The future of childhood

Would you buy a computer if you has to wait 12 or more years for the software programs to download before you could use them? And when you did, discover they are out of date and not much use.

Almost certainly not!

So why do we send our offspring to a place called school, and expect them to remain silent for the next 12 to 15 years of their lives as we fill up their "hard drives" with data rather than practice the ways of being in the world that will be useful to them, right now and later on. How to make decisions. How to design and make stuff. How to perform, speak in public, deliver a presentation, develop and use a thinking or decision method, inspire fellow citizens, contribute to the community, host a dinner party or conduct a conversation.

The world of the child is at the crossroads. The more we teach to the test, which involves ongoing cycles of drilling and testing in order to acheive certain standards, there is less and less room in the school day for the kind of learning experiences that really count. School becomes more and more like a factory and less like the communities and workplaces of the 21st Century.

Says Mitchel Resnik, of the Media Lab at Massachussets Institute of Technology, playful learning experiences were once the norm, but now:

"Kindergarten is undergoing a dramatic change. For nearly 200 years, since the first kindergarten opened in 1837, kindergarten has been a time for telling stories, building castles, drawing pictures, and learning to share. But that is starting to change. Today, more and more kindergarten children are spending time filling out phonics worksheets and memorizing math flashcards [5]. In short, kindergarten is becoming more like the rest of school. In my mind, exactly the opposite is needed: Instead of making kindergarten like the rest of school, we need to make the rest of school (indeed, the rest of life) more like kindergarten." 


School is a also convenient child minding service for busy mums and dads, and school is not something kids want to disappear just because it can be boring at times and you can't use the tools like computer, the mobile phone, video and audio producting tools, or games as much as you would like. Kids like school because it offers real 4D connection, at recess and lunch times.

Home is where many kids now live well into their twenties, as it takes much longer to prepare young people for the 21st Century world, so kids are delaying the day when they become fully responsible adults, capable housing themselves and cutting the ties with their parents. But enjoying the benefits of having a good time at the local bar and grill, or even bringing a girl or boyfriend home to warm their single or even double bed, with Mum and Dad's full knowledge is a kind of early adult form of play

There is also another anomaly. Play now permeates adulthood. Increasingly, business games are employed by management teams to explore complex scenarios. Simulations give us the opportunity to understand how to respond to unexpected events. Some businesses operate like games such as our friends and colleagues at Performance of a Lifetime in New York or the military, where complex manouvers are often played out under conditions which closely resemble multiplayer games.

There are also some uncanny similarities between children's collective play and new ways of learning autocatalytically, by setting up the initial conditions, and allowing the newly created knowledge to simply emerge, which is a feature of complex adaptive systems like to the Zing complex adaptive learning environment.

So here is a question sequence to explore the future of childhood in which collective play has a central role:

1. What is it like to be a child?
2. What aspects of being a child are valuable to carry on into life?
3. What is happening to children today that might be different to children of 100 years ago? e.g. making and influencing adult purchases.
4. Describe all the different ways that children play together, e.g. using sticks to represent people, animals and things.
5. What happens when children play together? How do they seem to learn from one another?
6. Describe all the different kinds of games that adult play. e.g. scrabble, cards
7. What can adults learn from the games they play. Choose one game and describe the kinds of learning that might be possible.
8. Describe all the different ways that business uses games, simulations, dilemmas, vignettes, improv etc.
9. What can/does business learn from games/simulations and how does this help leaders better understand growing complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity.
10. Describe a new kind of school, in which play, or playing collective games is the normal way of learning. What would teachers and students do? What would be on the curriculum of a school focused on play and games?
11. Describe a new kind of workplace, in which play, or playing collective games is the normal way of working.
12. Describe a new kind of community in which play or playing collective games is the new way of interacting.
13. What might the future of childhood be in the 21st Century, and how might it be different to the 20th century?

Improv games for new ZPDs

The Zone of Proximal development is a concept created by Lev Vygotsky, the legendary Russian psychologist, to distinguish between what a child can learn on his/her own compared to the additional development that takes place when he/she learns with help from an adult or more expert person or in collaboration with a peer.

But Vygotsky also showed that when children (and adults, so it seems) play collectively, they "raise themselves up in the zone of proximal development, as if they were a head taller" and create new shared knowledge. Almost magical.

It's the same principle as emergent order in physical and biological systems, where the new structures, chemicals or species emerge through a process of autocatalysis. It's the "kinetic melodies" or neural sequences of gestures, symbols, signs, ideas, concepts and activity that spark new sequences in the human brain.

These days we define the ZPD more broadly, but this same kind of super-development can occur when we participate in any kind of collective play, such as reciprocal teaching, in an interaction with a computer or via overlapping ZPDs in a community of learners. Other ZPDs include a "zone of proximal reflection" as occurs when you keep a journal and you have conversations with yourself, or when you learn with the guidance of a facilitator, mentor or coach who asks you to think about relevant meta-questions or poses new challenges.

The one sure fire way to create collective ZPDs is via play. The Improvisation kind of play. Simulations. Games. Vignettes. Collective pantomimes. The kind of stuff that actors do on the spur of the moment, starting with just a few words or situation.

Here's just a few different kinds of collective ZPDs. The give ourselves an "A in advance" ZPD (which is what Ben Zander, the conductor does to good effect), the authentic happiness ZPD (which is what Appreciative Inquiry is all about, the spiritual ZPD (where we might meditate collectively), the delighted ZPD (where we engage in activities that delight us), or the wunderkammer/curiosity ZPD (for those who collect and share stories about wierd/interesting/unusual objects).

Here are a few Improv games to help you play with other people in new kinds of ZPDs, as well as a method to create your own:

1. Rich questions game: If you could be a fly on the wall, on whose wall would you like to be and what amazing/interesting things might you discover? One person begins, then the next person says...Yes, and...

2. Invent new words game: In threes, write down three unusual words, then each of you have a turn at creating a new word and definining what it means e.g. crack, outside, singing. Outsidecracksinger - a junkie who sings outrageously loudly when he/she is high and is chucked out of his house by his/her partner.

3. The Wisdom Age game: Each of us invents a new job/profession, some new tools and some new rules to apply knowledge wisely. Then we act out those new roles with those new tools and those new rules...and see what happens.

4. Invent a new "Yes, and" game that begin with a sentence, a word, gestures, numbers, musical notes, colours, drawings, poetry, song, situations, scenes from famous movies...etc.

5. Improv game: Design a new Improv game for 10 people to play around some ethical dilemma e.g. capping BPs oil well in the Gulf.

6. Disussion with a famous person game: One person plays Einstein and the other plays Mahatma Ghandi. Act out what they might say and do.

7. Writing for an audience game: You have to give a speech at TED.org. It's a new concept called TED poster girls and boys for up and coming thought leaders. But rather than give you 20 minutes, they have to squeeze you into 30 minute. Write a one minute thought provoking speech about something the world can learn from you.

8. Create your own Improv and ZPD game. Begin by choosing an unusual kind of zone of proximal development (e.g. a walk through the zoo ZPD)  and describe the rules for the collective game..e.g. (form two teams, each team chooses an animal, and then plays yes-and to describe the animal. The other team has to guess the animal. The team who get to tell the most yes-and stories wins the game.

Teamwork image, created by Alan Lam, from the Zing title, Dreams, Memes & Themes, 50 meetings to power up your organization.

Deep creativity everywhere

Just for fun I have been participating in an on-line creativity course with my favorite group of learning  revolutionaries, the East Side Institute in New York.

Twenty three of us have been exploring "Everyday creativity: Teaching and learning for the 21st Century."

This week's task was to be creative whenever we encountered a problem. Instead of rushing to a solution, we would write a poem. Just for fun.

Poetry is a form of written/spoken language. The words are selected and arranged so thee express ideas with a musical, rhythmic or sensuous quality. A kind of aural beauty with it's own unique patterns.

It helped me think about the relationship between the beauty of natural things and tools that humans create, and how we have become "pattern creators" as well as "pattern detectors".

We seem to be genetically disposed to discover beauty in everything. In all its different guises. It's how we make sense of the world. We look for events/things that occur more than once, so we can develop a rule for dealing with what we discover. So we can switch control from the ever-vigilant right frontal lobes to the reliably automatic left. And live in cognitive peace. It's what brains do. It's what sets us apart from our fellow species on planet earth.

We look for repetition, diversity, symmetry, simplicity, fecundity, regularity, self-similarity and brilliance.

The patterns underpin our creative nature. They are found in the rhythms of day-night, the seasons, animal gaits, heart beats, menstrual cycles and the tides. The spiral nature of galaxies, whirlpools, cyclones, the water disappearing down the plug-hole. The beautiful clockwise and counterclockwise spirals of sunflower seeds. The fractal (self-similar) nature of fern leaves, lightning, blood vessels, the alveoli of my lungs and the arrangements of my neurons. Waves of every kind - the windblown waves in sand dunes and oceans or the ripples on a pond. The sounds of birdsong or the cries of animals. The flocking of birds and the shoaling of fish as the fly or swim a fixed distance apart.

We humans have created our own "species" of patterns. Language, music, mathematics, science, the arts and laws.

And starting with these psychological representations, we render them in physical form to create works of art, products and tools we use in our daily lives.

Human-made patterns now rival the natural world with their own intrinsic beauty. And sometimes we mistake the models, theories and simulations for the real thing, and spend an unhealthy amount of time living in the world of our imaginations, rather than in balance with our fellow humans.

Here is an example of a mental model, a powerful way of thinking about how we engage in the world, developed by Howard Gardner, which has it's own intrinsic beauty. It's what Roger Penrose, author of The Emperor's New Mind,  would call a superb theory or model. Imagine using this model as the skeleton for a poem...see below for how you can write a line of poetry for each characteristic.

1 Bodily-kinesthetic

2 Interpersonal

3 Verbal-linguistic

4 Logical-mathematical
5 Intrapersonal
6 Visual-spatial

7 Musical

8 Naturalistic

You might like to try these Yes-and poetry games in pairs or as a large group. When we write this way together, it's as if there is an "invisible controller" of the group, that organizes the flow of what we do.

1. Brilliance Yes-and poetry game: On your turn, add three words which express your Brilliance (completeness, blissfulness, rightness, majesty, purity, strength, joy, compassion, love, clarity). Each line of the poem should start with - I feel [complete, or other aspect] when...

2. The Christian Bok Yes-and (Eunoia/beautiful thinking) poetry game: On your turn, add three words at a time, using only the vowel "a". Start with: Abracadabra alarms all

3. The no "e" game Yes-and poetry game. Write a poem, two words at a time, with no letter "e". Start with - All aphrodisiacs

4. Spectacular words Yes-and poetry game. Add two or three word combinations of superlatives/spectacular words only using these starter words - Exquisite phantasmagoria.

5. The Multiple Intelligence Yes-and poetry game. Take turns to create a poem where each line is an Improv game allows us to explore the intelligences. Finish where you started. 1 Bodily-kinesthetic, 2 Interpersonal, 3 Verbal-linguistic, 4 Logical-mathematical, 5 Intrapersonal, 6 Visual-spatial, 7 Musical, 8 Naturalistic

For example:

1. Fly like a bird, up in the sky.

2. Ask each other what you desire

3. Employ a metaphor for saying goodbye

4. 1,1,2,3,5...give it a try!

5. Close your eyes and imagine a lie,

6. Draw a picture that smells like hot pie,

7. Sing us a song that's like angels on high,

8. Listen to the birds as they fly through the sky.

6. The retro-viral poetry game: This is a game that should create new versions of itself, like a retro-virus. It should infect the brain, help create something more spectacular/interesting, and then become contagious.

Create another, more spectacular version of these kinds of questions, that play movies/songs in your mind or tunes on your body...."Thinking about all the different colors of the sky, what colors were they, what was happening at the time and what is the pattern?

For example....

What color is da sky?

Blue you say.

Nay. Think about every other day.

When it was green or black

Or even red or grey.

Write a verse,

Perhaps worse than this,

That gets your brain or body

Laughing it's *....* off.

Spectacular? No. It's just play

7.  Starting with a mental model, list all the attributes, then create a line of verse for each attribute. Jungian archetypes, Servant Leadership actions (Haiku), Polarities (Managership-leadership), family roles, Six Thinking Hats kinds of thinking, the senses, the seasons.

Teaching to the test

The latest reading scores were published in the USA last week.

They showed little change, despite a huge investment in time, student effort and teacher energy.

This means that one in six kids will continue to leave school, functionally illiterate. One in six!

That's 50 million of tomorrow's Americans who will be unable to read, write or count adequately. And as the world becomes more complex, these marginalized citizens will face a dwindling supply of jobs, and the cost of supporting them via the public purse, will continue to climb.

McKinsey, the management consulting firm, forecasts that by 2017, some 44 per cent of all jobs will require conversation and negotiation skills, to help collectively create new knowledge, and use that knowledge to develop new and better products, or deliver new and more powerful or effective services, that improve our quality of life.

So what are schools doing to prepare young people for this kind of world? Certainly not helping young people develop their teamwork or conversation skills, because we know from the research that most US classrooms are designed for "blah, blah, blah" rather than "yak,yak, yak". The teacher at the front of the class lecturing or asking closed questions. The students seated at separate desks, remaining quiet until spoken to.

Could it be that by focusing on the minutae of how well kids can read, write or use mathematical ideas, we are setting ourselves up for failure? Could it be that we teachers "teach to the test" so our schools keep their funding and we teachers keep our jobs? Could it be that short-term memorization strategies are not in our student's long-term best interests?

What if we used the latest knowledge from brain science to guide how we teach? What if we designed an education system that teaches to our frontal lobes, the part of our brain that makes us uniquely human, rather than the ancient "reptilian" brain we have in common with many other creatures, or the limbic brain we and our fellow mammals developed?

Our frontal lobes are responsible for making sense of the world, planning what to do and how to do it. They act as our own personal Google and find stuff for us when we most need it, in the context of a complex problem or issue. They lay down new automatic thinking and acting patterns, so we don't have to push the porridge up our nose every day. They give us the capabilities that most other animals don't have, the ability to use tools, to learn from the past, plan for the future, create new knowledge together, and make new and more powerful tools.

What if we judged teacher and student success by focusing on the bigger picture of student passion, engagement, performance or contribution? So that we create a classroom culture in which young minds and bodies thrive? And where teachers are actually rewarded for teaching this way.

A frontal-lobe focused classroom would provide opportunities for young people to develop their conversation, planning and problem solving skills in interactions with each other. To respect each other, ask rich questions, use different forms of discourse, listen empathetically, persuade an audience, engage in playful simulation or present a performance. They would be prepared for the world that's emerging, not the world of a hundred years ago, when unskilled work was plentiful and technology less complex.

And when we teach this way, our brain chemistry delivers enjoyable rewards for successfully completing tasks, especially those that are just a little ahead of our capabilities, like the way games are designed to reward you as you progress through each level.

Think of it this way. If you were a movie mogul, would you judge the success of your movies on a written exam of what moviegoers learned - the minutae, the detail and a fight/flight response - or the jingle of the cash register at the box office and the reviews by the pundits - the big picture, and the flow of good feelings.

Here's a workshop to explore the mood of your classroom:

1. When you are asked to recall specific information from memory, what emotions do you feel? And why do you feel this way?

2. What is the mood of your classroom? Make a list of the main emotions that students experience during the course of the day, and why they feel this way?

3. What is YOUR mood in the classroom? Make a list of the emotions you experience and why you feel this way.

4. Describe an activity in your classroom when your students experienced positive emotions. What were they doing and what teaching strategies were you using at the time?

5. Describe a time when your students were enthusiastically engaged in an activity for a long period of time, so they did not notice time passing. What were they doing and why did they stay engaged for so long?

6. Thinking about what you know about learning, engagement, our emotions and how the brain works, design a learning activity that generates positive emotions for you and your students, and results in enthusiastic and passionate engagement.
7. Describe a learning activity that is designed to make use of the frontal lobes ability to connect up/develop lower level component skills of reading, writing and maths so they are swept along for the ride.
8. Describe a test that would allow teachers and students to measure the "big picture" aspects of learning including passion, engagement, performance and contribution.
9. Describe a dual system of testing - the "big picture" and the "nitty gritty" so that both act as feedback loops to guide the kind of learning students need to undertake for the future. How would you ensure there is balance between the two?

The knowledge and job creating place/space

Perhaps it's time we dumped the old-fashioned idea of school. A place to send children 6-7 hours a day to get the 12+ years of programming to upgrade their "stone-age" brains ready for 21st Century use.

Worth the wait? Of course you say. But think of it this way. How would you feel if you had to wait 12 years before you could use your brand new computer? You might prefer to start with what's available today. So why not kids?

Imagine a new kind of learning place/space. For Wisdom Age-ready kids. Who learn how to design and facilitate their own knowledge discovery and wise applications methods. Or go out into their communities to undertake useful projects for others, to serve not only their own interests as learners and people, but also the broader community interest. Who create their own jobs. Or the rich relating, negotiating and inspiring skills that are critical to success. 

It's a problem that no one can escape. Our collective knowledge is expanding at an exponential rate. Yesterday's theory is tomorrow's mythology. It's the driver for accelerating change. So by the time our children graduate, the jobs they aspire to today and the tools they will use, will no longer exist. And the content they have been exposed to, but may not have absorbed, will be marginally useful.

So here's a workshop to help young people explore the careers they might like to pursue:

1. Make a list of the top 10 wicked problems or unsolved issues in the world today e.g. injustices that people feel they have to take action against, diseases like malaria that can be dealt with successfully.

2. Thinking about the kind of career you would like to pursue, how could you re-invent this job so that it was a great fit with your sporting, hobby, home or other interests? e.g. rock climbing archeologist, Deep sea diving plumber.

3. Thinking about 2-3 different kinds of jobs/careers that you might like, how could you combine these kinds of jobs into a new super-job which would be more exciting, powerful or interesting.

4. Creating a better world: If you had any powers that you liked, what would you do to change the world for the better e.g. bake scrumptious cakes that people would drool over.

5. Important to keep: What do you really love about the world that is really important to keep and how would you like to play a role in doing that?

6. You have the job of re-inventing jobs, so they are more interesting, exciting, but most-of-all require that you do your work WISELY. How does this change your job? e.g. a hairdresser who helps you develop a plan for different ways to wear your hair, for different occasions or care for your hair between haircuts.

7. In the upcoming Wisdom Age (post-Knowledge Age world) new jobs are being invented in hunter gathering, agriculture, mining, construction, manufacturing, information, and knowledge sectors which add a Wisdom component. Brainstorm some new jobs e.g. Certified ethical hacker, global governance consultant, ecological foot print auditor.

8. Thinking about your new career idea, how could you best serve the interests of others, so there is a win-win-win result? You win, they win and other people win as well.

9. Thinking about your career preferences, how could you redesign the job, so you are always inventing better ways to make the jobs simpler, more efficient, more interesting, or something that others could easily do for themselves?

10. Which other kinds of people in the room could you connect up with to offer a new-to-the world product or service that you could not do alone e.g. hairdresser, self-help expert and trainer.

11. Thinking of a job such as a personal trainer, computer programmer,  tour guide, singer, etc. what kind of tool could you invent which would help lots of people improve their lives using your methods?

12. What is the title you will wear on your name badge this year?

The new language of facilitation

At the start of the 21st century, when accelerating change and growing complexity are the only constants, education administrators, universities, schools and teachers continue to use outdated "knowledge telling" models of teaching and learning that fall short of what we need.

According to management consultants McKinsey & Co almost half of all jobs in the future will require conversation and negotiation skills. The ability to develop a theory or concept, mount an argument, discuss your ideas and persuade others of their value or importance. It's more about the process - thinking, making good choices, knowledge creation or relating to others - rather than the content, although both are important. 

It involves a major shift in the way we communicate. From giving direction and instructions. To encouraging participation and the respectful exchange of ideas, empathic listening and creativity. From "I/you" to "us/we".

The problem is that traditional classrooms offer very few opportunities to develop or practice these skills. And the current fad of learning-on-line falls short as well.

If you trained as a teacher in an Industrial Age world of the blackboard, chalk, textbook and knowledge telling, your brain circuitry has been shaped to automatically give instructions, deliver clear explanations in a precise order and ask closed questions. If so, your classroom is most likely to comprise rows of desks facing the front of the room, you see your role as an instructor and you frequently check to see whether your students are learning what you have told them. And although you may use a computer, an electronic white board and a video projector, we, the teachers, are still central stage.

If you grew-up in an on-line Information Age world, you are more likely to be a skilled designer of content or competent with emails and chat. The on-line-learning approach, which some see as the current "holy grail" of education has become popular, particularly with universities, because it can be delivered at very low cost anywhere in the world. The lecture notes are on-line and augmented by fancy simulations. You see much less of your tutor or lecturer, and spend more time writing, completing on-line tasks or regurgitating information to demonstrate that you understand what it means.

And, although the ability to find and re-organize information is an important skill for today's world, it is a far cry from the much more complex task of converting data into knowledge, learning how to apply it wisely and persuading others of the need to act. And on-line-learning tends to be an isolating activity where students work alone in rooms-full of computers or from home.

So why has conversation become a critical skill for a Knowledge Age world? 

It's very simple really. What we collectively know is expanding so fast it is no longer possible for any one person or group to have a complete picture. And if your model of how the future might unfold is flawed and you make the wrong investments in skills, equipment and buildings, your choices can become a millstone around your neck. 

You can easily be sidelined or beaten to success by more nimble competitors. People with more advanced or appropriate skills. Companies with better products or cost effective production methods. Or nations with competitive advantages like a better education system, or more attractive places to live or invest, or more people with the skills you need for success.

Because its very difficult to create a bigger and better picture on your own,  we need to listen to many points of view, and deeply understand what people mean. We need to incorporate most if not all of their ideas into higher level ideas, which embrace all our thinking. Its called dialectical discourse. Or if we want to be sure that our ideas are appropriate for the whole of our society, we need to employ an even higher level conversational skill, which a colleague, Professor Linda Newman, and I call ethical dialectical discourse.

Change is occurring so fast that many of our traditional governance and decision making systems can't keep up. Think of the regulatory, distribution, management and learning failures of the past ten years. The banks and giant companies that were too big to fail, who were unable to notice major changes in the market place, or the dangers lurking in their trading practices. Our inability to reach agreement about what to do about global warning. Our impotence in the face of earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes. Our failure to deal with rogue states. Our inability to look after the poor and the homeless. The way we let young people fail school and fill up our jails to overflowing. The polarization and dumbing down of political decisions in order to win popular elections, instead of providing leadership around breakthrough ideas.  

Many more young people are now needed in all walks of life to be wise risk-taking leaders and facilitators of learning, able to create new knowledge themselves and persuade others of its importance. So they grow up ready for a Knowledge Age or Wisdom Age world.

The problem is, we teachers have only learned about meta-cognitive and executive control skills in the lecture theater or on-line and rarely practice these skills. We know the theory of what to do, but we really don't know how to do it. Because we have had so little practice.

On the other hand, pilots are not allowed to fly planes without years of rehearsal. Brain surgeons cant remove that tumor unless they know precisely what to do, without consciously thinking about it. So why should we let teachers teach, if we can't lead and facilitate and regularly practice these skills so they are automatic, easy to do, and be a good role model for young people.

I have hours of videotapes of very good traditional teachers struggling with the new role of facilitator. What to do and say. When traditional teachers try to teach this way, we mess up. What we say is a muddle of "inner speech" used to sequence actions, previously acquired automatic speech routines, authority speech, and the scraps of what we learned to say during our training day. So the next time we think of organizing a class discussion or use some technology in the classroom, we don't. 

Facilitation, which is a form of leadership, has a whole new language to learn, processes to follow and a structure that is different to what we currently find in the conventional classroom. How to set up the furniture for conversation. How to initiate and guide the group interaction.  How to give clear guidance to orchestrate a group so it can share and manipulate information and resolve their conversations into decisions, theories, models or processes.

Its all about using the inclusive and respectful "we" instead of "I" and "you". Phrases like "what if we?", "Let's" and "It would be good if we could" instead of "I want you to", "you must" or "you will". It's about looking for patterns in what we collectively say, rather than choosing between options, such as "what's the pattern in our thinking" or "how could we pull all our ideas together into a single fantastic overarching idea" instead of "choose the best idea". It's about conducting many conversations at the same time, instead of the loudest dominating. It's "what if we discuss this topic in pairs and then share our ideas with the whole group?" instead of "your idea makes no sense to me". And we used concepts like "ideas" or contributions" instead of "answers" or "responses".

So here are some activities to plan how to conduct conversations in your classroom:

1. Thinking about how your classroom is currently organized, how could you re-arrange the furniture - the tables and chairs - so that everyone can engage in conversation in small groups and pairs?

2. Describe a relating method, like think-pair-square-share, that would allow the people in your classroom to have a conversation with another person and then in either small groups, or the entire class or both, reach a decision where all the opinions are considered and resolved to everyone's satisfaction.

3. Brainstorm a series of open-ended questions from different subjects point of view - maths, science, history etc - to explore the topic of "Body image over the centuries and how our views have changed.

4. Assign each member of the group a different subject area to their own - maths, science, history, art, literature, design, social studies, music, sport - and brainstorm a list of the words used commonly used by each of those disciplines e.g. mathematics - addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, plus, minus, theorem, line, angle etc

5. Brainstorm a list of topics that students could discuss in class in small groups that would bring a broad spectrum of normally separate subjects - maths, science, history, literature, art, design, writing etc. - into the conversation and as part of an argument. e.g. Body image over the centuries and how our views have challenged.

6. Brainstorm some phrases that a facilitator could use to give guidance to a discussion that are inclusive, recognize that all ideas are useful contributions., inspires people to contribute, causes everyone be be involved and engaged.

7. Choose one of the following conversation types and give an example that explains the benefits/advantages and disadvantages. Monologue, Discussion, Dialogue, Dialectical, Ethical Dialectical.

8. Craft/design a series of open-ended rich questions that bring "knowledge" into the process so it can be discussed, evaluated and incorporated into the outcome.

9. Craft/design a sequence of questions that starts with a data collection activity and ends with one of the following. A Theory. A Decision. An Action Plan. A New Understanding. A Concept. A Design.

* Manyika, J.M., Roberts, R.P., & Sprague, K.L. (2007, December). Eight business technology trends to watch. Retrieved February 29, 2008 from http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Eight_business_technology_trends_to_watch_2080

Thinking about thinking

A current, but largely unrealized objective of school education is for learners to acquire thinking skills so they develop a helicopter view of themselves as learners and begin to recognize thinking methods and mental models as useful tools.

Self regulation and "thinking process" knowledge are critical not only to academic success, but are necessary for the new kinds of Knowledge Age jobs and Wisdom Age (wise application of knowledge) jobs that help us survive a world of ever-accelerating change.

Student access to higher level thinking skills depends on the ability of teachers to be role models, to frame rich questions, or to model the framing of questions, so students can learn to evolve or expand upon ideas, rather than simply reproduce what they have been taught.

But "thinking about thinking", otherwise known as metacognition, is hard for many teachers to understand or explain to their students. It is a fuzzy concept.

Although most teacher have declarative knowledge about thinking, they know what it is, and can use a thinking process themselves, they are often unable to identify the steps in a process, name the parts or explain or derive the rules.

Opportunities for students to practice higher order thinking skills are rare because teachers continue to ask mostly closed questions with a restricted range of solutions. To test for understanding. To keep control of the class. Or teach to a standardized test, which is all about short-term memorization.

Metacognition helps children organize complex sequences of thought or action and is effective for both high and low achieving students. Scaffolds are used by teachers to reduce the processing complexity to help the student develop new patterns of thinking, what steps to follow and in what order. The scaffolds are removed as the learner develops the skills to regulate their own activity.

Most programs to introduce thinking skills into schools fail because teachers also have difficulty arranging and facilitating classroom discussions as part of their teaching practice. Time is wasted completing routine administration tasks and maintaining order. Many teachers struggle to frame open-ended questions (for discussion) instead of the usual closed question (to test for understanding). As a result, students do not engage in dialogue or discussion, which defeats the purpose of the activity. Many teachers find they are unable to complete a round of activities in a 60-minute timetabled period.

But there is some good news. There is now an expanding range of tools to support thinking, question asking, and conversation in the classroom. One new method is Six Thinking Hats developed by Dr. Edward de Bono. He associates colors with different kinds of thinking. Red for feelings. Blue for what next. Black for problems or difficulties. Yellow for the benefits. Green for Creative thinking. White for facts. And to make sure that thinking is not a giant muddle, everyone in the group does the same kind of thinking at the same time, which he calls parallel thinking. For example:

White Hat: What do we know about human cloning?

Yellow Hat: What are the benefits of human cloning?

Black Hat: What are the dangers or disadvantages of human cloning?

Red Hat: How do we feel about human cloning?

Green Hat: What could we do creatively with human cloning?

Blue Hat: What should we do next about human cloning?

Another new approach is the Zing team meeting technology which helps teachers learn how to craft sequences of rich, open-ended questions, to conduct a conversation with a peer, and to share all the ideas with others on the other side of the classroom, before moving on to the next question. Students quickly learn how to craft their own question sequences, and with enough practice, develop metacognitive thinking skills by doing. The tool scaffolds not only the thinking process, but also different discourse models, for example, discussion, dialog and dialectical discourse. An example of a thinking process is this activity from Relating Well, 100 self-facilitated workshops for personal development, to develop an understanding of why society has Rules and Laws:

Make a list of all the rules in your school classroom. What are you expected to do/not do?

Make a list of all the rules at home. What are you expected to do/not do?

What happens if you break the rules at home?

What happens if you break the rules at school?

What could happen if you break community rules or laws?

Under what circumstances is it OK to break the rules? eg. To save someone's life. Give some examples.

If there was only one rule in the world what should it be and why?

Describe a bad rule you think we should change because it is unfair to some people.

Make a list of all the rules that help ensure people can live, safe, happy lives.

If you wanted to get support to change an unfair rule or law, what could you do?

Give an example of what can go wrong when people break the law?

Why do we need rules?

So here is a short workshop to "think about thinking":

1. Yes-no questions - Craft several questions which result in a yes or no answer. e.g. Should we go home now? Do you like sponge cake?

2. Closed questions - Craft several questions which have only one response/answer e.g. What is 1 + 1? Who is the president of the United States?

3. Open ended question - Craft several questions that can be discussed by a group and have more than one possible answer. e.g. What makes you feel sad?

4. When might it be appropriate to ask a closed question? Give examples.

5. When might it be appropriate to ask open-ended questions? Give examples.

6. Concepts catalyze/stimulate other concepts in memory. What do you immediately think about when you hear these words: animals, house, party, game, clothes, water?

7. Rich concepts are very powerful catalysts. What comes to mind when you hear these word combinations? Happy days, famous people, sensitive touch, glorious colors. 

8. Brainstorm a series of rich open-ended questions/activities to explore the topic: Body Image - how we look and feel about ourselves. e.g. What do you feel about magazines presenting "thin" as the normal body shape?

9. Here is a list of different kinds of thinking activities. Feel, Choose, Decide, Plan, Consider benefits, Consider disadvantages. Compare alternatives, Make sense of information, Recall facts, Understand something.  Choose a kind of thinking and ask a question to ask others what they are thinking e.g. What do you feel about the issue?

10. Create a three-question feedback method to find out what people like or dislike about something, using these three kinds of thinking as a starting point. Like. Dislike. Learn from this e.g. What did we like about the meal we just ate?

11. Most thinking processes start with a focus on the problem or the issue. Brainstorm a list of problems or issues as a concept to be understood: e.g. World peace. The distance from earth to the moon.

12. A great place to start is with what we know, the data, "facts" or prior knowledge. Craft a question/instruction which asks participants to recall what they know. e.g. Make a list of at least five small animals. What do you like about small animals like dogs and cats?

13. The logical order in which thinking steps should be undertaken is like a "thinking journey". Convert this planning process to questions and assemble them in the best order. First five steps. Team members. Success measures. Cost estimate. Main tasks. Technology/tools to be used. Description of the project. Milestones (dates). Project Title. Theory to inform the project. Resources required.

14. Undertake one kind of "opposites" thinking at a time. Split this question into two questions. "What are the benefits and disadvantages of immunization?" Or this one: What did you like or dislike about your holiday?

15. Here is a closed question. What color is the sky? Rewrite this question so that people will share their unique experiences of the sky and what was happening at the time.