00:00:00.000 I've written before about educational buzzwords, and there's a real liability with their
00:00:14.000 One is that educational theorists, enamoured with neologisms, can tend to co-opt already
00:00:19.520 well-defined concepts, redefine them, and subject them to a certain species of what could
00:00:24.440 be called educational lock-in. Lock-in is where, unintentionally, a design feature, has
00:00:31.680 some negative effect upon future potentials for growth.
00:00:36.160 The Polymath philosopher, scientist, and technologist, Jeremy Lenny Air, uses the example
00:00:41.160 of the London Underground train system, which lacks air conditioning. Built at a time when
00:00:45.720 air conditioning wasn't possible on trains, now that it is possible, the tubes simply aren't
00:00:51.000 large enough for the exhaust required to accommodate air conditioning systems. So, for now
00:00:55.600 at least, passengers are locked in to a hot and uncomfortable system most months of the
00:01:02.200 In education, sometimes we can define into being terminology that defines future directions
00:01:08.440 in teaching, and this constrains options for what might be learned and how. For example,
00:01:14.960 does calling certain activities critical and creative thinking techniques lock in how
00:01:21.960 I'm concerned we're headed down the wrong track, and before we get too far, I want to pull
00:01:25.760 the brakes and consider whether, metaphorically speaking, we might not want to widen the tunnel
00:01:30.800 to accommodate some better ideas about what these terms mean.
00:01:36.240 Critical and creative thinking are ways to generate knowledge, and how knowledge is generated
00:01:43.360 is the domain of a particular area of philosophy called epistemology.
00:01:48.960 Pistemology is one of the most interesting and yet least well understood subjects within
00:01:54.000 philosophy. People who know a little about philosophy, or perhaps have very little interest
00:01:59.520 in it, can be dismissive of the whole project at times because they think it is largely
00:02:04.840 concerned with moral philosophy or ethics, or metaphysics and ontology. That's a concern
00:02:11.240 about what really exists and what ultimately there is to know. And that everything within
00:02:17.000 philosophy is little more than some mere matter of opinion, but this is false. For example,
00:02:24.760 the central question within epistemology of how we can come to have reliable knowledge
00:02:29.800 of the world is no mere matter of opinion. It makes objective difference to how well we
00:02:36.760 can make progress as to what this answer is. And this is what epistemology really is.
00:02:43.760 It's literally the theory of knowledge as it's defined in analytical philosophy. And in
00:02:48.800 this area of philosophy, there really is a best theory that we should strive to understand.
00:02:54.520 Now not all of what is called philosophy or marches under that banner is interesting or even
00:02:59.200 useful, but much is worth preserving and trying to learn more about. Not least of which
00:03:05.720 is epistemology as it's relevant to learning the subject of this present piece. A epistemology
00:03:11.360 is it's currently best understood can help us to have an optimistic view of humanity
00:03:16.840 and life. And if you want a well rounded idea of philosophy, you should probably also
00:03:22.200 include some philosophy of science, if you want to understand how scientific knowledge in
00:03:26.960 particular grows. Now returning to our definition of epistemology as the theory of knowledge,
00:03:33.520 we can rephrase it without any loss of meaning whatever to epistemology is the explanation
00:03:39.840 of the growth of knowledge. And this growth of knowledge can happen as a civilization
00:03:46.560 or it can happen as a society or a small community, or it can even happen inside the
00:03:52.080 single mind of a learner. The remarkable thing is that the processes it turns out are the
00:04:00.760 same. Now let me explain. There are two absolutely crucial aspects to the growth of knowledge,
00:04:09.920 creativity and criticism. Now in educational circles, the terms critical
00:04:16.360 and creative thinking have migrated away from how they have largely and precisely been
00:04:22.480 used in the more rarefied spheres where they have been genuine domains of study, controversy
00:04:27.520 and progress over the decades, especially within epistemology. The terms now are synonymous
00:04:34.000 not with thinking as such, but rather with certain teaching strategies that are more or less
00:04:40.080 fashionable amongst some educators and some educational theorists. I wish to quickly admit
00:04:45.680 that it's more or less well known that there's a world of difference between a teaching
00:04:49.320 strategy and a learning strategy. It is safe to say that almost all strategies used by
00:04:55.200 teachers to teach students other former, not the latter. Teaching strategies, ways of
00:05:01.440 organizing schoolwork or ideas on paper, ways of having students respond to questions or
00:05:07.600 complete tasks. Whether they stand up and move around a class, sit down and do the work quietly,
00:05:14.160 speak or not speak, draw pictures or write words, indeed the very behaviours typically
00:05:19.920 promoted by theorists and cultivated in classes by teachers, these are teaching strategies.
00:05:26.160 Almost everything ever covered in any professional development course or a university-level
00:05:31.440 teacher training course completed by teachers and ostensibly labeled a learning strategy
00:05:36.960 is a teaching strategy. Learning strategies are very difficult to come by and that is because
00:05:43.840 learning happens best in a free environment where coercion is just not part of the picture
00:05:49.440 and someone else isn't choosing for you how best to learn. So it happens to be the case
00:05:56.400 that one can deploy every teaching strategy in the countless teaching handbooks and websites
00:06:01.920 and seminars ever deployed and learning can still be elusive. Why? Because simply naming something
00:06:09.280 say nine hats for better thinking does not mean it is genuinely about thinking,
00:06:15.440 labeling something does not make it so. Thinking is always a creative process
00:06:22.480 constrained by careful criticism. What happens in the mind of an individual learner is that they
00:06:28.880 guess or conjecture what might be true, what might work and then they criticise this idea.
00:06:37.280 If the ideas survives a criticism then they regard themselves as having learnt it,
00:06:42.080 they conditionally regarded as true. However, educational theorists love neologisms.
00:06:50.560 Educational theorists think that if they come up with a neologism they have actually invented a new
00:06:55.360 idea. Typically what they have done is either just label some common sense or some older idea
00:07:02.240 or adapted some pre-existing set of ideas for the purpose of naming a teaching strategy or a
00:07:08.000 learning strategy and a theorist often gives these a name that may sound very scientific. Sometimes
00:07:14.880 it can be fun. For example, you might want to encourage students to become a physics brain
00:07:21.120 an idea I came up with some years ago. Think of something about a given topic that
00:07:26.640 be bugs you. Then also something that you can are reflect on and A, another idea related to the
00:07:34.080 one under study. Find something I interesting and something N negative. You can make up your own
00:07:40.400 acronym. There are many such things. Now on my own our reflection I realised this scheme far
00:07:48.080 from organising thoughts can tend to restrict them. What we really needed was true criticism
00:07:55.280 and creativity if that's what we're interested in trying to learn. So how should it work?
00:08:01.520 Critical and creative thinking begins with a criticism. You should criticise what don't you
00:08:10.640 understand? What is wrong? Get to the heart of it. Then create. Can you improve on this? Can you
00:08:20.960 think of a new idea superior to the one that you've criticised? If you can then that new idea
00:08:28.000 is the one that you should regard as being true. If you can't and there is an idea that you don't
00:08:34.320 have a criticism of then you should regard that one as true. And so in learning now I've tended
00:08:41.280 to avoid ways of organising thoughts because minds just don't work that way and nor should they.
00:08:48.800 Now there are exceptions to this. For example, if your entire objective is that you want to pass an
00:08:54.960 exam then perhaps yes. If that's your goal passing exams all those many new monarchs and
00:09:00.960 tricks and techniques they can seem to work for some. But we must be careful to separate.
00:09:08.960 Passing exams is not the same as critical and creative thinking. Passing exams is about adhering
00:09:15.280 as closely as possible to someone else's ideas of what the correct way to think is.
00:09:21.120 It's anti-critical. It is not very good objecting to questions in an exam or you're having one.
00:09:29.200 It's no good taking issue with the premise of a question. Some people might. The best students
00:09:34.640 might take a risk. Most will not. Why not? Well why should they?
00:09:40.320 Examinations and assessment tasks in education are generally antithetical to anything
00:09:45.520 but adhering to or rising to meat to find outcomes. Things already thought through.
00:09:52.560 It is thus not only anti-critical, it's anti-creativity. Exams and assessment tasks are not
00:09:59.760 about new ideas. They're about showing that you have grasped old ideas. The ideas that have been
00:10:06.640 taught. See the problem? So let us right now return to basics. Let us consider what is meant
00:10:14.320 by critical and creative thinking and see if these can help us learn.
00:10:20.480 First, true critical and creative thinking are the very means by which we learn.
00:10:28.720 Indeed, they are the only means. They are the whole story. But do we understand the whole story?
00:10:35.520 No. Do we understand anything? Yes, of course, quite a bit. We have some very good ideas,
00:10:42.480 some very true ideas. We understand a lot about critical thinking,
00:10:47.520 but not quite so much about creative thinking. So in part two, I'm going to explain a little bit
