Insight Into: Education & Conceptualization Part 2

In my last article, I proposed that one of the main reasons for education is to keep people from doing "stupid things." If you have not read the article, please have a look to get up to speed. Today, I want to continue looking at how conceptualization impacts education. Let's get back to the discussion.

The Core Issue Part 2:

So it turns out that simply transferring data to a student does not, in fact, mean the student understands the data. In fact, students often only focus on remembering enough data to pass the tests, as, in the educational context, it is the tests that really matter (more on that in a later article). Now to understand why this is an important distinction, consider two warehouse employees, Jake and Janet.
Jake and Janet both work for Dr. Rebar* organizing items in a warehouse. In the back of the warehouse, there is a door. Dr. Rebar has repeatedly told both Jake and Janet that they should never open the door. Being good employees, Jake and Janet both listen to Dr. Rebar, and avoid opening the door, even when it seems convenient to do so, which is really quite often. After a while, Janet starts to wonder why the door needs to stay shut, even though there are many times during the day where life would be easier if they just used the door. Jake tells her that it isn't important why Dr. Rebar wants the door shut, the doctor is the boss, and if the boss says don't open the door, then you don't open the door. Janet, however, is unsatisfied with this. One day, she asks Dr. Rebar why you don't open the door. The doctor explains that the door is quite heavy, and, at some point, the hinges broke. If you open the door, the door will actually fall out of the frame, and a lot of extra effort will be needed to put the door back. In short, until the door is fixed, opening the door is more trouble than it's worth. This sounds reasonable to Janet, and she goes about her business.
Now, at this point, you have two employees, each of which are doing what they're instructed, and preforming their jobs as they should. Both know that the door should not be opened, but while Jake has just accepted this as a basic fact, Janet understands why the door should not be opened. From a performance perspective, there is no difference between the two, and, for the most part, Janet's understanding seems superfluous.
Then, one day, a fire breaks out in the warehouse, and Jake and Janet get stuck in the back of the warehouse. The only way out is the door, or a skylight, which can only be reached by a dangerous climb up to the top of the warehouse (a climb that might just end with the climber dropping two stories into a rapidly-spreading fire). Jake, not wanting to open the door-that-should-not-be-opened, opts to try the incredibly risky climb. Janet, on the other hand, realizes that, in the face of a fire, a broken door is a minor inconvenience, and simply opens the back door and leaves. Janet makes it out and, because this story is supposed to have a moral, Jake slips and falls and dies a terrible fally-fiery death.
So the point? Just acquiring data is fine, as long as all you need is that data. Unfortunately, when problems arise, they are almost always the result of something unexpected happening, which requires some creative thinking to resolve. This creative thinking, however, is impossible for someone who is simply acting based on their instruction, instead of acting based on their understanding of the ideas (concepts) the instruction is trying to convey.
Does this seem obvious? Yet we see variations of "I just couldn't figure out [fill in the blank with an incredibly simple issue]" as a reason for why someone failed at something all the time. At IRI, we have learned that one of the main reasons for this is not that people don't have the necessary data to solve the problem, but that they aren't thinking in a way that allows them to conceptualize the problem and identify solutions. In IRI parlance, their cognitive system is centered around concrete data (B), not concepts and analysis (A). It turns out that conceptualization is a learned skill, and must be taught as vigorously as any other type of educational information. The difference is, with conceptual thinking, you aren't talking about teaching data. You're talking about teaching people how to process data - that is, how to think." In our next article, I'll look at the necessary steps for teaching conceptualization, and examine how this intersects with (and conflicts with) our traditional style of education.

Next Week: Teaching People How to Think

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*I am going to assume Dr. Rebar has a degree that is consistent with a PhD graduate who gets a job as a warehouse manager. I imagine it is a degree in something like interpretative dance.

Insight Into: Education & Conceptualization

This begins a series on the difficulties with deliberate development of conceptual thinking in education. My goal is to 1) identify key issues in education and educational systems as they relate to developing conceptual thinking, 2) identify patterns in current educational processes that hinder conceptual thinking, and 3) propose solutions to improve conceptual thinking.

Before I begin, I think it is important to establish how I use certain terms, so here's a short list (I may expand on this later):

• Ideas: our thoughts about things
• Concepts: ideas we hold, where holding an idea connotes ownership and the ability to adapt said idea based on new information
• Definitions: ideas communicated to us via a 2nd person or medium
• Information/Data: ideas we receive through perception or formulate through analysis
• Conceptualization: The process of identifying, reviewing, analyzing, organizing, and generally thinking about concepts
• A, B, C aspects of thinking: refer to previous articles (link provided below)

To begin:

The Core Issue Part 1 (Education)

As I understand it, there is one primary area of conflict in education that tends to drive a wedge between teaching people "how to think" (that is, how to conceptualize and respond to ideas) and teaching "what to think" (i.e. teaching people specific instructional data they need to follow). This conflict stems from one of the primary reasons for education: to make sure people don't do stupid things, where "stupid things" include spending unnecessary effort to relearn ideas humanity has already investigated. 

For example, we have spent decades developing computer technology and programming and it would be incredibly wasteful to make anyone who wanted to work on computers have to figure out basic circuits and logic systems on their own, when we can simply impart known information to them. This way, they can add to the current body of understanding based on our previous research. In addition, we are absolutely sure we want to educate people who manage nuclear reactors on how to manage nuclear reactors - it has proven very bad when those people misunderstood their jobs, or got something wrong.

The need to impart existing information has two central areas of focus: to transfer said data to the student, and to make sure the student accurately understands this data. In short, we are interested in accurate transfer of data. This means, among other things, that error is one of our primary enemies. Let's face it - you don't want errors showing up in nuclear power management, or surgery, or waste disposal. That's really bad. Thus, we structure our education around transfer and accuracy, testing students to make sure they have acquired the data we give them as we intend them to receive it. If they pass the tests, all is well, and we can assume they understand the information.

Except that last sentence has proven to be wrong. Passing tests, it turns out, does not guarantee understanding of an idea. This is because understanding requires conceptualization. That is, the data we provide (in the form of definitions) must be converted into concepts. (I discussed this previously in my articles on direct and indirect understanding; see the link below to the relevant articles). This means that students, to successfully understand the information we are giving them, must be able to conceptualize the information they receive (i.e. transform them into concepts). This is where we run into our core issue, and to understand that issue we need to investigate what we need to do to teach people to conceptualize.

Next time: The Core Issue (Part 2: Conceptualization)

Link to articles on ABC thinking: http://incominginsight.blogspot.com/2015/03/a-review-of-reviewing-thinking.html

What? It's Monday Already?

Sorry everyone - I'm not quite ready. I don't have any really great excuses, I just had a lot of stuff going on, and fell behind on the writing I was planning. My apologies. I will get back to education-talk ASAP. In the meantime, enjoy a picture of a funny little dog:

Not my dog - a friend's dog, but a funny little dog.

This is the best picture I could get - that little guy moves fast!

Returned to Washington

Well, I survived my trip to Wyoming, but came back to find I have some stuff to catch up on, so I don't have much of a post today. Next time, I will review a bit of what's been going on in Mozambique, some of our plans for the future, and perhaps some other items. Sometimes life gives you minor but unavoidable distractions that keep you from posting blogs. Life is kind of a jerk like that.

On the Road! Next up: Conceptual Thinking and teaching

It seems I wasn't able to pull my ideas together in time to get an extra blog in. This is due, primarily, to the fact that my chosen topic required more reflection than I had originally thought. It's also because the topic will probably take more than one post, which takes some extra time to write up. Instead, I will provide some insight into my upcoming insight - over the next few weeks, I plan to look at how the idea of conceptual training interacts with the practice of teaching.

During the work we have done with IRI, we have identified several areas where traditional (and some non-traditional) teaching methods can conflict with conceptual training. I plan to look at some of these areas of conflict to see why the conflict exists, and what we might be able to do to facilitate more critical and analytical thinking in our teaching methodology. Please note that many of these concerns aren't unique to our work - a lot of them are concerns that have been raised in education for years. The reason I am reviewing them is not because they are all original, but in the hopes that the insights we have gained may inform the ongoing discussion and perhaps present new windows into potential solutions.

But that's what's coming next - this week I am on the road! Next week, I may have the beginning of the teaching discussion, or I may talk a bit about what I've learned on my WY trip - depending mostly on how interesting the trip turns out to be.