I thrive on massive intellectual overload. I don’t mean that I like sensory overload or information overload. I mean I thrive in an environment in which I’m inundated with a huge number of ideas and relationships and categories and factors that must be apprehended, made sense of, sorted, connected to one another, and distilled into a sensible mental model of the environment — a model that helps me make viable decisions. Let’s call this an environment rich in “potential knowledge”, waiting to be realized.
I think that’s one of the reasons I like travel, especially adventurous travel to exotic places and cultures and conditions. Drop me into a totally unfamiliar environment, and I’m happy as a bug trying to figure out how to function. It also might explain why I’ve gone through a whole string of hobbies and enthusiasms and sports and professional interests: once the terrain gets too well mapped, so to speak, the appeal fades. Some people like exercising skill and expertise; I like acquiring it.
I may be somewhat extreme in this regard, but I doubt that I’m wired completely differently from most of the human race. I suspect that we learn most efficiently, and are most captivated by the learning, when we’re tossed into the deep end and have to figure out in a hurry which end is up.
In my experiences as a student, a teacher, an educational researcher, and a teacher of teachers, one of the things I’ve noticed is how reluctant most teachers (myself included) are to leave students behind. We conceptualize instruction as leading students along a carefully-engineered path to understanding, one step at a time; any student who stumbles, strays, or straggles and gets left behind will be lost. Thus, being conscientious of our responsibility to all students, we put great effort into ensuring that every one (or at least every one who tries) is with us for the whole journey.
And this, I think, has disastrous consequences. To prevent any from being left behind, we must keep all together in a tight cluster that moves more slowly than most need. Which means that we are nowhere near saturating most students’ capacity to absorb new ideas. Which means that many students get bored, and turn their excess capacity towards “off-topic” matters, such as side conversations, crossword puzzles, daydreaming, or social posturing. And which also means that few students learn as much or as rapidly as they are capable. Perhaps more insidiously, it means that few students have the opportunity to develop the intellectual skills essential to sense-making in a fast-and-furious environment.
At the root of all this is a fundamental misconception about pedagogy. Above, I said:
We conceptualize instruction as leading students along a carefully-engineered path to understanding, one step at a time;
As soon as we think this way, we’ve lost. That’s the “transmissionist” view of instruction, the idea that we transmit knowledge to students. That idea has been pretty thoroughly discredited in educational research circles, in favor of the constructivist view that students must construct their understanding through a sustained and effortful sense-making process. Knowledge isn’t a set or sequence of facts that can be presented in a logically optimal order; it’s a messy, complex, massively interlinked network of ideas and connections and perspectives and ways of thinking that can only be fully appreciated through extensive and repeated revisiting and re-contemplation. It’s not linear. As Jay Lemke observes (Lemke 1990, p.17),
In fact, it can be difficult or impossible to teach a thematic pattern one piece at a time because it often takes a mastery of the whole pattern before any of its parts seem to make sense. It is not just in science that we find concepts that can only be fully understood in terms of one another: Each piece of the puzzle makes sense only if you already have all the other pieces. This is one of the fundamental problems of science teaching, and indeed of teaching and communication generally…
What is the alternative? Throw students into the deep end. Engineer a rich, thorny, messy, meaty problem or question for them to wrestle with, dump on some ideas and tools that they haven’t yet mastered, and then let them struggle. Scaffold and coach, yes, but don’t try to lead them through. And definitely don’t try to force all students to follow the same path to comprehension. (This is, in essence, what my colleagues and I at UMPERG call Question-Driven Instruction.)
And maybe, if we can bring ourselves to do this, our students will thrive on school the way that I thrive on travel.
References
Lemke, Jay L. (1990). Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. Ablex Publishing, Westport CT. ISBN 0-89391-566-1. (Amazon)
