Wild Idea Summit

This weekend I am at a "Wild Idea Summit" in California where six people from all over the country are meeting to share what they care about in education and to see where our passions and ideas might overlap and what project we might do together. To prepare for the meeting I was asked to consider the following question: What is the single most important change or improvement you would like to see in education? This is a challenging question - how could I boil all that I care and think about down into one single issue? But after working at it for a while, I did focus myself a little and here is what I am going to share today.

The single most important change or improvement that I would like to see in education is that teachers and students are given the chance to engage the capacity of their whole mind more fully to think and learn, and to be afforded the opportunity to approach teaching and learning like a designer or artist approaches his or her work. If stages of thought and learning were states of matter:

• Gaseous thinking is where elements of ideas/understandings are present, but are still in an abstract, intangible, unseen, not yet visible state.

• Solid thinking would be when an idea/understanding is in its most visible state – it has a completed product or representation that is visible to others, has shape and form to it, it communicates itself (like a paper, or a presentation or a project of some kind).

• Liquid thinking is where thought is fluid, flexible, and dynamic; where we play, explore, imagine; it is pattern seeking, connecting, proto-typing, revising and designing compositional integrity through balance and focus; it is adding color and pattern to texturize our knowing; it is taking perspective and trying on multiple points of view to add dimension to our ideas.

In the liquid state we are in the process of what I am referring to in my work as, “finding the design” of an idea (someone else’s like in a text, or creating one’s own design). I believe that many people need to keep thought liquid - see it and hold it and manipulate it - before they can commit to a solid representation of their thinking. To deprive them of that opportunity is to disable their learning and thinking process and lock them out of their own minds. Everyday I see the consequences of forcing students to go from gaseous to solid in their learning process, with no time or opportunity to be "liquid" thinkers. Performance in school declines and their whole self-concept suffers. When students are not learning as they should be, we aught to be asking, “What is dysfunctional about the learning system students are in?" and not just “What is dysfunctional about this student”.