Sitting at a seminar with 17 educationalists, Yoram Harpaz and Adam Lefstein exploring their ideas about education and learning.

The focus of Adam and Yorum’s recent work is the Community of Thinking Programme (fertile questioning) started by an Intel funded projects to develop a model of learning focussed on thinking. This lead to the building of a new school to demonstrate the model an since then work with many other schools to implement change towards the model developed.

My notes on Adam and Yorum’s presentation.

What is the foundation of good thinking? What are the most important elements of good thinking? How shall we teach good thinking? There are many definitions of what is good thinking and how can it be taught.

Three approaches:

- Skills approach.Skilful thinking

- Dispositions approach. Skills not so important. Dispositions or intellectual character make the difference, that is the ability to think systematically, analystically, evaluatively, or what is often termed critical thinking

- Understanding approach. Dispositions or skills not important. Knowledge and understanding of knowledge is important. Good thinking is good understanding of topics thought about.

Framework to teach the three elements make up the Community of Thinking Programme.

Skills
Main elements – the main role of the teacher is to allow demonstration or exemplifying – learning based on practice.

Disposition
Main elements – not primarily based on practice! Based on whom you are and can be developed through interaction and subsequent internalisation. Initially takes place through interaction with people we love, respect, admire. The main role of the teacher is to be a good role model.

Understanding
Main elements – not knowledge in a ‘positivist’ sense, but knowledge about understanding things (a relatavistic definition). The main role of the teacher is to stimulate self-directed enquiry.

Which approach is best? Ironically the understanding approach is the most important approach to thinking – that is gaining knowledge. This does not negate the importance of skills and dispositions but these should not be the primary focus.

Skills are a focus for schools because they are easy to teach! Disposition and understanding are much harder to teach and so tend to be not focussed upon.

An interesting discussion about the implications for diffrent domains ensued. This was problematic as the participants were using diffrenet discourses both ecternally and internally for thinking and discussing the issues. In effect, the balance of the three elements in use are different in the different domains.

These complexities mean that if we want to be effective we have to be brave and focus on one strategy. Part of this is an emabrace of sociatal and cultural elements of learning (group and collaborative work), but individual cognitive work is also important – an internal dialogue based on previous knowledge.

Blogging for learning

Approach
Over the past 6 months I have revisited Blogs thanks to the efforts of Tom Smith. My first foray into blogging was with Pete Bradshaw back in August 2002. Amazingly it is still there but you will see that if you take the link you will see that our co-authoring approach meant that Pete has all of the contributions attributed to him! In my second foray I have chosen to have my own Blog that I use primarily for professional postings with very little social stuff. This was a conscious decision as I wanted to explore Blogs as a means of online social learning (by this I mean learning with others through discourse).

My practice has been to generate posts of a few hundred words in length that are stimulated by some aspect of my work experience in the hope that it will generate comments from others. This learning activity has several dimensions. Firstly, making the tacit knowledge of my experiences explicit and secondly the learning from discourse with others that follows. Some of this is in the Blog itself and some is through other interactions I have with colleagues and friends. It is however characterised by the purposeful intention to learn.

Simultaneously I have become a member of the Ultralab Blog of Blogs community and here I read colleagues contributions to their own Blogs.

Process Reflections
This genre of publishing legitimates the sharing of ideas that may be based on observations, research, or are just hunches. As a staring point it opens up the possibility of validation of experiences and possibility of sparking thoughts and changes in others.

On balance, I have been encouraged by the response I have had to my posts. This has been both through comments left (the ideal), messages to me via email, and conversations with colleagues. There is no way of easily quantifying who or how many people read posts, but my experience suggest that there is a reasonable amount of participation in at least the reading of Blogs.

The Ultralab Blog of Blogs brings together a diverse group that includes colleagues from Ultralab South, Researchers on the Ultraversity project, and others. I have learned much myself from reading posts on other Blogs. I have also realised how little I leave comments myself and suspect this is the behaviour of a typical blogger. That is we read, but infrequently take the opportunity to comment on other people’s entries.

It seems to work!

PDF of diagram

At the heart of the Ultraversity model of learning is the philosophical belief that reflective practitioners are powerful agents for change in that they know the why and how to do things. Researchers on the Ultraversity degree come from a wide diversity of backgrounds, capabilities, and experiences of learning. Through a structured and focused approach, the Learning Facilitators (LF) work with the researchers to help them develop the skills of reflective practitioners and action researchers. This is done through modeling reflective discourse, the setting up of processes that promote reflective learning, and purposeful dialogue.

Anne Brockbank & Ian McGill (1998:48)

Critically Reflective Learning is nurtured by relationships between teacher and learner, learner and learner and between both with the subject under study. We identified the optimal relationship above, as mutual, open, challenging, contextually aware and characterised by dialogue.

Researchers report that as they begin to use reflective learning processes they increasingly identify issues and questions from their workplace. From this they begin to develop and apply solutions with a high degree of awareness and self-criticality. This rise in the frequency of intentional reflexivity has a significant impact on researchers learning, their working practice and by implication their workplace.

We would think that as researchers become increasingly sophisticated and practiced in reflection that the amount of time they operate as an intuitive practitioner will also significantly increase. This is along the lines of Maslow’s Unconscious Competence – the ability to do things successfully without particularly thinking about them.

The diagram above attempts to show this development where the proportion of time at work where researchers are operating as reflective practitioners (both at a conscious and intuitive level) increases with time spent on the degree (volume under the line on the graph). This process is initiated through directed learning from the LF, but in time the ‘engine’ for change rapidly moves to the researcher working as a self-directed learner applying reflective models. This reflection on action and reflection in action may be as a part of a planned action enquiry. Alternatively, at an intuitive level this may be a response to an increased awareness about their actions, the context within which they work, their beliefs and values.