minds to new possibilities. When you use these strategies with your class you will notice a new depth of thinking emerges from your students. The initial conversation may well disappoint. Surface level thinking and seeing is ingrained and takes time and persistence to overcome. As the students begin to look more closely, to see more detail and notice more of the stimulus they are engaging with a change emerges. Gradually the students embrace the opportunity that slow looking offers. 

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"Tales from Outer Suburbia" by Shaun Tan is a beautiful piece of creative work by a master of the picture book genre. Each page has multiple layers of detail and meaning. It is a book that deserves time and slow looking. We can begin the exploration of selected pages using the slow looking strategy of “Looking Ten Times Two”. In this strategy, students are invited to look at an image quietly for at least thirty seconds allowing their eyes to wander before they stop and list ten words or phrases about any aspect of the image. The process then repeats and can indeed repeat again. With each new looking more detail emerges. The students deliberately look for details they did not notice at the first looking. After two rounds of slow looking, we invite the students to share their observations. As each student shares their notes, fresh ideas emerge and the discussion takes on a life of its own. Soon students are not just discussing what they saw in the image but are asking questions about the artist’s choices, the meaning of the image and their personal take-aways. 

The process of slow looking is well supported by effective questioning. As we look slowly at a stimulus, what questions emerge? In the classroom, teachers know when to pause the learning and inject a question that encourages reflection. At home when we can’t be there we may need to find other means to achieve this goal. Perhaps we can provide our students with a list of questions not to answer but to ponder and reflect on. maybe we can arrange a video chat that is just about posing questions that spark dialogue. Maybe we invite our students to pause the video they are watching and reflect on some well-chosen questions. For parents who might be wondering about what questions to ask a link is provided to a list of possible candidates.

The strategies of slow looking are not restricted to the visual. Consider looking as a synonym for perceiving and you see its potential across multiple disciplines. Tishman provides numerous examples of “slow looking” in disciplines away from those most immediately associated with the visual and through senses other than our eyes. Consider the place of “slow looking” in science as an essential strategy for noticing what is taking place in an experiment or field observation. In music “slow looking” will allow the listener to notice subtle nuances in a piece and in literature “slow looking” encourages the reader to enjoy the language moves made by the author while the practice of slow looking is a valuable tool for the author to employ as they build descriptions. 

Now is the perfect time to consider “slow looking” at home. Rather than looking to replicate the classroom environment we might ask, what opportunities for slow looking are made possible when learning is located in the home? What discoveries await the “slow looker” in the backyard? What might we notice about the plants, bugs, birds and animals that share our living spaces? What are the stories hidden in the family photo albums? How might a slow looking architect interpret the design of the spaces we have come to take for granted? What would “slow looking” reveal about the lives of our communities during these far from normal times? How might we see the meals we eat and the processes of preparing them differently if we choose a “slow looking” perspective?

'Slow Looking' is a highly recommended strategy and those looking to implement this in their classrooms or in their own lives should begin by reading Tishman’s book. 

By Nigel Coutts

For further writing prompts that support Slow Looking- CLICK HERE

For "Questions that Encourage Deeper Learning” - CLICK HERE

From Good to Great: Writing well by Thinking like Authors

A common challenge for students and teachers is how to develop a great idea for a piece of writing. Too often students struggle with the process of finding inspiration for their writing. They have a vague idea for the story they hope to tell, but all too quickly it transforms into a list of events with little or no detail. The goal here is to provide our students with a process to use during the planning process. The hope is that by identifying the type of thinking required during the early phases of ideation and to focus their attention on details, that the stories our students subsequently compose will be more enjoyable to read. 

We begin with a reminder of some of the fundamental structures of good story writing. Students will often attempt to write their entire story as a single paragraph. The result is something like this:

There was this Hobbit called Bilbo and he met a Wizard called Gandalf and he had some friends who were Dwarves. The Dwarves asked Bilbo to help them steal their gold back from the Dragon Smaug. They went off together and fought Trolls and Goblins. Bilbo found a ring. They sneak into the dragon’s cave and scare him out. The people in the village are attacked but a lucky archer kills the Dragon. They have a big battle and in the end, all agree to share the gold.

All of the information is there. All the ideas that make the Hobbit a great story are present, but what is missing is detail. Writers include the exact amount of detail required to bring you into the story. A few pages to describe Bilbo, a few more to describe his house. Several Chapters for the meetings before they head off on their journey, even more as they head off on the road. Details of every character and every location and then details of every event that happens along the way. The detail is what makes the reader care about the characters, picture the scenes in their head and become involved in the action. Our students undervalue their ideas. If they routinely took each idea they have and dedicated at least a paragraph to it their writing would be much better. 

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The next step is to consider the structure of those paragraphs. A simple plan is that it should in its opening sentence give the reader a sense of what the paragraph is about. It needs to contain detail in terms of characters, action, emotion and setting. It should bring these pieces together and point onwards to what comes next. 

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We are going to use an image from the book “The Most Magnificent Thing” by Ashley Spires. You could substitute any image that is abundant in detail and points towards a possible story. The illustrations of Shaun Tan are inspiring. There are innumerable artworks which would fit the purpose of inspiring a writers imagination. Photos of city streets, remote wild places, images capturing human interactions and emotions are all great possibilities. 

With an image in mind, we want to maximise the value of this. We want the students to slow down and look closely. We want them to engage deliberately in a process of slow-looking. 

The definition of slow looking is straightforward. It simply means taking the time to carefully observe more than meets the eye at first glance. . . slow looking is a way of gaining knowledge about the world. It helps us discern complexities that can’t be grasped quickly, and it involves a distinctive set of skills and dispositions that have a different center of gravity than those involved in other modes of learning. (Slow Looking: The art and practice of learning through observation by Shari Tishman)

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We will scaffold this “slow looking” through the use of a number of thinking routines. We will begin with “Looking Ten Times Two”. Our aim here is to notice the details in the image or prompt. At first look, much of the fine detail is likely to be missed. We are trained to read images quickly and indeed it can be argued that there is a genetic imperative for this. If you do not spot the approaching predator quickly you are likely to become lunch. On first examination, we list ten words or phrases that come to mind as we absorb the image for the first time. We then repeat the process and on this second looking, we see more details. Our list of words and phrases is expanded. We can repeat these steps as often as we feel is needed. We stop when we feel we have exhausted all possibilities. 

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From our “Looking Ten Times Two” we have a list of words and phrases that will incorporate into our story. We have started the writing process and routinely engaging in this process builds a bank of ideas we can use time and time again. Some of these words and phrases will be great, others will be good but need improvement. This is the next step and we are going to encourage our students to engage in some reflection on their thinking. They begin by reviewing the list of words and phrases they have listed. They highlight in a positive colour the ones that they feel are “great”, the ones that they connect with. The look now to the ones which are not quite there yet. Maybe they can find a more descriptive or emotive word. Maybe they can rewrite the phrase so that it is more effective. Dictionaries, thesauruses, word-banks and the internet can be a great help here. It must be noted here that students who read prolifically will find this process much easier. 

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The next step is all about the possible characters. In the image we have chosen there are a number of possibilities. We are going to use the thinking routine “Perceive, Know, Care About” to explore some of the possibilities for each character. We use three guiding questions for the process and capture our thinking in a way that makes sense to us. 

1. What can the person or thing perceive?

2. What might the person or thing know about or believe?

3. What might the person or thing care about?

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Now we move to the location or other elements of the image or perhaps the events depicted. We will use the “Explanation Game” routine for this. We begin by identifying something interesting in the image. We use the script “I notice that . . “ and then follow this with questions like “Why is it this way?” or “Why might it happen this way?” Our goal is to identify possibilities in the stimulus. In this image, we might wonder what happened to make the girl in the red dress angry or what are the items scattered around her and did something break? I might wonder why the lady in purple seems to be pointing and laughing and why does the man in the blue shirt have a quizzical expression?

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By this point, I have a good idea about what is going on here. I have developed some words and phrases to use. I have reflected on my initial thinking and made efforts to enhance the quality of my expression. I have considered aspects of the characters inspired by the stimulus and thought about elements of action and setting. Now I am going to step back and consider what the story might be. I am now beginning to pull all of the threads together and develop a unifying idea for how the characters came to be in this place and this context at this point in my story. I am going to use the thinking routine "Generate, Sort, Connect, Elaborate" to do this. 

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I begin by Generating a list of story ideas that come to mind when you look at this image and your list of words and phrases. I am going to organise this as a mind map. I am going to keep them simple. I am not planning to write a sequel to "War & Peace”. Next, I sort my ideas according to how central or important they are. For example, explaining how the girl in red came to be looking so angry is important, but explaining why the lady in the striped top is wearing a scarf today isn’t. I might use colour and size to make these ideas stand out, doing this is easy if I am using software like LucidChart or Inspiration to organise my ideas on a device. I am going to connect my ideas by drawing connecting lines between them. Start to think about the order that events happen in. Now I elaborate on any of the ideas/thoughts you have written that seem very important by adding new ideas that expand, extend, or add to your initial ideas.

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The final step before I start writing is to share my idea with someone I trust to provide me with honest and valuable feedback about my story. Before this can happen I need to share my story in a way that will allow my trusted reviewer to understand the idea without being tedious or overly focused on the details. The details are important, but they will be enjoyed by my audience as they read the final drafts. I am going to use the idea of an "Elevator Pitch" for this. Imagine you hop into an elevator and realise that you are alone with a famous film director. You know your idea is the perfect story for this person's next film. You also know you have a very short time to share your idea and convince this director to take on your story. This is the idea behind the elevator pitch. Your task is to develop a short and simple explanation of what the story is about and why it is worth telling. Your description needs to be compelling and easy to understand. This can be a great test of your understanding of what the story is about. If you can’t describe it in simple terms and briefly, you might need to rethink your understanding. Share your elevator pitch in a way that makes sense to you. You might want to dramatise this and present the dialogue you would have with a famous director.

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Finally, I am ready to begin writing. I utilise all of my planning. I have this spread out around me as I begin to write. The time spent on this planning should make the process easier but I will continue to call on my imagination as I write and once I have a draft ready I will edit and make changes and revision. The process of thinking about my piece of writing will continue and as it does my story will evolve. In the end, I hope to have something that an audience will enjoy reading. 

This process has been tested on small groups of students across ages in primary settings. The results have been pleasing and the students have enjoyed the process and felt empowered as writers. It does require a number of lessons and some familiarity with the use of thinking routines to scaffold particular thinking moves helps. Thinking is best when it is built into the culture of a learning environment. Hopefully, you will have the same results. I would love to hear how it works for you and what changes you might make to suit your needs and context. 

Download this resource as a PDF

By Nigel Coutts

Online Novel Study Guide that Encourages Thinking

With many schools moving to online learning around the world I wanted to share a resource that might be of support. One popular option for online or remote learning is the Novel Study. It combines the advantages of encouraging students to read with ease of management and the opportunity to encourage reflection upon what is read. Often this is supported by a set of questions or activities, but they are sometimes very specific to a particular novel and may not require a great deal of thinking. This Novel Study Guide aims to overcome that by linking selected thinking moves to parts of a text. The result is a mash up of thinking routines with close looking at particular features of novels or narrative texts. It is hoped that this approach develops skills which would transfer to other situations where a detailed analysis of a text is desirable.

The site is structured in two ways. You can either begin by selecting a Thinking Move you would like your students to be using (e.g. Reasoning with Evidence or Capturing from the Heart) or target a particular feature of the text (e.g. places, people, events).

The site has been constructed quickly and will continue to evolve. Feedback is welcome using the comments below. You can also download the site as a PDF which allows parts to be copied into other formats.

Access the site HERE

Download The PDF for Text Features

Download the PDF for Thinking Moves

By Nigel Coutts

Celebrating the significance of creativity for educations future success

The past two weeks, I have considered some of the consequences of a world where uncertainty and unpredictable change is the norm. These are “postnormal times” as Sardar describes “Ours is a transitional age, a time without the confidence that we can return to any past we have known and with no confidence in any path to a desirable, attainable or sustainable future.” (Sardar, 2010) There once was a predictable pattern to change; things became predictably larger or smaller, more or less frequent, quicker and easier, swung to the left or swung to the right. Now, this is not the case. Change is fundamental, and the solutions which worked for us in the past, such as our reliance on technology, science and due processes for politics and social understandings are no longer adequate.

In response to this, industry is identifying new skill sets which are considered necessary in these times of uncertainty. Skills such as active learning and learning strategies should be the core business of schools. After all, the fundamental business of education systems from the customers perspective is learning. We often get this the wrong way around and focus on what the teacher does and as such, consider the core business of schools to be teaching. This is like a restaurant that focuses on what the chefs do, cooking, and forget about the experience of the customer, which is dining and the practice of being a diner. If schools get it right, our teachers will do excellent teaching that creates the right opportunities for our students to become learners. Our collective ability to learn and by doing so, adapt to changing circumstances through the acquisition of new skills and dispositions is what Edward de Bono refers to as EBNE; Essential But Not Enough.

The capacity to learn new skills in response to rapid changes is EBNE because in doing, we become dependent upon others to identify and solve the emerging problem for us. Learning in a traditional sense relies upon someone else possessing knowledge and skills that we hope to acquire. According to Daniel Wilson, this model works for traditional problems, even quite complicated ones which are the norm in large systems. Someone somewhere will have experienced this problem before, and there is a solution that is proven to work. The challenge is to identify the problem, find the corresponding solution and apply it in ways that are respectful of context.

But uncertainty means that the challenges we confront have not been experienced before. These complex problems combine challenges from the past with new challenges and new contexts. We can not rely on wisdom from elsewhere as the knowledge we require does not yet exist. We are the first to confront the particular challenges, and we are the first with access to the opportunities that come from solving these in ways which are most responsive to modern times. Learning to learn in these times is, therefore, EBNE, but what then do we need.

Creativity becomes the key path towards solutions to the challenges of uncertainty. According to Tim Brown, past CEO of the design innovation company IDEO creativity is the greatest weapon we have against uncertainty.

“One of the greatest weapons that we have against uncertainty is creativity. It’s how we forge something new out of it.” - Tim Brown IDEO

Creativity is what will allow us to look at the world and see opportunity amidst the chaos of uncertainty. Creativity offers us the fresh perspectives we need, guides us towards new questions and allows novel solutions to emerge. Truly successful individuals will be those who see the world as a place to be interpreted through a creative lens. They will seek out fresh perspectives and challenge the status quo. Organisations will empower their creative individuals by enabling collective and participatory creativity where innovative solutions emerge from truly collaborative processes of ideation.

“The problems of today are too big for one person or organisation to solve alone. We need many people bringing a vast diversity of perspectives to begin to think about old challenges in new ways." - Tim Brown IDEO

Commonly, creativity is seen as a disposition which some people possess and others do not. We see it as a process for individuals and point to the works of those we imagine to be creative geniuses as examples of this process in action. Such an individualistic definition of creativity does not serve us well in times of wide-scale uncertainty. In these postnormal times, no individual will possess all of the information necessary to understand fully and subsequently respond to challenges defined by their complex nature. A more collaborative definition of creativity might better serve our purposes.

Inner Circle - Expertise is the path to solving complicated problems

Outer Circle - Emergence is the path to solving complex problems

Source: Daniel Wilson - @danielwilsonPZ

This is what Edward Clapp describes in his book “Participatory Creativity”. In this, creativity is defined as:

“Creativity is a distributed process of idea development that takes place over time and incorporates the contributions of a diverse network of actors, each of whom uniquely participate in the development of ideas in various ways.” - Edward P. Clapp - Participatory Creativity

Such a definition encourages us to see creativity not as the thinking of an individual but as the output of many. Successful organisations will be those that create the conditions which encourage participatory creativity at all levels. The most successful organisations will be those who nurture opportunities for participatory creativity, both internally and externally. Organisations which are closed shops, where ideas are secreted away, where collaboration is curtailed will confront uncertainty through a restrictive lens where alternate possibilities and perspectives remain unseen.

“At IDEO, we’ve worked hard to shift our mindset around uncertainty to one of curiosity and excitement. We value embracing ambiguity—finding the opportunity in the grey space between your comfort zone and the next big idea.” - Tim Brown IDEO

This is the ultimate challenge for schools. Teaching our students to be creative participants is vital for their success, but this too is EBNE. Until schools become places that genuinely encourage models of participatory creativity for every member of their community they will remain doomed to repeat the practices from our past and continue to be surprised when the results thusly achieved do not change.

By Nigel Coutts