What Brain Science might teach us about Conceptual Understanding.

Evolutionary cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga argues that one useful way to understand the brain is as a collection of modular units each evolved to solve particular functional challenges. Let me give an example: 

You’re standing on the curb ready to cross at the pedestrian lights on your way to work. The lights turn green and you start to step onto the road. Just as you step forward a flash of red in your peripheral vision causes you to step back quickly onto the curb.

Several things have happened in this scenario. Because you are familiar with the process of crossing roads and have crossed this road many times before, your brain is following a script for how to read the green light and where to walk. You do this relatively automatically, perhaps directing your attention to a podcast you’re listening to or thinking about your day ahead as you stand at the lights. When you step forward onto the road and the flash of red light is detected in your peripheral vision, another set of scripts come into play. You have learned that vehicles travel on this road and that they may approach fast and be dangerous. Your brain detects a possible danger and structures deep in the brain activate autonomic responses which cause you to jump backwards. Your heart rate is elevated, digestion is slowed, your pupils dilate and your body automatically prepares itself to respond to the threat. 

Activating your “fight or flight” response in this instance was a very good idea. Although this brain system is very primitive - your response was anatomically roughly the same as that of a dog or a lizard were they to have been crossing the road beside you - jumping out of the way of a bus has clear evolutionary advantages. Inside your brain are structures which evolved to keep you safe from predators but which are still clearly functional in the modern world. 

It is of course possible that the flash of red was not a bus. It might, for example, have been the reflection of a billboard on your new sunglasses. In this case you would have jumped for no good reason but you would still be alive. Over-reacting has only minor negative consequences. Under-reacting is potentially fatal.

Now consider this scenario:

You are at a football game dressed in the colours of your team, excited to have got rare tickets for this finals match. Last year your team also got into the finals and you also managed to get tickets for you and a couple of mates; you stood in the middle of the fans chanting and cheering and had a brilliant time feeling at one with the team. This year you got delayed and your mates arrived before you. In your hurry you went in through the wrong entrance and you’ve found yourself in the middle of the opposition fans. Nobody has said anything, but you feel like people are looking at you and you remain subdued. It’s too late in the match and things are too packed for you to move. You quietly take off you scarf and hat and put them in your bag as you watch. After the match you catch up with your mates for a drink at a local cafe. There’s a TV in the cafe and when an item comes on the news about refugees entering your country, you join your mates in complaining about refugees coming to your country rather than staying in their own.

Cognitive neuroscience shows us that, just as we have structures in our brains that are evolved to keep us safe from predators, so too we have structures evolved from our hunter-gatherer past to help us identify with our social group and make us wary of outsiders. In our evolutionary past, these structures served the purpose of creating strong bonds between group members leading to behaviours that increased the likelihood of individual tribes surviving. It’s probable that competition between tribes for limited resources meant that outsiders were often dangerous and it was wise to be wary.

In this instance, a deeply embedded evolutionary structure or “module” is very problematic in our modern world. Although we still enjoy and find comfort in tribal behaviours - such as supporting football teams - our world has evolved beyond tribalism but our brains are struggling to catch up. In our complex globalised world we need more than autonomic responses to enable us to live well together.

Conceptual Understanding

We perceive ourselves to be deliberately thinking about the world, sorting out the information available to us, and making considered decisions about what we will do next. Mostly this is wrong. Mostly our actions are determined by scripts and systems such as the one that saves you from being hit by a bus or causes you to chant and scream at a football match. Micheal Gazzaniga is one of many cognitive neuroscientists whose work shows that the basic architecture of the brain is not designed to work carefully through to a decision but rather to make predictions using existing scripts and modules to allow for quick responses which minimise cognitive load. The part of our brains that does the hard thinking work - our short term memories - is easily overwhelmed and needs shortcuts and supports to help it do its job. 

One way to think about education is that it is the deliberate front-loading of the scripts needed to allow us to function well.  In a cultural world which is evolving faster than our brain architecture, we need to be front-loading scripts which can be accessed to allow us to quickly navigate each new challenge as it faces us. These scripts range from narratives about good and evil which can front-load moral behaviours to strategies for approaching computational challenges such as which packet of breakfast cereal is better value. Extrapolating from the work of philosophers such as Jurgen Habermas and Amartya Sen, we can see that the process of reasoning through a solution to a particular problem is not something we do in our heads in the moment, rather it’s something that has been mostly done for us through the scripts we learn. Sen and Habermas argue that what is “reasoned” and “reasonable” is a culturally evolved negotiation between those who shape our cultural understandings. When we learn those scripts, we inherit those negotiated understandings.

Which brings me to the the idea of Conceptual Understanding in education. Here’s how I am increasingly finding myself to be understanding Conceptual Understanding: when we absorb the scripts of our culture, we are gaining Skills and Knowledge; when we learn that the scripts are scripts and that we can engage with them as constructed conventions, we have Conceptual Understanding. 

We can know that it is wrong to see people from a different cultural group as less human or less deserving than ourselves. Conceptual Understanding happens when we understand that racism is not just wrong, but complex and problematic and the result of culturally constructed scripts which have fuzzy boundaries and possibly some functional elements. Loving our own children more than the children of strangers is not wrong, but it is a script evolved from the same conceptual foundations as racism. Learning for Conceptual Understanding means that we are learning to have agency over the scripts which will shape our identity and our future impact on the world rather than simply learning the knowledge and skills that will shape us.

I wonder if we may often mistake Knowledge and Skills for Understanding in our work in education. In the vision of Conceptual Understanding that I am generating here, Understanding is as much a matter of our relationship to Knowledge and Skills as it is any particular educational acquisition; it has as much to do with agency as it does with how we organise information. Evolving beyond the limitations of our hunter-gatherer brains to have the agency to shape a better world, means working deliberately with our modular brains knowing how they work to keep us alive and understanding how we can work with them to make changes for the better.

Afterword

Whilst the specialisation of brain function is relatively well understood and foundational as a concept in psychology, modular brain theory is an emerging and more controversial development. The relationship between mind and brain implicit in modular brain theory can be described in multiple ways and, if Gazzaniga's book Human is anything to go on, there's a lot of very interesting work still to come. 

Kurt Hahn and Experiential Education

Admin building, Gordonstoun School, Scotland

This July I had the great pleasure of spending several hours in the Archive Library at Gordonstoun in Scotland. Gordonstoun was Kurt Hahn’s second school, dating back to the time of his exile to Britain from Germany in the 1930s.

The challenge of a library is how to find one’s way in. In the case of Gordonstoun, the literal path is through the front arch of the Round Square building then up some stairs to the main library - quaintly monastic with it’s raw wooden beams and thick stone walls - and through a rear door to a room which feels every bit like a chapel. 

The intellectual path is the more challenging. The archive is a forest of documents and memorabilia and the fear is that hours can be spent exploring one small region while other, more dramatic spaces, will be missed. Without a plan, you might walk in circles or find that you visit only the most well-trod routes and fail to discover something unique. So I began my navigation with a quote from Hahn, ‘The Moray Firth is my best school master,” and  the hope that I might learn more about his vision for experiential education by navigating a path through his writings about the sailing program.

The Moray Firth is the body of water closest to Gordonstoun; it’s where the school has always kept it’s sailing boats. Today they’re sleek fibreglass ocean-cruising yachts; in the 1930s they were a series of wooden boats traditionally rigged and every bit as capable as their modern counterparts. Hahn’s assertion that the Moray Firth is his most capable teacher is a statement about experiential education. It’s a statement about the power of challenge and a well-crafted learning environment and, for me, it’s a reminder that “the teacher” can be much more than just a person. 

I know from my time working in a number of Kurt Hahn organisations how central experiential education is to his vision. I have been an Outward Bound instructor in Australia, a teacher at Woodleigh School (a Round Square school in Australia) and my present teaching role is at the United World College of South East Asia in Singapore. In each of these organisations outdoor education is more than just an extra-curricular activity, it is central to the curriculum and intentionally designed to shape young minds in specific ways. Where classrooms teach knowledge, skills and understandings, experiential education focusses more on dispositions and attitudes that allow an individual to make something of themselves. 

One discovery in the archive that highlights Hahn’s focus on learning beyond academics is this 1950’s report template.

Notice the relatively small space allocated to English, Maths and other academic subjects. Achievement in each of these areas is represented by only a grade. More considerable space and teacher effort is devoted to describing dispositions like “public spirit” and “ability to plan”. In the Australian curriculum these dispositions are known as Capabilities, in the IB they’re the Approaches to Learning and in the UWCSEA curriculum we call them Skills and Qualities. The desire to teach and report on dispositions is still important in contemporary education, but it certainly isn’t front and centre in the way that it was for Kurt Hahn. 

In contemporary education we have elevated grades to give them a declarative authority beyond other professional teacher judgements. The apparatus of academic assessment - particularly Grade 12 exams - creates a social authority (in sociology this mechanism is called allocation) that often gives grades precedence over other forms of judgement. What Kurt Hahn’s 1950s report format does is balances the weight of judgements differently. It says, as much by its format as by its words, that how we act is more significant than what we know.

In the 1950s when WWII was in near memory, the need to find balance between knowledge and actions must have been pressing. Gordonstoun, like all schools at the time, was a very changed place with many of its teachers having seen active service and some of its staff not having returned from the war. Academic achievement must have seemed less impressive and less pressing when it was personal actions like planning and ability to manage hardship which were keeping people alive and winning battles a few years before. 

This is simplistic, of course. Not far away on the coast of Scotland are the remains of the early RADAR installations which were critical to defence in the the Battle of Britain. WWII was a technological war as much as it was a war of human values and technical knowledge was as much a weapon as determination. But in the 1950s, agency and human dispositions must have seemed very much at the fore of educational thought at Gordonstoun as this report format shows.

Which brings me back to sailing. The story of the Gordonstoun boys sailing the Prince Louis down to Wales during WWII has an important place in the mythology of Outward Bound and we have used this story in our Grade 6 curriculum at UWCSEA East. In summary, when Gordonstoun’s location on the coast of Scotland became too dangerous during the war, the decision was taken to relocate to a safer location in Wales. Most of the school population travelled down by train but a small group of boys sailed down as crew of the school boat, Prince Louis. Over several weeks they sailed down the Caledonian Canal to the West coast of Scotland and through the Irish sea to Wales. They spent several days disoriented in the Irish sea and eventually fell in with a Merchant Navy convoy coming in from the Atlantic. The seamanship and personal qualities of the boys who crewed for this voyage played a part in convincing benefactors of the value of the Outward Bound movement which Kurt Hahn founded soon after.

As I discovered in the Gordonstoun Archives, sailing was a central part of the learning program at all of the Schools that Kurt Hahn built - Salem, Gordonstoun, and UWC Atlantic. I think it was the challenge and camaraderie of sailing that Hahn valued. He wrote that:

an eminent man challenged me to explain what sailing in a schooner could do for international education. In reply, I said we had at that moment the application before us for a future king of an Arab country to enter Gordonstoun. I happened to have at the school some Jews...If the Arab and one of these Jews were to go out sailing on our schooner. . .perhaps in a Northeasterly gale, and if they were become thoroughly seasick together, I would have done something for international education.

It’s hard to quantify the value of experiential education. In the world where I live and teach, it often feels as if money is the best security - that economic prosperity is what will make the world safe - and that is perhaps partly true. Grades on academic subjects are a way that we allocate positions at universities which lead to higher paying jobs and a greater possibility of financial security. 

I think, however, that security meant something different to Hahn and the post-war generation. For Hahn, security was paradoxically a product of testing ourselves in challenging experiential environments and learning the personal dispositions that would build a better world. 

Our challenge as we shape learning in the present time, is to think about what kinds of security we need and how best to prepare our students for the challenges ahead. 

Thank you Louise Avery, Gordonstoun Archivist, and Claire MacGillivray, Director of the Gordonstoun Summer School program, for welcoming Sharon and me into your school.

Digging

Photo by Alistair Christie-Johnston
Peat in Shetland Islands

In my email this week was a message from my uncle who lives in the Shetland Islands, far to the 

north of Scotland. He sent me this picture of his “peat bank” and wrote that, between his peat bank and his million dollar view, he has a unique kind of wealth.

I sent him in return a poem by Seamus Heaney called “Digging” in which Heaney compares the work of his grandfather digging peat and his own work as a poet digging for the good earth with his pen. 

Heaney writes about the way we find meaning in our lives. His father, like his grandfather, dug ‘Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods /Over his shoulder, going down and down/ For the good turf. Digging.’ What I read in the poem is a celebration of the way we can find purpose in our lives and a humble respect from a nobel laureate for his labouring forefathers. 

Meaning emerges in this poem through the juxtaposition of shovel and pen. Nowhere does Heaney write explicitly about the way meaning and purpose can come through digging deeply into the rich earth of our cultural world, but the understandings emerge as carefully shaped as the peat sods his grandfather dug from Toner’s Bog.

I’m far from the poet Heaney is, but my most successful writing has these same characteristics. Meaning emerges through the cracks opened by a metaphor and, like Ted Hughes’ “Thought-fox”, wearily tests its vitality as it enters the space between my mind and yours. It seems to happen almost by accident; an emergent phenomenon as improbable as any other miraculous birth.

...

Words seem to me anything but ordinary. The very possibility of words producing meaning - let-alone creative meaning - seems so unlikely that it’s necessary to stop from time to time to marvel. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote somewhere that imagination is “like snow upon a river, a moment there then gone forever”. In a recent email to a friend I described the creative process as oddly woolly - like herding sheep with little sense of cohesion until suddenly and miraculously they’re all there neatly penned and staring back at you. 

This reflection was based on the experience I had while writing a poem. While I was riding to school I though of a metaphor: "a camera photographing itself in a mirror." I’d written the first half of this post and the ideas were still sloshing about in my head.

What’s interesting is the way the poem emerged. The metaphor was the heart of it. As my journey progressed, the second part of the poem - the idea of the complexity of the mechanisms that capture an image - began to form and when I arrived I sat in my classroom and wrote it down.

Here’s the interesting bit: only when I read what I’d written did much of the potential meaning come to light. The lovely paraphrase of Shakespeare’s line “signifying nothing” - echoing Macbeth’s soliloquy at the death of Lady Macbeth - was unconscious but powerfully apposite. I know the soliloquy, but I had not remembered its use of the metaphor of the “player”; the performer as mimesis, the signifier of a world who’s meaning is futile at best, and incomprehensible at worst. Shakespeare, the greatest interpreter of our world who reminds us at every turn of the futility of

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interpretation. 

The form of the poem as a mirror was deliberate because I wanted the two ends of the poem to reflect endlessly back to one another. Structurally, the poem is a deliberate nod to the philosophic idea of the hermeneutic circle. What emerged from this structural device was the word “beyond” which becomes a fulcrum for the poem. It was the power of this word and of it’s mediation through “nothing/ beyond/ perhaps” that struck me afterwards as powerful. I didn’t write this. These words and the meaning I find in them assembled themselves. 

And as always I am in awe of the power of our minds to dance with the world. From the blade of my uncle's shovel through the echoes of a Shakespearian soliloquy, the terrible beauty of our world assembles.

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

— Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)

Reflection

CC - Wikipedia.

Writing about the brain
Is like a camera
Photographing itself in a
Mirror - a series of
Endless reflections signifying
Nothing
Beyond
Perhaps
The elegant architecture
Of the camera itself -
A miraculous configuration
Of parts in which
A world is reflected.

Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's hard to put labels on this book. It's about complexity and systems theory and sociological analysis of workplace relations on the surface, but in drawing all these areas together it also presented a fundamentally humanist analysis countering the pragmatic and rationalist perspectives that are more common in this field.

Beginning with the idea that in complex systems predicting all eventualities is, by definition, impossible, Perrow argues that we must accept that some kinds of accidents will be inevitable or "normal". A key concept he introduces is that of coupling. When a system is tightly coupled, one event will lead to another without opportunity for intervention; when a system is loosely coupled, buffers of time and human expertise allow for intervention and the possibility of avoiding accidents.

On the surface, this might sound dry and not a very compelling read, but Perrow writes with elegance and a humanist insight that made this book unexpectedly compelling. I found myself constantly comparing and reflecting on how his analysis informed the work I do as a teacher. How does my organisation compare to those that Perrow analyses? And what can I learn through using the lenses of "tight v loose coupling" and "linear v complex" systems?

The big take-away for me in my work was the role of stress and the impact that stress has in limiting the creativity and efficacy of decisions. Tightly coupled complex systems fail because, when the unexpected happens, the system lacks the spaces to release pressure and one event leads to the next in unforeseen ways. When systems are stressed, the capacity for creativity and agency that might ordinarily allow the unexpected to be managed, is reduced. Perrow was dealing with systems where consequences are much more pronounced that a loss of efficacy in a school (the Three Mile Island Nuclear Disaster is a major focus), but I think the basic insights are transferrable to many contexts. What I wondered, as I train the next generation of managers and CEOs, is how building agency into the systems we use to manage and lead in our school, might model the kinds of professional autonomy that students will need to lead effectively in their futures.

Perrow deals only fleetingly with education in his book (and only with universities). It's a sign of the power of his writing that he could prompt so much thinking outside of the direct focus of his analysis. I'm confident that this is a book I will come back to often.

View all my reviews

Shadows.

How much is our present shaped by the uneasy shadows of the past - the half-forgotten spectres that lurk at the periphery of our cultural vision?

As a kid in 1980s white Australia, I remember there were three kinds of jokes: one kind was about Irishmen; one kind about Jews and the third about Aboriginals. Jokes about Irishmen centred on how stupid they were, Jews were money-grabbing and Aboriginals were pitiful and dirty. At the time I had no experience of people who were Irish, Jewish or Aboriginal. I know now that I was surrounded by people from all these backgrounds - some of whom would have been conscious of their heritage and others who were not. It’s an uncomfortable thing to remember as I think about the way these jokes were traded for cultural capital. We were kids passing narratives we didn’t fully understand, but we knew enough to sense the power they gave the teller and the power they sucked from their victims. 

Penguin Books Australia

I’m reminded of these “jokes” as I reflect on James Boyce’s book Van Diemen’s Land. Boyce’s history of early 19th century Tasmania tells of the arrival of the British with their - mostly Irish - convicts and the subsequent conflict with the aboriginal Tasmanians. This part is widely known. What isn’t so well known is how well things went initially and how an abundance of kangaroo and a fairly liberal attitude by the British Governors to the convicts left everyone - including the Aboriginal population - relatively healthy and relatively happy. What changed was the overhunting of kangaroo and the arrival of settlers who were given allocations of grazing land for their sheep. In a short space of time, the grazing lands of Tasmania went from being a shared resource to become a private bounty for the British settler class: conflict became an inevitability.

What also isn’t so widely known is the duplicity of Governor Arthur and George Augustus Robinson, Protector of Aborigines. Boyce sums this up clearly in the following paragraph:

The sense of inevitability about what occurred to the Aborigines that still pervades Tasmanian history is a distortion of the historical record. It disguises the fact that the colonial government made a policy choice. The decision to remove all Tasmanian Aborigines after 1832 and to pursue this relentlessly to its tragic end was, even by the standards of the time, an extraordinary and extreme policy position. Robinson’s public lies and absurd journal self-justifications, along with Arthur’s carefully worded dispatches, have disguised the truth for too long. The colonial government from 1832 to 1836 ethnically cleansed the western half of Van Diemen’s Land [Tasmania] and then callously left the exiled people to their fate. The black hole of Tasmanian history is not the violence between white settlers and the Aborigines - a well-recorded and much-discussed aspect of the British conquest - but the government-sponsored ethnic clearances which followed it.

So how much is our present brash self-confident Australian identity built on a past we choose not to remember? Like the jokes of my childhood, how many of the cultural narratives which we use to shape our present identity are built from a fabric of repressed history we choose not to remember? How many of those who are stridently opposed to “boat people” are choosing not to remember the migration stories of their own families? When the government chooses not to engage Aboriginal communities in discussion about ways to address the myriad issues that face them and instead imposes white solutions to black problems, how much is a denial of past wrongs unconsciously shaping the present political agenda? To what degree are we realising the inevitability of  Santyana's assertion that, “those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it”?

These are not new questions. Nor is the answer new: when we remember the past and engage honestly and justly with all who inherit it, we have a foundation for building an honest and just future. 

Teaching and learning to remember the past

There are many pasts to remember and many ways to remember them. This is the crux of the teaching challenge: how to empower students with the skills and knowledge to engage with the past and understand it with a meaningful level of complexity when there are so many ways to remember so much history? Teaching for meaningful historical understanding is a task that is even more challenging - and interesting - in the context of an International School like UWCSEA where the students come from all corners of the earth. The particulars of Tasmanian history are of limited relevance to my Kazakh students. 

But the underlying shadows are not. Every human society has its history of repression and its fights over land. The specifics of how each conflict plays out may differ in the detail, but the underlying motifs are similar. As we work in our teaching and learning to bring the shadows of the past into the light, the challenge is to move meaningfully between the specifics of history and the underlying patterns that cross times and cultures. 

Kurt Hahn

When Kurt Hahn and the founders of the United World Colleges conceived of the schools’ mission, it was in response to the horrors of WWII. Like so many of the world’s conflicts, land was a key ingredient in WWII as well. Hitler’s policy of “Lebensraum” (space to live) lead to the succession of incursions that preceded the German invasion of Poland and to the declaration of war by the United Kingdom in September of 1939. 

Kurt Hahn’s vision was to mix together students from the world’s diverse nations and cultures to create an environment where humanity came before nationality. It is a very human trait to identify with particular groups - be they political, social, economic or national - but beneath these labels is always a common humanity. 

The lesson that I take from Boyce’s account of Tasmanian history is that humans always make choices but the motivations behind these choices are often complex and deeply rooted in our cultural identity. Making choices that are just and lead to a better world requires learning about our own culture and about the culture of others. This is complex. But equally important is to remind ourselves, as Kurt Hahn did, that beneath the diverse cultural identities of the world is a common humanity. Understanding this is simple. 

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.