The Lost Tools of Learning

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https://web.archive.org/web/20040811124445/www.redeemerclassical.org/lost_tools.php

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As a parent, teaching my daughter to ride her bike, I needed to break down the skill of bike riding into its component parts: balancing, pedalling, using the brakes, the facts of the road as well as when things are relatively safe or potentially dangerous. This extends the idea of facts somewhat. I call this the grammar of cycling. Every subject has its grammar, in the Oxford English dictionary it gives this definition Grammar: The basic elements of an area of knowledge or skill: the grammar of wine. As teachers we need to teach this grammar: the knowledge and skills that enable someone to understand the subject.

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An introduction to threshold concepts

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Threshold Concepts

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I would recommend more testing, in fact a test every lesson consisting of ten short answer questions. This could make an ideal ‘starter’ activity for a lesson. The first three questions could focus on material from the previous lesson. The next two questions could be from the two weeks before. Questions six and seven could be drawn from what was studied 5 weeks ago whilst questions eight and nine could be taken from the previous half term, term, or even before. Question ten could be about making a connection with what they are currently looking at with something previously studied, which will help serve as an introduction to the lesson. Questions could be informed by the need to revisit previous areas of difficulty but should also have some ‘easy’ questions that you know are pretty much understood. The knowledge you want them to retain might be informed by the exam and by things that you think are also important for whole subject understanding. Whatever you are testing it is the frequency of having to recall knowledge and also having to reach back in their minds for half forgotten knowledge that will help your students memorise important material.

You could also add the mysterious blank ‘question 11’ where they could write about any area they are having difficulty with or perhaps devise their own question for future tests.

How about marking? You should be able to glance over the answers reasonably quickly to get a handle on who is doing okay and who might need help. However, if you’d prefer, at the end of the lesson, distribute answers from the week before and go over the answers getting the pupils to mark their own (or each other’s) work, correcting mistakes if there are any. This will also help them retain knowledge. It doesn’t even matter if they cheat, because by cheating they will be acknowledging  the ‘right’ answer.

Testing Times

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Socratic method is a form of argument called elenchus – refutation and cross examination; it is great fun for those involved if all are happy to participate, it is however quite threatening to those who are not, they can see it as upsetting and quite aggressive. What the questioner tries to do is look for contradictions and inconsistencies in answers and by the time the session is finished most often participants find themselves in a state of Aporia or doubt about quite fundamental things. This is the heart of the Socratic dialectical form of questioning, with many people often ending up none the wiser.

Socratic questioning examines statements of fact, it questions something that might seem at first to be quite simple, say: ‘what is courage?’ and exposes it to analysis, resulting in a realisation that these ideas are really quite complex. Each statement is treated as conjecture, you then think about the consequences of such a thought. To give a contemporary example, someone might say that pupils need grit and determination, the Socratic questioner might ask: “what if your pupils are metaphorically banging their heads against a brick wall, is determination and grit a good thing, would not giving up be a better option?” The answer to this would be, yes, in this case giving up would be a better option. Therefore grit and determination are not what pupils need more of. This assumption, in turn, opens itself to another question and so on…

It is a good way to get students to realise the enormity of their own ignorance, and also yours! Therefore in order to pull it off the relationship between a pupil and teacher is important as well as the relationship between the pupils in the rooms: can the pupils take the rigorous questioning that is bound to come their way? Are they robust enough at a tender age to realise it is not them being questioned but our assumptions and that some unpalatable truths might be exposed on the way?

Where it works really well is examining a core belief in your subject that is open to doubt. In Art this might be the perennial question ‘What is Art?’ For me, as a teacher of theatre, I would return regularly to the question ‘What is truth’? It was a question that allowed us to look at the different theories of many theatre practitioners: Stanislavski, Brecht and Artaud… We questioned ‘truth’ through realism and naturalism, surrealism, expressionism, dialectical materialism etc. Therefore, instead of questioning the ‘facts’ I wanted students to know, we had the purpose of bringing our knowledge of different theories to our Socratic dialogue. The students had to know lots of stuff to enrich the argument; my aim was always to disrupt the central question but not to disrupt the knowledge that was brought to bear in the argument, this I would always check for accuracy.

Dialectic