I’ve been having a bit of think this week.
Firstly I read Daisy Christodoulou’s post on Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum. She points out that Hirsch, oft-condemned for being the darling of ideologues like Mickey Gove is, in his own words ‘a quasi socialist’ and big mates with Diane Ravitch (who is nobody’s fool.)
Then I listened to the hugely entertaining Jonathan Lear give an excellent presentation at Independent Thinking’s Big Day Out in Bristol on Friday and like any speaker worth their salt he got me thinking. His point, if I may make so bold as to attempt a precis, is that we limit children’s learning if we set out to teach them a concept in a clear and focussed way. His rallying cry is… vagueness.
Like Jim Smith’s redefinition of ‘lazy’, Jonathan wants us to unpick and unpack the benefits of being ambiguous, a bit ill-defined and somewhat nebulous. Got it? He illustrated with the use of Little Miss Sunshine who, when both her hands were held, completed an electrical circuit and lit up. When this phenomenon is demonstrated to children, particularly primary school children, they want to know how. What on earth, they wonder, is going on? His point was that had he simply said, ‘right boys and girls, today we’re going to learn about electrical circuits,’ something would have been lost. The nascent curiosity of their young minds would have been, if not crushed, certainly restricted.
Crack team of education consultants
So far so good. I’m all for harnessing students’ curiosity and tricking them, á la Hywel Roberts, into learning accidentally. But then he asked us to consider why students seem to become less curious and excited about learning as they trudge their way through the education system. Is it, as Ken Robinson suggests that we teachers flatten it out of them with our dull, quotidian lessons and our soulless reliance on text books? Jonathan referenced a study of divergent thinking (The ability to interpret a question in many different ways and the ability to see many different answers to a question.) undertaken by NASA and used by SKR to make his point in Out of Their Minds. It goes a little something like this: Most people are able to come up with 10 to 15 uses for a paperclip. People who are good at divergent thinking would come up with around 200. Unfortunately, our capacity for divergent thinking deteriorates with age. This longitudinal study of kindergarten children measured 98% of them at genius level in divergent thinking. Five years later, when they were aged 8 to 10 years, those at genius level had dropped to 50%. After another five years, the number of divergent thinking geniuses had fallen further still. Robinson argues that the main intervention that these children have had is education, a conveyor-belt education that tells them that there is one answer at the back of the book but don’t look and don’t copy.
But is this really true? Have a look at this:
Correlation is not causation by Glen Gilchrist
Clearly, the decline in piracy is to blame for the problems we’re experiencing with climate change. Any right thinking human being can see that the only viable solution to the likely annihilation of the planet is to finance privateers to harry world shipping. Those pesky Somalians are actually doing us a favour.
Except, of course, that this is nonsense. It should be obvious that any link between piracy and global warming is the most arrant and wrongheaded pap. Correlation does not mean causation.
So, could Ken be equally wrong about what NASA’s data reveals? Could it not perhaps reveal that as we get older we dismiss the idea of a giant 50 foot paper clip as ridiculous. How could it ever be used to clip paper? And it would be hopeless for getting the battery out of your iPhone! The less we know, the wilder our misconceptions about the world. As we know more we restrict ourselves to the most likely solutions to problems because this is the most efficient way of using our brains. Our divergent thinking happens in microseconds allowing us to converge on sensible, useful solutions. Or maybe I’m wrong: maybe pirates did keep the temperature down.
And then Jonathan demonstrated the uselessness of teaching children knowledge by asking us to look up the date of Mozart’s birth. Predictably, an audience member was able to retrieve this information from the internet in a little over 5 seconds. You see? Why bother knowing anything – you can always look it up. Or, as ED Hirsch asks, can you? Now, I can’t speak for cognitive science but some things just make sense: the more you know, the easier it is to fit new concepts and information into your mental map. Hirsch makes the point that “Any teacher of science who fails to offer concrete experiences that manifest the feel and heft of things is missing a big opportunity for helping students gain conceptual insight. Any teacher of early math who doesn’t challenge students with real-world problems that require a translation back and forth between the physical world and the abstract relations of math is leaving out an essential element of good math teaching.” Or to put it another way, “The best teaching methods do not have to be coupled with an anti-fact or anti-academic mentality.”
The only way you can use the internet to substitute for learning knowledge is if you have massively low expectations. Try looking up this one : what would have happened if Mozart had been born in 1450? Or, Is Mozart better than Picasso? Why does the Dies Irae movement of the “Requiem Mass in D Minor make me feel a bit tingly?
I’m waiting…
So, why can’t we bring together the awe and wonder of some of the marvellous progressive thinkers with a bit of old fashioned academic rigour? Why have the two come to be seem (from both sides of the gulf) as mutually exclusive? The current vogue for SOLO taxonomy is, in my mind, representative of this division. I gave a seminar at the Big Day Out (which after a conversation with Phil Beadle I wished I’d retitled as SOLO – shit or not?) which tried to bridge the divide. If you don’t believe in the fundamental importance of knowledge then SOLO just ain’t gonna work! SOLO, more than anything else has got me to reconsider the importance of knowledge within our curriculum. In my haste to take students on a journey to becoming extended abstract thinkers I neglected to concentrate on the quality of what students knew. One of the delegates at Friday’s event pointed out that this taxonomy of educational outcomes while conceived to improve the quality of thinking at the post-graduate level is equally applicable to the National Curriculum levels of Key Stage 2. You would however hope that students had acquired a bit of knowledge in the intervening years and it is these ‘mere facts’ which improve the quality of our thinking. Quite simply, if I know more than you in a particular area then my thinking on that topic is more refined and nuanced than yours. I’m sorry but it just is.
As Sir Francis Bacon said back in 1597 (Get me – I looked it up!) , ‘Knowledge is power.’
Jonathan finished his presentation by asking whether the world would be a better place if it were run by five year olds. My first thought was that it would be a lot messier and more concerned with cake and Ribena. But having watched the last in the latest series of The Thick Of It, I’m not so surely they could make it any worse!
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Is SOLO a waste of time?
I enjoyed reading this and feel a strong resonance in your finishing considerations. I struggle enormously with (what seems to be an English) current preoccupation with creating dichotomies between things like knowledge and skill, process and outcome, thinking and knowing. I just can’t bring myself to consider these things to be discrete.
My quest is to deliver and stimulate (carefully chosen verbs) in my classrooms all of these things. I don’t think knowledge is of any use without the capacity to evaluate, interpret, interpolate, extrapolate, synthesise. But I also don’t think skills are of any value at all without something concrete upon which to perform them. I am against de-contextualisation as an end in itself – but I have no problem with stripping away context and examining the structure of a novel, poem, sentence, word, phoneme.
Anyway, enough of my blather. I like what I read here. I particularly like the conclusion – that it may not be “either/or”, it may in fact be ‘all’.
Thanks for taking the time to share your thinking. It informs mine and I appreciate it greatly
Chris
It’s always incredibly hard to find fault with your posts David. I found myself nodding along at regular intervals.
The only point I would make about divergent thinking at secondary level is that, along with volunteering and answering questions, children at this age often seem to be reticent to think differently, be positive, take risks because they are put in front of subject experts who (often, not always) expect one answer or expect things to be done a particular way. I do feel this might have something to do with why divergent thinking can decrease. There is an answer; it’s in the back of the book, or in the teachers head….
Your questions about Mozart and Picasso are of course the sorts of questions which allow knowledge to be used creatively. How many times within the curriculum are questions where divergent and abstract thinking can be used? PBL allows content to be brought together, to help see knowledge as something more than discrete subject areas which just belong in schools.
Chris, Pete
What stands out from both your replies is ‘carefully planned’ and ‘questions where divergent and abstract thinking can be brought together’. That’s really the key isn’t it: value the knowledge, then carefully plan questioning so that it isn’t just about guessing what’s in the back of the book. Everything else is faff and gloss.
Many thanks, David
Hi David,
I’m really pleased that my Big Day Out presentation made you think, however I can’t help but feel a little misunderstood and misrepresented by your article entitled ‘Knowledge is Power’.
My point was that knowledge is not unimportant, or unnecessary, it’s just that it’s not as important as it once was. The idea behind embracing vagueness is that along with nurturing children’s innate curiosity, it can actually be a vehicle that enables children to increase their knowledge far beyond the limits of a lesson with predetermined outcomes.
What I wasn’t able to do in the twenty minutes presentation, was to model, or explain fully, how process would work.
With Little Miss Sunshine, the object is introduced, and then the children are taken through a structured question generating session (using some of the features of Question Formulation Technique – primary style!). When they’ve generated questions, we do some sorting based on Three Way Thinking (an idea that stemmed from Ian Gilbert’s 8 way thinking) with the children deciding which category the questions would go in. The three strands are Research (self explanatory), Explore (questions that could be investigated), and Think (the more philosophical stuff). With very young children, each category is represented by a picture/symbol to make it more accessible. For older ones, in a science context, the ‘Explore’ could be replaced with ‘Test’.
An example might be:
Research:
Who made it?
Explore:
How does it work?
Think:
Can you be happy all of the time? (Potential for a P4C starter)
Following this, there could be discussion about which areas the children want to explore further. Equally, the teacher may decide to address a particular strand based on the learning they want the children to experience i.e to ‘understand how a simple circuit works’. All the children’s questions are valued and can be shared – some might be worked on straight away, others ‘parked’ for later.
It is perfectly possible to ensure that the children have all the required knowledge in terms of the science curriculum, whilst also opening up other opportunities to take their learning forward. The ‘Who made it?’ question is an interesting one, and whilst I haven’t checked, I’m pretty sure she was made in China, or certainly somewhere in Asia. Along with the science learning, perhaps the children could go onto find out about working conditions, fair pay, which in turn could lead to work on FairTrade.
In a recent lesson I taught that was watched by the Chilean visitors and Ian, I used a similarly vague approach to enable the children to learn about the parts of a flower. We started with the news that there had been a terrible crime, and then took the children to a mocked up crime scene complete with multiple tulip victims. They collected a flower, and took them back to the classroom where I modelled an autopsy. During the modelling, whilst professing that I was an expert, I used made up names for each part of the plant/flower – the stem was the sticky bit, the petals, the flippy flappy part. It wasn’t long before the children were berating me, and suggesting that they could do a better job. They then went off to their tables and did! Prior to the lesson, I knew exactly the knowledge that I needed to impart, and could have gone down the direct teaching route. Instead, using this approach, they got the core knowledge, but many of them also learned about photosynthesis and osmosis – KS3 stuff, all without me teaching a thing. With the open ended lesson, there was no imposed limit on what they could find out. (Success Criteria is quite popular in primary at the moment, but it can often lead to lowered or ‘capped’ expectations).
Despite believing in the huge benefits of this kind of learning, I am also a fan of direct teaching. There are plenty of areas of the curriculum where I would not employ vagueness – the teaching of grammar, concepts in maths, or working on the Holocaust with Y6’s for example. A bit like most things in life, I think it’s about balance. My argument, or encouragement to embrace vagueness, is not anti-fact or anti-academic – it’s about bringing both knowledge and skills together. My concerns arise from the tone of the new draft primary curriculum ‘Children should be taught to…’ It’s a real worry that this will encourage some schools or teachers to return to the dark days when the focus was on teaching and not learning.
Perhaps using the mobile phone activity was a mistake, as it isn’t my belief that knowledge is not worth bothering with. The point I was trying to make is that knowledge is more accessible now than ever, and on its own, is not enough. I’m much more interested in the ways in which our children can acquire the knowledge and skills they need to be successful.
When I do a full day inset, I spend half the day dealing with ‘Creative Teaching’ (direct teaching, knowledge, but with fun and engagement), and the other half with ‘Creative Learning’ (embracing vagueness, pupil-led learning) – in my opinion, the best of both worlds!
I wouldn’t want you, or anyone else to think that my approach is one sided – I believe that wonder and awe can go hand in hand with rigour.
I’m not sure if you’re going to the Big Day out in Barnsley, but if you are, maybe we can catch up then.
P.S. I think you might be right about the Ribena and cake.
Best wishes
Jonathan
Hi Jonathan
Thanks for such a detailed response.
I’m sorry to think that you may have felt upset by what I’ve written. This wasn’t an attack on you, but on a popularly expressed position on the importance of knowledge. I tried to make clear in my article that I appreciate and agreed with the idea of vaguenes. If that wasn’t sufficiently clear then I apologise. I think your example of getting children to think about electricity by using Little Miss Sunshine was wonderful and worthwhile; again, I hope I made that clear.
However, if you feel misunderstood and misrepresented on your views about knowledge that may be because I misunderstood you. If that is the case then I may well have misrepresented you. My view is that knowledge is far more important now than at any other point in human history – as you say, maybe the mobile phone activity was a mistake – it seemed like a cheap shot and, I fear, deceived some people in the audience about the importance of being able to contextualise what you are able to look up on the internet. Have you read Hirsch’s pamphlet, “You Can Always Look it Up, Or Can You?” – it does a fine job of demonstrating exactly how and why we can’t outsource our memories to the internet.
I’m pleased to hear your position on this is more nuanced than the presentation allowed for – but under the circumstances I feel I have fairly represented what I heard and saw on the day. I’m afraid I won’t be at the event in Barnsley, but I’m sure we will meet again soon – hopefully we will be able to thrash out our differences and will probably find that we aren’t so very far apart after all.
Many thanks and apologies if I have caused offence, David
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