A Day on/at MaRS: A Notebook of Thoughts and Thinking from F2F3

As the day begins, I’m looking forward to the chance to explain my thinking thus far and receive lots of new insights about other ways of seeing the same issues and topics. The theme of “you don’t know what you don’t know until you’re confronted with your unknown” will resonate I’m sure throughout the day.

I am really talking about self-regulation and, specifically, helping students become owners of their own thinking. Students don’t know yet that they don’t know how they are thinking, why they are thinking that way, or that there are other ways of thinking different from how they think. It has really resonated with me that we can’t expect students to progress towards unknown goals and ideas that they have encountered before. It occurs to me that learning could be explained with the analogy of exploration: we have to go somewhere we haven’t been before if we really want to call ourselves explorers. What I am interested in, in part, is exploring what holds us back from exploring. An obvious answer is that we think we uncovered everything there is to uncover. Why explore when there is nothing left? The other answer, which I believe lurks beneath the first answer and behind a lot of what holds back exploration, is a psychological one: many of us are afraid to find the unknown because we know that our world will probably be deeply disordered by what we find. From my reading of Thinking: Fast and Slow, I understand more now about the bias toward familiarity that we all drift toward. We are challenged and frightened by what doesn’t fit into our existing systems and binaries and categories. Our brains abhor disorder and desperately strive to fit, even jam, new, apparently anomalous ideas into the existing order. As is to be expected, this usually doesn’t produce good results, distorting the new concept, sometimes to the point of being unrecognizable. As I sit here,

As I sit here, I realize that this phenomenon must apply to our professional learning as well. To what degree do we distort professional learning when it doesn’t fit what we already do? Do we pick items from new learning that “fit” and disregard the rest? Is this why some PD “takes” and makes a true impact and other PD fizzles away? Is there a way to prevent this reflex? To allow ourselves to see new ideas as they were meant to be seen? As they truly are, at least in the way that they were when they left the minds/hands of their creators? I suspect that the best we can do is suspend judgement when we approach new information, using protocols such as you would hear in active listening programs (e.g. mirror what you hear in summary without judgement). Our comprehension of what we see and hear will never be a perfect match to the original, but we can go a long way toward grasping the essence and meaning of what we see, all the while making the new mesh with the old. Hopefully, as I will do with my students as my action plan unfolds, the fact that we will be aware of what we are doing (synthesizing a new normal by integrating old to new) will make it more likely for us to embrace the unfamiliar, to size it up as best we can, and glean from it whatever we are presently able to glean.

A key challenge, moving forward, will be beginning this journey with students. How will this conversation start? What kinds of diversity of experience will I observe? Likely some students will be more aware of when and how well they focus and attend to detail, and be able to admit the fact that they are often less than successful at moving between different modes of thinking. This is the type of self-aware, blunt honesty that I hope will be the norm. It is likely, however, especially among grade 8s and 9s, that many will be exposed to a new reality when I pose these questions. It’s possible to think about thinking? I have different modes of thinking? It’s possible to choose how I think?

The challenge moving forward, then, is a bold one: helping students discover the inner world of their thinking; helping them evaluate its efficacy; and build the maturity and awareness to be willing to change what doesn’t work. This is a bold task, and certainly one that won’t be finished this year, but one that is essential. Realistically, I will likely be able only to start the internal conversations for the students and watch the ball start to roll. Hopefully, this will be enough to make a difference for those I work with on this for the next six months. When the year is over, I will be able to assess whether my supposition (that careful thinkers learn Latin best) is true, and whether sharpening and teaching thinking improves achievement outcomes. I will also be able to test routines, protocols, and strategies and see which ones work and which ones don’t. I look forward to seeing what works within my current arsenal of instructional strategies, and to receiving and trying new strategies and broadening my repertoire. Looking forward to the adventure!