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IT IS BETTER TO IMAGINE THAN TO REMEMBER

 CREATING SCHOOLS THAT EXPAND THE MIND AND NOURISH THE IMAGINATION

 

Frederic JacobsProfessor and Director of the Master’s Program

In Curriculum and InstructionSchool of Education, Teaching and Health

American UniversityWashington, DC

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CAVE PAINTING AT LASCAUX, FRANCE

Circa 15–18,000 B.C

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Creating Schools for Students and Teachers Emphasizing Motivation, Engagement and

Satisfaction? 

How Do People Learn?   

    How Can People Become Reflective

About Their Learning and Practice?

  

   Can We Create a Future Where Students Are

Motivated and Their Imaginations Are Nourished?  

  

 How Can Schools Excite and Challenge

Students ? 

  How Can Schools Learn?

How Are People Motivated?    

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How Do People Learn?[Kolb, Dewey]

  

    How Can People Become Reflective

About Their Learning and Practice?

[Schon, Brookfield]

  

   Can We Create a Future Where Students Are

Motivated and Their Imaginations Are Nourished?  

[School Leaders and Teachers Everywhere]

  

 How Can Schools Excite and Challenge

Students ? [Bateson, Dewey]

  How Can Schools Learn?[Senge]

How Are People Motivated?[Herzberg] 

  

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 ON CREATIVITY

 As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.

Orhan Pamuk  

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Questions We Are Asking Today 

1 HOW ARE PEOPLE MOTIVATED? 

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  How Can Schools Excite and Challenge Students? 

3    How Can Schools Learn? 

4   How Do People Learn? 

5   How Can People Become Reflective About Their Learning and Practice? 

6   Can We Create a Future Where Students Are Motivated and Their Imaginations Are Nourished?

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ON MOTIVATION

The opposite of job satisfaction is not job dissatisfaction, but, rather, no job satisfaction and,

Similarly, the opposite of job dissatisfaction is not job satisfaction, but no job dissatisfaction

Can This Concept Be Applied to Education?

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If children dislike school, the way to get them to stop disliking

school is to reduce or eliminate the things they

dislike. 

What do we know about what children dislike in schools?

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WHAT DO CHILDREN TELL US THEY DISLIKE ABOUT SCHOOL?

  Constant repetition which leads to

boredom 

A lack of relevance to their lives beyond school

  An ongoing emphasis on completion, not

comprehension 

For many, if not most children,schools represent a culture of compliance

and conformity, not independence and creativity

 

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SOCIAL BEHAVIOR &

CONTROL

AN OVERVIEW OF WHAT IS TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS?

COGNITION & CONTENT

IMAGINATION &

CREATIVITY

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Questions We Are Asking Today 

1 How Are People Motivated? 

2 

 

HOW CAN SCHOOLS EXCITE AND CHALLENGE STUDENTS? 

3    How Can Schools Learn? 

4   How Do People Learn? 

5   How Can People Become Reflective About Their Learning and Practice? 

6   Can We Create a Future Where Students Are Motivated and Their Imaginations Are Nourished?

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How Can Schools Excite and Challenge Students? 

JOHN DEWEY The world is constantly changing, and students

need to learn critical thinking skills and problem solving skills in order to deal with these changes. Traditional education treats students as docile, non-active receptive entities [who] learn only from books and teachers.

  Knowledge is taught as a finished product.

Students cannot learn essential problem solving skills if they are taught that all problems and answers to these problems have already been worked out

“If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob out children of tomorrow” 

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JOHN DEWEY (CONTINUED)

Active learning is essential; students must be engaged in the learning process. Traditional education, in which conduct is strictly enforced, automatic drills are used to transfer knowledge and students’ power of judgment and intelligence are impeded, created the wrong kind of experiences to promote learning. They rendered the students callous of ideas and caused students to associate learning with boredom.

Students should understand why they are learning. Instrumentality of learning is paramount in progressive education. Students should not learn in isolation.

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GREGORY BATESON Human learning is a continuum of learning, applying, and improving one’s abilities. It is based on three principles:

• applying learning to increasingly complex tasks and situations

• reflecting on learning to improve future understanding and performance

• increasing capacity to move from simple to DEUTERO-LEARNING (LEARNING II) as illustrated below

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Category Basic Definition Example 

Learning 0 is: 

Direct, actual experience resulting from behavioral events

“I put my hand in the fire – it gets burned”. 

Learning I is:

Generalized learning occurring from direct experience

“I have experienced "hand in fire" and "being burned", and I won't do it again”. 

Learning II is:     

Maximizing learning occurring from Learning I by extracting implicit rules or principles as well as by developing strategies to deal with various contexts 

“I don't generally risk getting burned, but I might do so to save someone else from a fire”.

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Questions We Are Asking Today 

1 How Are People Motivated? 

2 

 

How Can Schools Excite and Challenge Students? 

3    HOW CAN SCHOOLS LEARN? 

4   How Do People Learn? 

5   How Can People Become Reflective About Their Learning and Practice? 

6   Can We Create a Future Where Students Are Motivated and Their Imaginations Are Nourished?

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The Work of Peter Senge 

How Organizations Learn 

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Everyone can remember a time when they had an experience similar to this :

“When someone fired your imagination or touched a deep chord in you that opened doorways you didn’t know existed.”

Peter Senge

The schools that most often succeed in accomplishing this are SCHOOLS THAT LEARN

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Ways of Experiencing Reality

Events Reaction

What Just Happened?

Look for Patterns and Trends

Anticipate

Examine Systemic Structure

Design

What Mental Models Existed?

Transform

90 per cent of an iceberg is not visible

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1. SYSTEMS THINKING2. Personal mastery3. Working with mental models4. Building shared vision5. Team learning

What are the “five disciplines” that Senge believes are necessary to build effective learning organization?

Schools That Learn Rely on Five Principles:

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Systems thinking is the ability to comprehend and address the whole, and to examine the interrelationship between the parts and the whole.

Defining the Five Principles Characterizing Schools that Learn

Systems Thinking

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A key problem in organizations is that activities done in the name of management frequently apply simplistic frameworks to complex systems. Such frameworks tend to focus on the parts rather than the whole, and fail to recognize that organizations are dynamic and changing.

Defining the Five Principles Characterizing Schools that Learn

Systems Thinking(continued)

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We often assume that cause and effect will be relatively “close” to one another. When dealing with problems, we tend to seek the ‘solutions’ that are we can implement immediately. That is, we associate “quick actions” and “successful actions”.

Defining the Five Principles Characterizing Schools that Learn

Systems Thinking(continued)

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Organizations are frequently harmed by short-term improvements because many of such improvement result in significant long-term costs. For example, we can cut back on counseling services which will result in immediate cost savings, but can damage the stability of the organization and the people in the organization.

Defining the Five Principles Characterizing Schools that Learn

Systems Thinking

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Questions We Are Asking Today 

1 How Are People Motivated? 

2 

 

How Can Schools Excite and Challenge Students? 

3  

 How Can Schools Learn? 

4  

HOW DO PEOPLE LEARN? 

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How Can People Become Reflective About Their Learning and Practice? 

6   Can We Create a Future Where Students Are Motivated and Their Imaginations Are Nourished?

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HOW DO PEOPLE LEARN, THINK, CREATE AND REFLECT?

BRAIN, BODY AND SOCIETY

Kolb’s Cycle of Experiential LearningWATCHING Observation leads to

Action limitation

DOING Action (doing something) leads to reflection and judgment as assessment of both competence and performance

GAINING MASTERY

After an initial Feeling of accomplishment and competence, an individual moves to gain further knowledge and expertise about extending boundaries, doing things faster and , better using less energy, in every sense, improved.

GENERALIZING

Individuals actions provide the basis for broadening one’s understanding from the specific to the general, from extrapolating from present circumstances to universal

awarenessEXPERIMENTI

NGThrough mastery and generalization, the individual is ready to observe again with the intention of changing modifying and experimenting

WATCHING

DOING

GAINING

MASTERY

GENERALIZING

EXPERIMENTIN

G &REFLECT

ING

Kolb’s Cyclical View of How People Learn Through Experience

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Questions We Are Asking Today 

1 How Are People Motivated? 

2 How Can Schools Excite and Challenge Students? 

3 How Can Schools Learn? 

4  How Do People Learn? 

5 HOW CAN PEOPLE BECOME REFLECTIVE

ABOUT THEIR LEARNING AND PRACTICE? 

6 Can We Create a Future Where Students Are Motivated and Their Imaginations Are Nourished?

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In reflective practice, a practitioner analyses experiences in order to learn from them.  When experiencing something (reflection-in-action), we are learning, but in the midst of action, it is difficult to put emotions, events, and thoughts together coherently.  However, in retelling/rethinking events, we are better able to categorize organize events, emotions and ideas, and link the intended purpose with the actions we carried out. There is a distinction between events experienced and events retold. Therefore, it is important to develop the capacity to remove one’s direct emotional attachment from an action, and view it from a critical vantage point. Taking oneself out of the action involves telling a story as a sequence of events without personal involvement

DONALD SCHON ON CRITICAL REFLECTION

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DEWEY’S DEFINITION OF CRITICAL REFLECTION: 

 the active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends

How We Think (1933) Dewey’s description contains two important

principles:  

ability to analyze present behavior based on one’s beliefs and assumptions, and

  capacity to change future behavior based on the

learning that results from present behavior.

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Another definition Reflective practice…involves thinking about and critically analyzing one's actions with the goal of improving one's professional practice. Engaging in reflective practice requires individuals to assume the perspective of an external observer in order to identify the assumptions and feelings underlying their practice and then to speculate about how these assumptions and feelings affect practice.

Susan Imel (1992)

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Stephen Brookfield:Defining Critical Reflection

Reflection becomes critical when it has two distinctive purposes:

The first is to understand how considerations of power undergird, frame and distort so many educational processes and interactions.

  The second is to question assumptions and

practices that seem to make our teaching lives easier but that actually end up working against our own best long term interests.

 

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We teach to change the world. The hope that undergirds our efforts to help students learn is that doing this will help them act towards each other, and to their environment, with compassion, understanding and fairness. But our attempts to increase the amount of love and justice in the world are never simple, never ambiguous. What we think are democratic, respectful ways of treating people can be experienced by them as oppressive and constraining. One of the hardest things teachers learn is that the sincerity of their intentions does not guarantee the purity of their practice. The cultural, psychological and political complexities of learning, and the ways in which power complicates all human relationships (including those between students and teachers) means that teaching can never be innocent.

Brookfield (Continued)

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Teaching innocently means thinking that we're always understanding exactly what it is that we're doing and what effect we're having. Teaching innocently means assuming that the meanings and significance we place in our actions are the ones that students take from them. Breaking this vicious circle of innocence and blame is one reason why the habit of critical reflection is crucial for teachers' survival. Without a critically reflective stance towards what we do we tend to accept the blame for problems that are not of our own making.

Brookfield (Continued)

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Questions We Are Asking Today 

1 How Are People Motivated? 

2 How Can Schools Excite and Challenge Students? 

3 How Can Schools Learn? 

4  How Do People Learn? 

5 How Can People Become Reflective About Their Learning and Practice? 

6 CAN WE CREATE A FUTURE WHERE STUDENTS ARE MOTIVATED AND THEIR IMAGINATIONS ARE NOURISHED?

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The Task Ahead:

Can We Create a Future Where Students Are Motivated and Their Imaginations Are

Nourished?

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What if, Where we once saw danger,

we now see something very different. . .

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GREGORY BATESON  

We need to live and hope that our efforts will lead us to positive results, and that like every mother, we should act with the conviction that with enough love and attention, she will raise that infinitely rare phenomenon, a great and happy child.

 

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ReferencesBateson, G. (1972, 2000). Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brookfield, S.D. (1995). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.   Dewey, J. (1933, 1952). How we think: A statement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. Boston: DC Heath and Company. Herzberg, F. (1968). One more time: How do you motivate people? Harvard Business Review Kolb, D. A. and Fry, R. (1975) Toward an applied theory of experiential learning in C. Cooper (ed.), Theories of Group Process, London: John Wiley.  Schon, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books. Senge,P. (2012). Schools that learn: A fifth disciplinefFieldbook for educators, parents and everyone who cares about education. New York: Crown Publishing.

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For More Information, please contact: 

Frederic JacobsProfessor and Director of the Program in Curriculum and InstructionSchool of Education, Teaching and HealthAmerican UniversityWashington, DC 

fredj@american.edu 202 885 2124 (office) 202 746 3733 (mobile) 202 885 1187 (fax)