Understanding understanding.

Understanding is to education what entropy is to physics, emergence is to complexity and the sublime is to aesthetics. Stretching the analogy further (perhaps too far), it might be what heaven is to religion. What each of these concepts has in common is both a level of significance that makes them central to their disciplines but also a level of abstraction that makes them very difficult to define. We can feel that concepts such as beauty, order, emergence and understanding make sense, but it is very difficult to describe exactly what they are.

In education, knowledge is much easier than understanding to define and recognise. A knowledge question such as “what year did Shakespeare die?” is unambiguous and easily taught and learned - for this reason it is often prioritised in high-stakes assessment. Understanding is hard. An understanding question such as “why is Shakespeare so important to our culture?” is much more of a challenge to teach and to assess. Indeed, “knowing” whether a student has “understanding” of the concept remains  endlessly problematic; understanding whether a student has understanding is interestingly less so.

While wrestling with what it means to teach for understanding, I’ve been thinking about lego. I have a lego analogy I’d like to try out: as you read this, I hope you’ll join me to take my analogy for a spin and think critically about how it performs.

Teaching for understanding might be a bit like learning with lego blocks. Imagine I want to teach Amrita and Bill an understanding of what a house is. I’m going to give each a pile of lego blocks to make a house, but I’m going to teach each one of them quite differently as I work to build understanding.

I give Amrita her pile and say, “Amrita, here’s a big pile of lego blocks. What I want you to do is make a lego house. You can use any of the blocks you like but do your best to make a great house.”

I give Bill his pile and say, “Bill, here’s a big pile of lego blocks and here’s some great instructions written by the lego people in Denmark to help you make a house. Follow those instructions and I’m looking forward to seeing your house.”

Amrita and Bill each start working away and eventually finish their houses. Amrita makes her house very quickly but then changes her mind and starts again. In fact she changes her mind quite a few times as she works, adjusting and adapting as she goes. Her final house takes her a while to build and it’s a bit wobbly in places but a good achievement nonetheless. 

Bill, a methodical worker, follows the instructions carefully and builds a lovely house. He finishes his house quite a while before Amrita finally gets hers done and he’s able to sit back and admire his carefully crafted handiwork.

Who has learned what? Who has gained knowledge and who has understanding? Here’s some thoughts.

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Through experimentation, Amrita has learned about what does and doesn’t work when you are putting things together. She has had to reflect more critically on what the concept of a “house” might be as she envisioned the final house she was creating. Her learning was mostly limited to what she already understood about the concept of a house but she has a richer understanding of how to organise the blocks and herself to create a final vision.

Bill has had a very different experience to Amrita. By following instructions, he has implicitly learned one way that a house can be structured. He may not have understood in the same detail as Amrita why his house is built the way it is (what, for example, might go wrong if he were to alter some of the structure), but he may also have a complex vision of one way that a house can be made.

Amrita has had to combine and synthesise prior knowledge and shape it to create and demonstrate understanding. Bill has likely had his knowledge expanded with greater complexity than Amrita and may have had opportunities for understanding opened to him. Evidence of understanding is more evident in Amrita’s house but it may also be occurring in Bill’s. 

So which is the better way to learn?

I think it depends. If both Amrita and Bill have an existing provisional understanding of what a house is, then it’s likely that Amrita emerges with a more complex understanding. She now knows a lot more than Bill about how bits and pieces fit together and importantly how they don’t. Bill completely missed the opportunity to know what doesn’t work, and this can be a critical piece in our quest for understanding. Bill might know a bit more about one way to envision a complex house, but Amrita has a much more autonomous understanding of how to engage in the process of creating a house; she has certainly demonstrated an understanding of the concept “house” that Bill has not. He may or may not have a comparable understanding but this task doesn’t demonstrate his understanding and likely hasn’t allowed him to expand his understanding even if it has expanded knowledge.

But what if neither of Amrita or Bill had any knowledge of the concept they were building at all? 

What if, for example, the task was to build a DNA molecule and neither Amrita nor Bill had any  knowledge at all of molecular biology?

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In this scenario, Amrita would really struggle. Without any vision of the final concept she is trying to construct, her lego pile would likely have to stay a pile. 

Bill, following instructions from Denmark, could get straight into the construction process and quickly build an impressive DNA structure. 

In this scenario, Bill has been much more successful in the building process, but what has he understood? Without some contextual learning about what a DNA molecule is and is for, his understanding about DNA may not be much more complex than Amrita’s pile of blocks. Bill may have come a little further than Amrita, but we would be mistaken to assume that because he has built a DNA molecule and Amrita hasn’t, that he has a significantly better understanding.

Building Understanding about Essay Writing

The lego metaphor has been prompted by some thinking around how we teach students to write essays. In Middle School, the essay, like the DNA molecule, is very new to students. As the lego analogy demonstrates, acquiring understanding when a concept is new is a challenge. Without some knowledge of the concept, understanding is limited; without some understanding, knowledge is limited. 

What might applying the lego analogy to the teaching of essay writing look like?

In Amrita’s case, the method would be to say to Amrita something along the lines of “here’s a book with a bunch of ideas we’ve talked through in class, now I’d like you to turn your ideas into an essay.” Amrita, with little or no idea of what an essay is, would struggle to complete the task. Based on my experience of students new to essay writing, she would likely either write what she liked about the book or she would write a long collection of information about what is in the book. In both cases, her writing would lack any clear understanding of the purpose and form of an essay.

In Bill’s case, he would be given a very detailed rubric. The rubric would tell him exactly what to write in each paragraph, where to include quotes and how to start and end his essay. He would end with some knowledge of what an essay can look like but, as the lego analogy demonstrates, he may not end with much understanding. 

The trouble with a detailed rubric is that it can give students and teachers a false sense of achievement but may not support transferable understanding. The trouble with no rubric is that students may not even begin to learn.

The challenge is to find the right balance between instruction and experimentation, the proximal zone for learning that best produces the desired outcome of understanding and mastery.

The art of teaching is often about finding this sweet spot between knowledge and understanding where learning will happen. This spot is different for every student on every task on any given day. Curriculum materials can’t provide this kind of specificity but they can provide this kind of flexibility.

Finding the Sweet Spot

What we’re learning at UWCSEA as we work in the Middle School with the TCRWP Units of Study, is that the best learning happens when we use a toolkit containing both instructions and freedom to experiment and explore. Neither Amrita’s freedom to experiment nor Bill’s tightly controlled instructions alone are going to efficiently produce understanding: true understanding happens when you have a much richer combination of both. It’s hard to get this right, but when you have checklists with just the right level of abstraction and models that are meaningful for students you have a good beginning. The other ingredient is a pedagogical framework that gives some instruction mixed with a good amount of time for students to experiment, get feedback, and try again.

What in the end I think I understand about understanding is that it is an emergent phenomenon; it can’t be taught but it can be learned. Crafting the right kind of learning environment is at the heart of this understanding.

Teach the writer, not the writing.

A couple of months back I started working on a presentation to parents explaining how and why we teach writing in the Middle School at UWCSEA East.

It was a surprisingly difficult thing to write: focussing on the "how" seemed uninspiring; focussing on the "why" seemed too abstract. In the end what seemed to work was focussing on a specific example of student writing and using this as the narrative focus to talk through both the "how" and the "why".

Making the abstract "real" through a concrete example helped to give my presentation a little more vitality.

I delivered the presentation to parents last Thursday evening and then we all headed off to classrooms for a hands-on writing experience. Once in the classrooms the parents took the role of students and two teachers worked together to teach the lesson - one in the role of classroom teacher and the other as a pedagogical commentator interjecting occasionally with explanations about the process and the theory behind it.

Making the abstract real in the classroom was a huge success. Feedback from parents was that my presentation was OK, but what they really loved was the writing classroom which helped them truly understand how their children learn.

Below is a version of my presentation. You'd be far better off to have come and joined us in the classroom, but this is OK as a second-best. I think our whole English team is looking forward to doing this again next year.

--oOo--

Good evening,

My name is Ian Tymms and my role is Middle School Head of English.

In 15 mins we’ll be moving to classrooms to do some writing. My aim in the interim is to give you some context to help you understand more about the how and why of what you’ll be learning in our classrooms.

On the screen is the lead and first paragraph of an investigative journalism article written by one of our Grade 8 students last term. I’d like to read this to you and as I do, I wonder if I can ask you to cast your mind all the way back to your own experiences in Middle School. What kind of feedback do you think this piece of writing might have received when you were at school?

The Modern World of Peer Pressure

By A Grade 8 Student

Josh sits down by the curb, waiting for his bus to arrive. A couple minutes later, he is met by another group of kids from his school, who, to his surprise, are smoking. They sit behind him. Suddenly, one of the kids taps him on the shoulder. “d’you want a cig?”  he motions to his pocket, revealing a packet of new cigarettes. Josh shakes his head and turns back around, feeling the stare of the kids burn into his spine. He feels small, he feels cold. Suddenly, he stands up and starts walking away, walking as fast as he can.

When most people think about Peer Pressure, these above types of negative situations would come up with their head. But instead, the victim would succumb to it. This example shows just one of the many social circumstances children around the world face every day. But just like this scenario, good parenting and general better decision making made by children around the world, makes it so that most children around the world come up with solutions to their own peer pressure.

Turn and Talk - what feedback do you think this piece of writing would have received when you were in Middle School?

(30 seconds for discussion)

If, like me, you were educated a very long time ago, you might well have come through an education system where the emphasis was in fixing mistakes. Feedback was often via a red pen which would be used to underline key errors.

In the early years of my teaching career, my feedback to this student might have looked something like this:

“You’ve written an engaging first paragraph. The second paragraph suggests you need to learn to draft your writing. Reading your writing out loud might help you improve your expression and avoid repetitive phrases.”

I’m going to say something provocative now which is that this feedback is unlikely to be useful.

And here’s why:

The feedback I’ve just given focusses on the writing and has little connection with the student.

Twenty years ago, this is often how we taught, the writing was what mattered and fixing the writing was the objective.

What we want to show you tonight is how much more powerful the learning can be when we focus on the writer rather than the writing.

Let me ask you two  more focussed questions as I read you part of the student’s self-assessment:

Here’s what he wrote:

The piece of writing I have highlighted in the top of the article shows my ability to hook and engage the reader with my anecdote. My anecdote also demonstrates the power of change in tense, as my first paragraph is done completely in present tense as if it is a narrative piece of writing, as well as in active verb form. However, my tense changes to past tense, as well as passive verb form, as we were taught, that provides a far more journalistic tone, and shows that the piece of writing is more about the news, and showing info, rather than being about the action.

Like all stories, this student’s writing life exists in a context.

To support the student as a writer, there are some important things we need to know:

• we need to know him  
• We need to know the learning that has been going on in class
• We need to know what form of writing the student is engaging with and how the student is using this form of writing to engage with the world.

Were we to focus simply on this student’s writing, we would undoubtedly miss some powerful learning about grammar as this student builds an understanding of the way tense and voice can be used to position an audience. Without knowing the student, we can’t know why his expression is a bit clumsy and without knowing why, we can’t know whether addressing this or another issue is what he most needs. Most important of all, if we don’t recognise and foster the student’s growing capacity to use writing to engage with his world, we risk missing the very point of writing.

If we focus on the writing rather than the writer, we risk completely missing the learning.

Tonight we want to give you some tools to help you engage more powerfully with students as learners. Grades 6, 7 and 8 are so important in student’s development because they are right in the middle of a critical transition from childhood to adulthood. Writing is not just a mechanism for passing exams, it is at the very foundation of student’s ability to make sense of their world and shape their responses to it;

supporting student’s growing reading and writing skills is is a moral imperative long before it is an exam requirement.

One can find morality even in the utility of exams, however, and I’d like to take a moment to show you why building a student’s agency as a reader and writer in Middle School is so important for their future exam success.

This slide is a screenshot of the examination criteria for an A and an A*, the two highest grades in IGCSE English at Grade 10. We know from previous years that over half of our students will be in these two bands and about ⅓ will be in the A* range. The criteria and achievement rates are similar for IB English in Grade 12.

Let me zoom in a little closer.

The A criteria says:

Sustains a perceptive and convincing personal response

A* adds to that with the expectation that students will write...

with further insight, sensitivity, individuality and flair. And show complete and sustained engagement with both text and task.

The examiners at Grade 10 are focussed on the writer rather than the writing as well. Whilst they can’t know the context of the writer, they are nonetheless looking carefully in the writing to try to uncover the voice of a student who is engaged and autonomous.

The really important question to ask is how and when these skills are best taught. What we are told by experienced IGCSE and Grade 12 English teachers such as Kate Levy, our Head of High School English here at East and Stuart MacAlpine, who prior to being Director of Curriculum at East was Head of High School English at Dover, is that it is relatively easy to teach a student to write an exam essay; it is much, much harder to teach them voice, insight, sensitivity, individuality, flair and engagement.

These skills are the consequence of years of immersion in a rich and challenging language environment beginning right back when you first started talking to your child and continuing through the early years of their education into Primary School and Middle School.

Our responsibility in Middle School is NOT to teach exam style essays week after week. Our responsibility is to engage students with a rich and broad foundation in Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening. For success in life and in exams, students need to have read widely as well as deeply in the areas that are of particular interest to them, they need to have experimented with their writing voice and tried many different forms and genres, they need to feel part of a community that encourages and challenges them to speak up and say what is important to them.

And all this needs to be supported by a carefully constructed and sequenced curriculum which provides them with the right language skills at the right time in their development.

So what does this look like in the classroom and how can you best support this kind of complex learning at home?

In just a moment we move to the classrooms where the MS English teachers will take you through a lesson. Anne Marie Chow, our amazing Literacy Coach, has worked with us to design a lesson which should give you a sense of how your sons and daughters learn. It’ll be hands on - we want you to write - but we’ll also give you some tips and tools for how to support writing at home.

I’d like to prime you with a few things to look out for.

Pay attention to how we focus on you as a writer rather than specifically on your writing. We’ll give you copies of the Learning Principles document that Stuart introduced, to help you think about how we teach and you’ll see a summary chart of this in the classroom, too.

There will be whole class instruction, but much of the lesson will also be time for you to write. During this time, the teacher will be conferring with some of you. If you’re not lucky enough to have a conference, keep an ear out for what is going on. This is one of the most powerful parts of a lesson because it’s where the teacher gets the chance to assess how the student is developing as a writer and support them to take next steps in their learning.

Tonight’s lesson will be only a tiny snapshot, but in the normal run of a writing unit, the student would have a menu of skills they would be learning from (we call this a checklist) and the conference is a chance for the teacher to see where the student is growing and celebrate and build that growth.

Notice the confidence that comes from the encouragement and autonomy that conferencing supports.

And when you leave tonight, we’ll give you this card with a few prompts to help out at home.

We hope this will be useful.

My guess, however, is that the most useful thing you will take from tonight, is a stronger awareness of learning as a process. A process in which we collaborate - you as parents, us as teachers and your kids right in the very center.

Reference of Frames

I got lucky, once, when teaching a Literature class about point-of-view. My friend Mark Friedlander had made an art installation which showed what I was struggling to tell.

I took my class to the gallery and invited them to engage with Mark’s work. It was plywood, like a packing case, about two meters high and a meter square. On two sides were tiny holes. If you walked up and put your eye to a hole, you saw into a miniature white corridor illuminated from above. It was like looking into the start of a labyrinth; your imagination was invited into the possibilities of a space where your physical body couldn’t go.

Mark Friedlander

You can see some later iterations of Mark’s work here.

It strikes me now that Mark’s box was a lot like the way I think about poetry: it was a space for the viewer/reader to make meaning. Many meanings were possible but all were bounded by Mark’s manipulation of the space - his crafting of the materials and his manipulation of the light source.

Tonight I have been thinking again about Mark’s art as I try to find a way to describe a dance performance I have just seen. The performance was called Impulse and it was extraordinary.

Unique in my experience, this was a “site specific” work, which meant that the performance wasn’t on a stage. Instead, the ticket gave directions to the stage door of Singapore’s Esplanade Theatre with clear instructions that if you were late, you wouldn’t be admitted.

At 7:00 pm sharp, I found myself backstage in the greenroom with 30 other audience members. After an initial safety briefing - “we’ll be moving around a lot, be careful - when you sit or stand for each scene, stay inside the taped areas otherwise you might get hurt by the dancers” - we were led through to the first performance space, a loading bay where we were asked to sit on the ground in the small space designed to be occupied by an off-loading truck.

Da:ns Festival

Load industrial music. Drum beats and sounds like assembly-line machinery. Dancers in blacks and greys and khaki. High energy. Running and jumping off walls. An intimate space with concrete and echoes. But a beginning that was powerfully confronting as a female dancer had her head bounced in slow motion against a wall and then held by her male companion against a railing. And the two of them froze for an uncomfortably long time so that the audience started taking furtive looks around to see if something was meant to be happening somewhere else. When the tension was broken by the four other dancers re-entering the space, the energy kept building. The raw intimacy of the dancing was accentuated by droplets of dancer-sweat hitting my face.

Clearly quite a performance. From the loading bay we moved to an industrial lift for the second movement and then to a workshop and finally a basement corridor between warehoused props.

It was in the workshop space that I started thinking about "framing" and Mark’s artwork. Ordinarily the workshop we were in builds the props which frame the dancers but tonight it became a frame itself. The choreography made extensive use of the fixtures in the space with the dancers plunging over and under tables, sliding on saw-benches and climbing on prop-boxes. The music and choreography was again pulsing and industrial with machine noises and movements that made me think about things being made. Things being shaped and controlled.

I’m struggling to find the words to describe the power and the point, but I think that may be part of the point; dance like music is its own language and not usefully reduced to the banality of words.

As I sat to try to write about it, I found instead that a poem was forming about my ambivalent relationship with cameras. Like Mark’s box, the camera takes the endless possibilities of the world and sucks them through a lens into a box. The world is framed and so often this seems banal. An Eichmann-like repetition of an unreflective act.

What I value about art - poetry, sculpture, dance and photography - is its capacity to reframe our experience - its capacity to invite a different view shaped to unsettle us from what is familiar. Tonight’s dance performance will keep me searching for words for a long time to come.

You can read the poem I wrote here.

A window into the soul

Sunday night in Singapore

Primitive people, so I’m told,

Feared photography because

It stole their soul.

In civilised countries,

Like Singapore and Australia

Kalashnikov cameras

Shoot holes in everything -

Capturing images

Like there’s no tomorrow.

Certainty

The line between
word and world
Is no greater than
A typo.

Tongue tip
To tooth
Touching a

Certainty

I have no
Way to
Verify.
"Guilty"

"Innocent".
Words and
Words and
Words and

Worlds entwined;
Tripping off
The tongue
Like

Lazy mood
Music that
Means
Nothing.

A missing
Letter
Signifying
Everything.

Cultural Archaeology

A photo

Freud, I think, would have been amused by the photo I took outside his house this summer. Across the road from the Viennese apartment where Freud worked and lived is now a 2nd hand shop and in the window of this shop is a display of Barbie Dolls. My photo captures the facade of the Freud Museum reflected above a crowd of used Barbie Dolls.

It's not hard to imagine what Freud might have thought about Barbie. With her impossibly exaggerated proportions, the Barbie Doll represents an intrusion (extrusion?) of adult sexuality into childhood consciousness. Freud claimed that sexuality in various forms is an inherent part of childhood anyway, but I suspect he might have had a lot to say about the way consumer marketing has used the Barbie Doll to exploit the uncertainties of an emerging childhood identity. What I’d be interested to hear is Freud’s thoughts about the focus of this marketing – is Barbie more marketed to children or their parents? Is the attraction of Barbie’s exaggerated proportions grounded more in the insecurities of the children who ask for the doll or the parents who give it to them? Adding layer to layer, what does a 2nd hand Barbie represent (does she feel used?) and why have so many been placed in a shop-front in this affluent Viennese suburb? With my interest piqued, I decided to go inside and explore.

Entering any shop is a little like walking into someone’s mind. What is placed where says something about the priorities and values of the shopkeeper and the kind of relationship they might be hoping to build with you. Like the eye-shadow and red lipstick of a prospective lover, a shop is arranged to attract and entice. But a 2nd hand shop is a little different. None of the fresh, smooth polish of a fashion outlet here; instead there is a kind of aging lack of pretence. A 2nd hand shop represents a version of a vision of what has lasting value – what has enough residual utility to be offered up for a second term in the market without polish or pretence.

Inevitably my browsing was turning from something passive to a more active process of cultural archaeology: an attempt to explore the layers, trying to find the underlying maps that could help me navigate a culture that 100 years ago had produced Freud and now produced a display of barbie dolls looking back at him. 

On one wall, cheap paintings with splashes of fast colour; on another, a shelf of mugs with sayings for the office; in a corner, a rack of suits now perhaps fashionably out-of-date; a back room with bookshelves filled with books in German, tantalisingly indecipherable.

What struck me most was how familiar everything seemed. Language aside, this shop was fundamentally familiar. Add a few wetsuits and board shorts and I could be at home in Melbourne. The sense of an ordered chaos - a mass of mostly related objects piled up more for utility than for appearance - was just like any similar shop in any number of cities around the world.

Except for the Barbie Dolls. And here I was left with a conundrum and a sense of hope. My hope is that the Barbies were placed deliberately to be ironic. Sitting looking as they do at Freud's home, they made me wonder if they might just be a humorous challenge: "look at me Freud" they seemed to say, "can you imagine, from your conservative pre-war world, that children might end up with toys that look like us?" 


And Freud, I think, would have smiled. Sitting in his upstairs living room contemplating the extortionate "emigration tax" required by the nazis as a bribe to escape the impending holocaust, Freud no doubt saw a dark future for his city. 

But Freud, too, was a master of irony. A final condition of leaving Austria was that he sign a document attesting to his good treatment by the German Reich. It read:

 "I Prof. Freud, hereby confirm that after the Anschluss of Austria to the German Reich I have been treated by the German authorities and particularly the Gestapo with all the respect and consideration due to my scientific reputation, that I could live and work in full freedom, that I could continue to pursue my activities in every way I desired, that I found full support from all concerned in this respect, and that I have not the slightest reason for any complaint."

 Ernest Jones writes that,  'When the Nazi Commissar brought it along Freud had of course no compunction in signing it, but he asked if he might be allowed to add a sentence, which was: "I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone".' 1.

From a world wiped of humour and humanity by the scourge of Nazism, I think Freud would have taken a little delight in the idea of this gaggle of Barbie Dolls looking across the street. I have spent the last few months trying to decipher what they mean and I still don't know; there's a lot not to like about Barbie, but in this display in modern Vienna, I couldn't help but see a little humour and hope.




1.Ernest Jones: Sigmund Freud. Life and work. (1957) 

Spinning a Yarn

In the 1980s, when I went to Melbourne University, the Old Arts building had only one renovated lecture theatre. In contrast to the oak panelling and uncomfortable chairs of the other spaces, the "Public Lecture Theatre" had tiered seating upholstered in the pastels of late '80s modernity. It was a place of flickering fluorescent lights and shimmering contrasts. Outside, the sandstone walls spoke of tradition and gravitas; inside, the sound-absorbing roof panels whispered invitations to the future.

Each week I sat in this shimmering space for my "Introduction to Philosophy" lecture. My lecturer was one of the best teachers I have ever had. Frustratingly I don't remember much about him, but I have vivid recollections of his teaching. Lectures would begin with him walking briskly to the lectern, removing his tweed cap and taking a piece of chalk from his pocket. The entire lecture would be structured as a conversation between "Chalky" and "Hatty". Hatty would pose a problem to which Chalky would respond - occasionally using one of the many blackboards to illustrate his point. I don't remember my teacher ever referring to notes nor do I remember him ever standing still; he paced constantly, eye's closed, holding in turn Chalky or Hatty as the dialogue progressed.

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Two particular lectures have stayed deeply rooted in my memory. The first was an introduction to Plato's Theory of Forms. Plato, in responding to the philosophic challenge of how we might know the universal essence of a thing, developed one of the most famous theories in philosophy. Let me try to illustrate the problem and Plato's solution.

Hatty: This morning I drank coffee from my coffee cup. As I drank, I wondered about how I know that a cup is a cup. I know my particular coffee cup is a cup because I have drunk from it before and I recognise it as the cup I drank from yesterday. But if today my housemate accidentally broke this particular cup and bought a new one to replace it and left it on the table for me, how would I know that the new cup was a cup and not, for example, a plate? No two cups are exactly alike and the new cup might be a little shorter or taller or fatter or thinner. It would likely have slightly different characteristics to any other cup I had ever known, but I would still know it to be a cup. How could this be?

Chalky: Well Socrates would tell you that in your head you have a perfect image of "cupness" and when you see the new cup, you compare it to this image and note that it fits the image more nearly than it does that of your image of "plateness" or any other category you hold in your head. Socrates called these categories "Forms" and argued that they are deeply grounded in our minds. They are part of an ideal world which includes also categories like "Good" and "Evil".

In a very simplistic nutshell, that is Plato's Theory of Forms. Hatty would no doubt have a lot of questions to ask about the idea as have philosophers since.

Assessment - from a Platonic perspective

The Theory of Forms has something in common with the challenge we as teachers have in assessing students' writing. Like the "cup" on the table, we must decide whether a student essay is a good approximation of "essayness" or not. But like the cup bought by Hatty's housemate, every student essay will have properties that are unique; there will be combinations of words I have never seen before. So how, when I look at an essay, can I decide if it is a good approximation of the ideal?

A common answer teachers bring to this problem is the rubric. One view of a writing rubric is that it describes the characteristics of an ideal essay and acts as a template for judging individual student approximations of this ideal.

Immediately, of course, we hit a problem. Plato's forms exist only in the abstract (like the idea of a perfect circle) and a rubric that was even close to accurate would need to be so detailed as to be unworkable. Such a rubric might describe some of the elements of an ideal essay, but could never tell us how to combine these elements with originality or creativity and an essay without originality or creativity is surely not an ideal essay at all. In the end what rubrics for writing (such as those used for the GCSE) often end up saying is that an excellent essay demonstrates creativity and flare, which, as a detailed guide to teaching and assessment, isn't much use. In essence, all a rubric of this nature is telling a reader is that a good essay show's "good-essay-ness".

An alternative view

Fortunately Chalky and Hatty had more to say on the matter. Whilst the early lectures focussed on an introduction to Plato, some of the later ones address more modern responses to the same issues. A lecture about Wittgenstein's theory of Family Resemblances is vividly in my memory.

Hatty: Understanding how two objects are related is difficult. One of the problems I am finding with Plato's Theory of Forms is that it seems to require that the ideal forms are present in my head from birth and that doesn't seem to correspond with my understanding of the world. I know that I can learn new things and whilst I can agree that there seem to be some categories that might be in my head from the beginning, that doesn't seem to be the case for many of the things I think I know. Maybe the concept of a circle was always in my mind, but I don't think the concept of a Canadian was. The category "Canadian" seems to be something I have learned and I can even imagine that, had history unfolded differently, this category might never have existed. Plato certainly would not have had an category of "Canadian". 

Chalky: Indeed. The problem of how we can understand two related objects as being connected is very difficult. There is another way of understanding the problem developed by the 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. 

Imagine you have a family with 5 brothers. 

Brother one has blue eyes, long hair, a long nose and big ears. 

Brother two has blue eyes, long hair, a long nose but small ears.

Brother three has blue eyes, long hair but a short nose and small ears.

Brother four has blue eyes but short hair, a short nose and small ears.

Brother five has brown eyes, short hair, a short nose and small ears.

All five brothers belong to the same family but brothers one and five have no characteristics in common. What links them is not their individual characteristics but their relationship through shared characteristics with other members of the family. 

Hatty: Interesting. But how does this help to solve the problems of essential understandings that we found existed in Plato's theory? 

Chalky: Well what Wittgenstein is pointing out is that words and concepts don't have to have meaning in any essential way, but they can point to relationships or connections. What makes our 5 brothers members of the same family is not any particular quality they share, but the connections between them. If we think about the problem of recognising the cup that my housemate has bought, it is not any essential "cupness" that makes the new cup a cup, but some qualities which I recognise it as sharing with some other cups. 

Although this may not sound very profound there is a very important difference in recognising the problem from this perspective of resemblances or, as Wittgenstein described them on other occasions, as language games. "Cupness" becomes not an essence but a set of shared characteristics which I recognise because I have been learning this "game". The rules of "cupness" can change as my culture changes its conventions on what will be seen as a cup. The rules of "Canadianess" are certainly changing constantly both at a formal legal level and also at the more subtle level of cultural identity. 

Another metaphor that Wittgenstein used to explain the nature of concepts is that of a thread. In referring to the concept of "number" here's what he said:

Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a direct relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. (source)

Hatty: So the insight we take from Wittgenstein is that words indicate relationships and we know concepts as being like a set of games, or connections or threads that we are constantly weaving and elaborating and extending. 

Chalky: Exactly.

Some implications for assessment.

As we develop Standards and Benchmarks for our curriculum at UWCSEA and prepare them for use in our teaching and assessment, how should we understand their nature and purpose?

No doubt my thinking will evolve as the yarn spins, but, for the moment, here's what Chalky has lead me to think:

Rubrics are useful because they help to organise and prioritise the fibres that we will focus on in our teaching and students will use to make the threads of their learning. But the threads themselves are beyond the scope of a rubric, and, in the end, it is the threads that matter most, not the fibres.

To put this another way: our curriculum helps us to define specific parts of an essay that are useful to learn because this learning points to characteristics of language games which help students understand the cultural territory of "the essay". But a curriculum (or a rubric) can never provide the kind of complexity needed to understand how a specific essay fits within the category "essayness". This requires the enormous complexity of a well-trained, culturally complex, essay reader - a professional English teacher. The teacher who reads the essay and notices the original organisation of words can look to see how these words fit within the conventions of the game of "essayness" and make a decision about whether this particular essay is playing the game with flair or not.

This suggest two things to me about assessment in English:

1. The role and function of rubrics is limited. Powerful, yes, in focussing in on the crafted fibres of learning that expert teachers hone to point students towards the culturally vast and unstable spaces of understandings. But limited in that they are never an end in themselves.

2. Teachers need to trust their professional knowledge when they make judgements about attainment. In the end, it is the skill of the expert reader that we need to rely on when judgements are to be made about the way a particular essay has engaged in the playful cultural spaces of our language games.

Spinning a yarn

In Australia, my home, the process of storytelling is known vernacularly as "spinning a yarn". Bushmen sit drinking tea around campfires conjuring worlds from their words. For me, one of the great mysteries of the world is how this process works. How is it that a particular combination of words can come together in the hands of a gifted storyteller to build something strong and beautiful?

What Wittgenstein suggests is that spinning a yarn is not a skill we are born with but one we learn through our rich engagement in the complexity of our culture. I thank my wonderful lecturer and Chalky and Hatty for sharing this understanding.

At the most profound level, learning is a conversation; a thread we continue to spin.