All right. Well, welcome to our next session, everybody. We've been having a great summer
camp so far, and I'm looking forward to it continuing. Our next summer camp session is
going to be a year of uncertainty, fighting the fight against the Rand Corporation with
Dave Cormier. I'm here with Dave, so you can just take it away. Go for it.
Thanks. Welcome aboard, folks. I think it's entirely possible that some of you have better
things you could be doing than sitting here listening to me rant about uncertainty for,
I don't know, 45 minutes or an hour. But that's about what's going to happen. My name's Dave
Cormier. I work at the University of Windsor here in Canada. I've been around the education-y
space for quite a while. I've been near DS-106 since pretty much the first day that it started
up. But back in those days, I lacked the artistic vision. I was incompetent and did not have
the intellectual fortitude to participate in some of those early activities. And I've
always been sort of, I don't know, a little daunted about coming on here and doing one
of these shows. But when I saw the invitation for the summer camp to come out, I thought,
summer camp? That sounds like a place where I can learn and give things a shot. So that's
what I'm going to do today is I'm going to sort of give a ride here through some of the
things I've been thinking for the last year and trying to organize sort of where I'm going.
Rant Corporation. There you go. Nice one, Terry. So I'm going to sort of lay out what
I'm on about. We ran a conference about three or four weeks ago called Shrug Con. Imagine
yourself in a giant shrug and imagine that it's going to be a conference. And we brought
in people from all over the place who were all talking about how somewhere deep inside,
we all had this kind of suspicion that the things that we were doing, the things that
we were approaching, the answers to some of the questions we had, weren't actually answers
at all. That somehow we've all kind of fooled ourselves into believing that the thing we're
supposed to be doing is finding the right answer to questions. The thing we're supposed
to be doing is getting the answer right, doing the right thing. Where in a lot of cases,
those are just expressions of power. In order for you to decide what the definition of a
table is, to take it at its very simplest, you almost necessarily need to exclude somebody
else's feelings about it. You have to decide, you have to put your own boundaries around
it. And it's one of those things that is a part of our culture. It's a part of how we
think about learning. The vast majority of us have been through an education system,
some 12,000 or so hours just to get to university, where someone is in charge of deciding what's
right. And that person adjudicates that in some mysterious way that we never see. And
then we're told whether or not we've performed appropriately. I'm all for the normativizing
processes of education. At some point, we need to normativize our culture in some way.
We have to share a language so we can talk to each other. But at the same time, in this
process, and whether you go back to 1895 in the UK, where they were going around with
-- there's a great report that was done by the Americans who went over and looked at
the British education system, the K-12 system. And they had people who were going from school
to school to check and make sure, one, that kids were coming to school and their parents
could get arrested and thrown in jail if they weren't. I think in that report, there were
some 500 or so kids in the city that they were talking about whose parents actually
got put into jail for one reason or another because of attendance. And the second one
is trying to make sure that they achieved those fourth grade -- was what they were looking
at at the time -- those fourth grade standards. And I mean, standards are fine. But if you're
going to bureaucratize a standard, we've got to solidify it. We've got to turn it into
something that's static and observable and verifiable in some sort of way.
And so I'm not here proposing that we haven't had a problem with this since the beginning.
Because I think to some degree, as soon as you bureaucratize education, you're going
to end up with this standardization issue, just logistically. If you look at what Pestolizzi
was trying to do in 1798, where he was trying to teach the entire country of Switzerland
how to read, you're going to end up with problems. And he would say that a good school book can
teach a child how to do something as well or almost as well as a well-educated instructor.
And what he was trying to do was standardize the process of teaching so he could get more
people taught. Like, I get it. Those things make sense. I think there's more value in
having more people read than it is in allowing some sort of Caesarian experience.
When he went to talk to Molin, he took the boat for two weeks in, I think it's 68 BC,
to go see Molin on the Isle of Rhodes. It was caught by pirates, like the whole deal.
But that's to have that sort of individualized mentorship, rich learning experience that
would sort of customize what he needed to learn. I understand that the bureaucratization
forces us down that road a little bit. And I think we've gotten better than we lost in
that process. I don't think it's an either/or, but I understand that distinction. But that's
not what I'm talking about. Look at the other 90s. That's not where the Rand Corporation
comes into this process. So for those of you who don't know the Rand Corporation, they
show up in cartoons as the weird other company that sort of mysteriously designs things.
They're like the Acme Corporation, almost, the way they show up by times. They partially
grow out of a conversation that happens on the West Coast of the United States after
World War II, where the Air Force particularly started looking at ways to do better decision
making. It was part of the thing that they were doing. It's not the only thing they were
after, but part of what they were doing. Yeah, thanks, pilot. But looking at decision making.
And so they built a fair chunk, or worked on at least a fair chunk of the early computers.
And the early computer in question today is called Johnny-ack. So for those of you who
are up on your computer history, the Johnny-ack was a gigantic computer that, I've got the
specs here somewhere. I think it was 40, there it is. Word lengths of 40 bits with two instructions
in each word. Its fast storage consists of 4,096 words of magnetic cores, and its secondary
storage units consists of 9,216 words on magnetic drums. An incredibly powerful computer. Oh,
it does 15,000 operations per second, which frankly is still kind of amazing today when
you think about it. But we're talking about a computer from 1958 here. So not the insanity
that we have now that does language conversion, which I still don't understand. But we've
got this kind of computer. And the article that's sitting in front of me right now is
called Elements of a Theory of Human Problem Solving. Ooh, thank you. That's a fantastic
link. I appreciate you. Though I want to call you Carpet Bombers. I'll call you Carpet
Bombers until I get a name. So Elements of Human Problem Solving with Alan Newell, JC
Shaw, the Rand Corporation, and Herbert Simon. Herbert Simon is the key word here. So this
article is fantastic. In it, they describe how they have been looking at digital systems
to come up with a more efficient means of problem solving. So for them, when you crystallize,
when you decide exactly on what the inputs are, when you define them very specifically,
then shockingly, the process of problem solving becomes much easier. In that moment, and actually
there's a couple of things that come out of the '30s and '40s as well. But let's say one
of those moments, and I don't want to-- I've already wandered you through 2,000 years of
history here. At that moment, you see a part of this shift that I'm talking about towards
the idea that a clear objective is somehow something that we want to have as part of
the learning process, as part of the problem solving process specifically. But I would
argue that it bleeds into this learning process stuff later. It sure does show up again and
again with Alan Newell. So Alan Newell and Herbert Simon and-- oh, God, what's the other
guy's name? I'll get it. Over the next bunch of years, are looking at artificial intelligence.
They're looking at trying to solve problems and what they call well-structured problems.
And that's an important distinction here. And you'll see in this distinction some of
the stuff that I'm talking about. So a well-structured problem is one where the goal, like the question,
and the process to solve that question, and the outcomes you're looking for are clearly
definable-- not necessarily defined, but definable. And for them, an ill-structured problem--
and Herbert Simon would say this all the way into the 21st century-- that an ill-structured
problem is the messiness that's left over. It's the stuff we don't worry about. It's
the stuff we can't be bothered with. In that stuff that can't be bothered with is what
I would argue the vast majority of the important things in our lives. But in educational history,
Herbert Simon ends up becoming a huge figure. He becomes somebody who is very much-- he
won a Nobel Prize as an economist, but becomes this huge figure in talking about how to--
how to solve problems. And then when people are looking at good learning, they're looking
at problem solving as one of the pathways to find that. And you see this everywhere
from the engineering design model is a good example of something that's looking to solve
a problem. And so they work a lot on chess. If you put an education in chess or educational
theory in chess, Esmanger has a really good article about this where he sort of tracks
it down and talks about the different ways in which you can look at how a certain part
of the education community has looked at chess, chess players particularly, as the best kind
of learners. So let's imagine them as a model, right? And imagine them as-- let's look at
the way that they learn, at the way that they work, the way that they solve problems. Let's
use that as our model for our schools and then apply that into the classroom.
And behind this sort of framing, behind this frame of problem solving, you see a whole
host of people who are writing today, are very influential educators today, who have
an awful lot of influence on public policy. They do an awful lot of the speaking that
gets done inside of the field. They write very influential books. People like Paul Kirshner,
Daniel Willingham, inside of their books, you see a lot of the citations that come back
towards this stuff. And I'm not here to say that 80 years of educational research, problem
solving research is somehow wrong. That's not the point I'm trying to make. What I am
saying is that that history of problem solving, of things being better whenever they're efficient,
and by efficient we mean getting the answer correct, getting to the answer quickly, being
able to remember the thing that you were given, we have a history of that being the way that
we judge our education system.
Increasingly, I've been in-- I'm sure anybody listening has been in tons of conversations
where people are looking for clarity of objectives. They're looking for student performance. When
we talk, we hear governments talk about education, we're looking about raising grades, and by
that we mean them doing better on certain kinds of standardized testing, which is mostly
about recall, though some would argue that those tests are better than that.
Shannon asks or comments, I was unfamiliar with the Simon's framing of ill-structured
problems and design discipline, ill-structured problems are not diminished, but acknowledged
as incredibly hard to solve, as something design practices aim to tackle. So I agree
with you, Shannon, but the magic word in there is solve. So a design problem is a-- not every
version of it, and there are many different versions and many different approaches.
But when you look at-- I think of things that respond to things like Lean Six Sigma. So
Lean Six Sigma is an improvement model that is used in a lot of companies and governments
to take on a process and make it better. And it's actually a really impressive model, and
I've been involved in several projects that use it. So one of the projects I was included
in was when we were looking for the Department of Motor Vehicles, it took 37 minutes for
somebody to walk in the door and get their driver's license printed at the time in the
province that I was in. And we worked on that process. And one of the sort of concepts of
it is to look at all the different parts of the process, look at the really clear outcome
they are looking for, for the goal that's involved, and then sort of dig through there
and get rid of all the things that don't work. And in this case, the success model was shorter
time. So we weren't looking at whether or not the person had a pleasant experience.
We weren't looking about how it was measurable exactly. So we could measure that we went
down-- I think it was seven minutes is what we got it down to. Because we realized that
a vast majority of the people who were coming in were actually just trying to do this renewal
thing. And it actually didn't involve the rest of the process. We broke the processes
off. We did this whole thing. We ran it inside of the department. People were working. They
were happy. It worked out better for the clients. It was great. But we could measure success.
I've also been in, God, dozens of conversations with consultants, corporate consultants, who
come into the education sphere and say, we're going to apply a process like Lean Six Sigma
on your thing. And in one case, actually, I wasn't representing education at the time.
I was representing the medical community. And they said, well, what we really need to
do in this instance with patients inside the hospital was fail fast with our model. And
we're like, well, hold on a second here. Those are humans that we're talking about. Failing
fast with them is not something that we can do. And success with them is not necessarily
all that clear. So in some cases, success is making the patient feel comfortable. In
some cases, success is making sure that patient doesn't infect another patient. In some cases,
there's not one measurement of success inside this process. And some of these things we
can't even measure. So it becomes-- Taylorism, there you go. It becomes really difficult
to get your hands around that. And I would even suggest that they're not even solutions.
Shannon, I'll push even further on that. And I'm not trying to pick you out. I really appreciate
your engagement. So let me give you an example from my own town. We have a mayor in my city
who is against us building four plexes inside of the city of Windsor. Now, there's a bunch
of different ways of looking at it. To some degree, some people in the city are against
us creating new buildings inside of green spaces in the city because they're-- right?
Exactly, Shannon. So they're trying to conserve as many green spaces in the city as possible.
I can totally understand that. That makes total sense. There's also another group of
people who really want people to have homes that are not part of a giant apartment complex
that are like a family home. And they see a certain value to that. They have arguments
around what that does for the economy. There are other people who think that that's going
to lower their-- the value of their houses because suddenly it won't be single family
homes. It'll be four family homes. And it attracts a quote unquote different kind of
person. A little tone there gives you a sense of where I sit in that matter. But the point
here-- and there are a bunch of other issues. And that's just three of the eight or 10 or
12 that we went around the table for one day-- is that success is entirely dependent on who
is asking the question and what that person is looking to get out of it, what their values
are. It becomes a value-based decision. Now, inside of that, there are lots of things that
you can measure that you can solve inside of that process. So for instance, one of the
things that our mayor did was turn down millions of dollars to help build fourplexes from the
government because he doesn't believe in them. That money is a countable item that will solve
some of the problems should we get it. Certainly, there are better and worse ways to build things.
There are better and worse ways to conserve green spaces. And I'm not suggesting relativism
here, but rather more like a wicked problem, where when you ask a question, even the fact
of asking the question, one, excludes people from the process. And it becomes difficult
for people to understand where they're supposed to go.
So why do I think this is important? So this said a year of uncertainty, the title here.
So where I'm going with this, I've sort of set this up hopefully in giving you a sense
that while I'm not disrespectful of the work, certainly of the work, the people like Herb
and Simon, and of the people who are looking at problem solving as the thing we should
be teaching and improving problem solving as the pathway forward. I think there's certainly
a place for that inside of our education system. My concern is for those other things, right?
Not to exclude the problem solving argument, but in addition to it, there are certainly
kinds of problem solving that are really important. I love building things, for instance. And
in the process of construction, you do a lot of problem solving. You also do a lot of fudging
that you don't necessarily tell anybody about. But I'm not suggesting the problem solving
is bad. What I am saying is that what we've seen inside of the students that we're working
with, and whether or not this is me being an old gray beard, and I'm seeing this for
the first time and it's always been there, or whether or not this is something that's
come out of reactions to COVID, increasing problem solving approaches inside of schools,
and there are reasons around that that I'm happy to blab about if people are interested.
But I do think that our schools certainly in Canada have become more rigid in terms
of the way that we assess students. But for those other things, that tolerance for ambiguity,
which is what Budner would call it from his work from 1962, it's that tolerance for ambiguity,
that ability to deal in nuance, that ability to work an ill-structured problem, that ability
to consider what to do inside of a situation where there is no right answer. That's the
stuff I worry about. And we've seen it pop up all over the place.
So in some of the work that we're doing, we're looking at students who are going into the
workforce as part of their education program. And the biggest complaint we get from employers
right now is, "Hey, what am I supposed to do?" Students looking at their supervisors
and going, "What am I supposed to do in this situation?" Supervisors going, "Well, I don't
know." So for instance, if they're meeting with a client and work with social workers
and work with law students and a variety of different places. So enough of them are places
where they're actually dealing with a client. "So what am I supposed to do?" "Well, I don't
know. I haven't talked to that person yet. You need to go talk to them." It's at that
point that the problem starts, right? Because what the student is looking to do is get the
right answer. And we see this in our classrooms all the time. Just tell me, students looking
at me and saying, "Just tell me what you want me to do. Just tell me what you want me to
do. I'll go ahead and do that thing. And then I'll hand it back to you. You'll give me a
grade and we'll all be happy." Don't, like, let's not go any further than that. But they're
running into that same problem inside of their workplace situations where they walk in and
they're not understanding what they're supposed to do, quote unquote. They know what the tasks
are, but they don't know how to succeed because the situation in front of them is not controlled,
right? There is no necessary right way of doing it. There are definitely things that
are wrong to do, but there's no necessarily right way of doing it. You know, different
people might do it in different ways, depending on your personality, and certainly depending
on the client that you have in front of you. So it's that tolerance for ambiguity, that
tolerance for uncertainty, that ability to confront, to embrace uncertainty is the thing
that I'm not seeing. The thing that I'm worried about inside of our education system.
A great example comes from the work of Michelle Lazarus. She works with medical students in
Australia. One of the things that they're seeing is medical students, when they get
into the hospital, are presuming that if they can't help a patient, that it's necessarily
something that they've done wrong. Because in their education, they're dealing too much
with problems that always have solutions. And so their job, even in sort of a round
table sort of discussion space, everybody knows that there's a right answer to the question,
or maybe two right answers, or maybe three right answers, but that there are right answers
to the situation, and that the job of the medical student inside of their learning is
to find the right answer. So they bring that approach into the hospital, and it's leading
to mental health issues amongst those students, because they don't know how to confront the
uncertainty of the situation. One of the things that they're doing in those schools is using
what Michelle Lazarus calls gray cases. So a gray case is one where you... I appreciate
you shared it, where you give a problem to a student that does not have an answer, doesn't
have a right answer. In some cases, the case itself is just the case. There's no knowing
what actually happened. And you discuss your way through it. You decide what you probably
shouldn't do. You work on things that you might try, but that's where the case ends,
to sort of develop some of this tolerance for these kinds of situations in our lives.
And that's where the things that we were discussing at the conference, and this was across the
way. We saw it in Mo Jafar, who was one of the speakers of the conference, was talking
about in phys ed classes, and how freeing it can be when you take that right way of
doing it out of the process, and kids start to come out of themselves in using their bodies
in more creative and more comfortable ways, because they don't feel like they're constantly
doing something wrong. I argue further. And I know I've been blabbing here for 26 straight
minutes. And the couple of you who are hanging on, I appreciate you. Does anybody have any
comments or questions they want to throw in? Does anybody have any fruit they'd like to
throw? It'll be tough for you, but we can try. There's my dead air space. Well, I had
to drink water. Okay. So why do I think this matters? I think it matters for workplace
enhanced learning, for sure. I think it matters whenever we're talking about preparing kids
for their workplace. Oh, sure, Shannon. I think problem-based learning is a really great
way of thinking about the ways of doing this and the ways of not doing this. So there are
tons of problem-based learning frameworks. There's a really good one from Finland that
somebody sent to me a couple of weeks ago that I have not tracked down yet, but I've
got the link around here somewhere. So problem-based learning is the battleground for this conversation.
So you can do problem-based learning where there is a problem clearly defined, a process
that's clearly defined. All right. Theoretically, I'm broadcasting again.
We're back.
And I can hear you all. So I think you will be coming through here. But I'll keep monitoring.
Can you guys hear me now? Can I get a note from the room if you guys can hear me in there?
Here are some of the -- we've started annotated bibliography around this for those of you
who might be interested. This will bring you to some of those. Some of the links to some
of the stuff that I'm talking about.
Just going to read that one out loud for you. Uncertaintycommunity.com/annotatedbibliography
for the recording.
Hooray! We hear things.
So problem solving. We can definitely -- it's so much easier to teach problem solving whenever
you have a right answer. So you walk into a classroom and you want a whole bunch of
different people doing things. So what we did with that Arduino project, that's where
I was, was we didn't grade any of the coding or any of the robotics that they were doing.
And all we graded inside that process, all we reflected on was one, project management,
which I'm more than happy to grade in a very firm problem-based -- like solutions-based
approach. I think there are really good lessons to be learned from good, strict project management.
So we graded that in a kind of a structured way. And then we had a series of reflections
that the students were to do that were basically effort-based. That were on the things that
we had noticed in our testing.
So one of the things that we noticed, for instance, is that one of the reasons why some
students didn't participate in our testing was because they didn't like the noise that
the computers made. Oh, no. Silence again for Shannon. That's sad.
Let's keep cruising through. I think we're still live.
Okay. Cool. So we did reflections -- that's fine, Shannon. So we did reflections on things
like noise. Things like how they felt about participating in groups. Things about just
a variety of emotional spaces that they were in. Some of the technical responses, but also
-- we didn't have this language -- I certainly didn't have language at the time. But their
tolerance for ambiguity. And so in that process, we allowed them to mess around with the right
answer business. Not worry about whether or not they got it right. That's my job as a
teacher. Is to try to keep you moving and to try to help you figure out how to make
the code do the thing. So one of the things that my kids and I made were elastic band
shooters and trying to make the thing shoot. That's my job as a teacher is to keep that
going. But it's not what I want to evaluate. It's not what I want to show the student I
care about. What I want to show the student I care about in one case was how to organize
things. Because I think that's a really good lesson. And when I came to much later in life,
my life got a lot easier once I learned how to not necessarily formally project manage,
but think of things in structured ways to organize my work. And also I wanted them to
think that I cared about their emotional state. Because the things that we actually grade,
the things we evaluate in that formal sense are the things that students are going to
believe that we care about. That's the secret message. That's the hidden curriculum. So
if my entire design and my problem, to go back to the original question, if my problem
based learning design rewards you getting the answer right, then I'm rewarding strategic
compliance. I'm rewarding students who are winning the game of school. Which again, it's
a skill. It's not the skill that allows us to speak across political lines. It's not
the skill that allows us to talk about very difficult conversations. It is not the skill
that allows us to work on our parenting, to be good friends, to do the things that I think
are the most important parts of our culture. And you could argue that is not the job of
our schools. I'm willing to hear that argument. I don't like it, but I'm willing to hear it.
But I do think that we need to find ways to help students confront uncertainty inside
of our classrooms. When we talk about the K-12 system, there are some complications
for trying to do this. So the biggest complication, I would argue, in the K-12 system in Canada,
and I'll only speak for my country here, is the relationship between the grades that students
get and the scholarships that they get after high school. So right now, in a lot of universities
in Canada, students get a set scholarship number based on the final grade that they
get through a sequence of courses. Which means, and I've talked to high school principals
about this and teachers and whatever else, which means that they will get a phone call
from a parent saying, basically, you just cost me $1,000 a year for my kid by giving
them that 85 on that test. So we have one thing that's really easy to measure, that
am I getting this money to help my kid go to school? And another thing that's really
kind of vague and nuanced, wow, the kid tried this hard on this thing or was 78% creative.
So that's the first piece that's a problem. And there are lots of good models that are
being used. So I really like Genius Hour as a model, for instance. And that's certainly
something that's being done that fits along with the E-Learn techies talking about hackathons
and game jams and those kinds of things and how they can be creative, trial and error,
and how you can just go through the process, enjoy yourself, and not necessarily even quote
unquote win or finish or get it or whatever, but it's participation that's important.
And those things are great. And things like Genius Hour are a great example. So a colleague
of mine is doing Genius Hour in several classrooms, and that's a student-led hour. So they're
in charge of what they're going to do. There are different models for it. But broadly speaking,
you have a variety of things available inside the classroom. Let's call it a grade six classroom.
And then students can come in and decide what it is they're going to work on that day. They're
in charge of organizing it. They're in charge of doing that kind of work. And she took a
lot of grief from her colleagues for this because the kids kept bugging all the other
teachers to do it. Their class was super noisy whenever that was going on. Kids were waiting
at the door for her, all excited that one or two hours a week that they were doing this.
And it creates conflict inside the system. So that's another piece. Creativity is annoying.
If you've ever run a classroom about a creativity, and you'll know there's a lot of things you're
not going to expect that are going to happen, there are things that are going to happen
outside the box. And that sounds great whenever you talk about it in a keynote presentation.
But in practice, inside of a classroom, that creativity can be dangerous. That creativity
can be upsetting. That creativity can be offensive. There's all kinds of ways for that stuff to
go pear-shaped. Actually, I've been told not to use that expression anymore. To go in a
different direction, to go in ways that are unhelpful or problematic. And we end up with
different-- I mean, there are other problems. But I talked to a curriculum consultant once
who was like, look, we know for sure that if it's not graded, the teachers aren't going
to teach it. And if they're not going to be rewarded from it, then why would they do it?
I don't think that's entirely the case. I think that's a cynical response from somebody
who's doing the same job for a long time. But I think there's a grain of truth in there
too, right? Where-- I'm going to follow Taylor's-- I'm going to read through this out loud. So
sometimes it's difficult for me to contain these types of issues, like the relationship
between grades and scholarship. I tend to go all the way down to charging for education
at any level is probably unjust. Obviously, I personally can't do too much about that
on my own. The line of thinking, though I feel like makes it hard to figure out what
problems to focus on. I'm not sure I have a question. 100%. So I hear you about it,
creativity facilitated and supported. I've just-- it can go sideways on you, right? Like,
yes, you need to scaffold it properly. Yes, you need to put a lot of structure. But the
learning how to do that well is something that comes from experience. Some people--
I mean, I've seen people who just magically have it. But for the rest of us, for the vast
majority of us, this problem-- there's a trial and error process to getting there. And so
early on, certainly, it gets more challenging. But I want to go back to Taylor's comment.
This is, in some ways, the crux of the whole issue. And I thank you very much for this
comment, Taylor. Here's the thing. We are taught to believe that when someone asks us
a question, there's an answer to that question, right? What should I do about housing in the
city of Windsor? And we're expected-- common discourse, at least in my language in this
country-- I speak French as well, but I don't know-- I haven't spent enough time as an adult
in French to know for sure. I'm only going to speak to my own culture. I don't know if
it's true other places. But we have an expectation when somebody says, what's your opinion about
x that somehow you're supposed to have one, and then an opinion is something that you're
going to clearly state, right? And when we look at problems that very clearly don't have
easy answers-- let's use climate change as an example. And in my book, I talk about climate
change over and over again as an example about this. You just can't figure out what you're
supposed to do, right? Do you eat local or do you eat organic? Do you try to find a way
to do both? And then because these problems seem so huge, and when you look at them all,
they all look-- we're not accustomed to sifting through the problems and applying our values
to them and accepting that it's too big for us to solve, accepting that the only work
we're ever going to be able to do is have a small contribution to making the thing a
little bit better. So I had a question very much like this at a talk I was doing a couple
months ago. There was a young woman in the back row. And I don't know if you guys have
seen this. You know what I'm talking about. But she had that, I'm waiting for you to get
to the back row so I can ask you a question and look on her face. She did not want to
get up. She did not want to come over. But I knew she was waiting for me. And she was
right on my line for getting out. So I was talking to a couple of people after the talk.
I kept looking over at her. She was looking at me. And I'm like, OK, I'm going to go talk
to this young lady. So I get over there. It turns out the reason why she didn't come over,
she's like 12 months pregnant. She is pregnant and clearly uncomfortable in her chair. And
I ask her how she's doing. And we have a little conversation. And then she goes, look-- and
I was having a conversation very similar to this. But she goes, I think I agree with you.
But what am I supposed to do? How can I fix any of this? And my response, which is, it's
meant to be encouraging. But I understand that it isn't for everybody. Is that we're
pulling on our end of the tug of war rope. You're lending your energy to where your values
fit. So for me, when we talk about housing, my values of people having places to live
a little bit above green spaces and way, way, way above what people's housing values are
going to be. So for me, when I apply to one of those situations, I've been trying to teach
myself to pull my values in, sift through as much of the conversation I can, find places
where the application of my values support the way that I look at the world, and then
grab onto that rope as much as I can. It's not as satisfying as just saying, those guys
are jerks and our guys are awesome. It's not as satisfying as saying, let's burn the system
down and rebuild it from the ground up. It just isn't. And I understand that. I'm not
suggesting that there aren't situations where you need to burn the system down. But I'm
not going to. What I'm going to try to do is apply my values to these wicked, complex
problems where I can and try to learn to find solace, comfort, happiness on some occasions,
satisfaction sometimes in the little bits I'm able to do to the little parts of the
problems I'm able to impact. Because if you look at the whole problem, you're never going
to be able to fix it. And all you're going to be is disappointed. So what you need to
do is work on this process of sifting through larger problems, looking for the places where
your values can be applied, and looking for ways that you can help those things. And that's
what we need from the problems that we're setting for students inside of our K-12 system
and our universities. And that's what I'm proposing, right? Is that this is where we're
able to help a little bit, prepare those people for dealing with the big problems of the world
with nuance, dealing with those ways in ways that allows you to keep doing part of the
things that are helping so you don't get dispirited knowing that you can't solve the problem.
And work on that muscle that allows us grabbing the rope after applying values and pulling
where one can feels helpful to me. That is the thing that I'm proposing. And I think
it's the thing that we need to help students learn how to do. There has never been a time,
and I'm fully comfortable saying this, where an 18-year-old comes into the world knowing
more about all the terrible things in the world than there is now. I'm not suggesting
that there are more terrible things happening. I wouldn't even know how to count that. I
wouldn't enter into that conversation. But we certainly know more about it. And a lot
of those problems are intractable, at least to us individually. And there are problems
that are constantly bombarded back on us. They're constantly returned to us. And so
it can feel comfortable to become rigid and caught in space where you're constantly just
applying a response to a situation rather than engaging with your values. So you look
at something as a situation that is deep and complex as if it's simple and answerable and
solvable, then you're never going to be able to interact with the people who are engaged
in that conversation. And you're not going to be able to move it forward. I didn't see
this. Shannon has a big comment here I want to address. I have a fantasy that if I had
enough money to endow a scholarship, I would explicitly avoid GPA minimum requirements
and have joked that maybe I would have an upper limit of GPA. I was that student. I
failed more than one class, but I was very eager to engage in being challenged and generally
think I'm doing all right in life. Yeah, I failed out of university my first two years,
Shannon, partially because I didn't go to class. But I certainly did not fit very well
into the structures that were given to me. And so it's just Joe Murphy has commented
here too. The more I think about grades, the more I wish that plus and minus didn't just
split to A to F scale into finer gradations, but meant and I busted my butt or I kind of
skated. Yeah, I've done a fair amount of effort based grading. It has totally changed my classrooms,
particularly with responses for students. I'll not give you a two out of three because
your response wasn't deep enough. Like a personal response, a reflection. What I will do is
grade you on the fact that you made no effort. And I'm happy telling you, you get a zero
out of three because look, you mailed that in. And then allow them to try again. But
what I found in those situations, when I take off the I'm judging you to get the right answer
and give it a, as long as you make an effort, I'm happy with whatever you say. One, I've
gotten some hilarious responses from my students where they take off into never Neverland and
it's entertaining as all hell. But more importantly, and that's great. And for me as a, as a greater,
that's much better because, oh my God. But more importantly, what I see is a, is a, is
a slow train, a slow progression from I'm giving you this robotic answer that I think
is the one that you want to, huh? I was thinking about this thing and, and I get, I get, I
get much more stream of consciousness. I get much more reflection. Um, it's totally changed
what it's like for me to grade those kinds of posts. So I think Christine, I mean, I,
am I surprised that I agree, uh, with Dr. Hendricks? I am not. Um, cause she's brilliant.
If you don't read her stuff, you should, cause she's amazing. Uh, yeah, that's what it comes
down to, right? Cause if you're going to teach this, if you're going to teach students to
embrace uncertainty, the key stone to all of this is values, right? If we're judging,
if I'm work for Deloitte and I am trying to the example to go back that, uh, so earlier
on, I use an example where a consultant had come in and said, we need to fail fast. And
we were talking about medical issues. The consultant was from Deloitte and they're using
an example from Lou Lemon about how they had done so well with some pants they were making
and saying, we need to follow that model. Now, when I say that to you like that, it
sounds hilarious, but it was said with great seriousness and the way that it was positioned,
it was almost hard to catch that that's what was happening. But several of us sort of snapped
our heads to each other and then went back over. Cause we'd been having this conversation
where I wasn't using the word uncertainty at the time, but around that kind of thing.
And we're like, you understand that in a company success is judged by money, right? They've
got a built in measurement system, which is why when we talk to corporations about how
to run schools, there's always a disconnect because corporations have a built in measurement
system, right? This is why those people who are selling problem solving are usually very
comfortable as consultants, right? Because they walk into, uh, in my country minister's
office or usually deputy minister's office. And they say, Hey, here's how you can solve
your problem. Here's how your grades can get higher. What they're not selling is here's
how to make your students happier because a can't really measure happiness. Don't tell
me I can, I can't, can't really measure happiness, but it is super hard to sell student happiness
in a minister's office. And it's not the kind of advice that they're looking for. They're
looking to solve the problem. They've got to get elected. There's a whole bunch of process
going on. I understand that. Like I've worked in government, but for us, for those of us
who care about this and the way that I've just presented is exactly what she says. It
is about bringing values into the conversation. Again, they don't need to be my values. And
this isn't really just a conversation for students. This is the, the, the secret, the
hidden curriculum here too, is we all need to continue to do this. I am constantly trying
to learn how to do this myself in my own approach to things. So you just have to look at the
situation around the break dancer from Australia who made all the memes in the last couple
of days. Suddenly every second person is an expert on break dancing, suggesting that the
thing that this woman is doing is whatever. I am not an expert in break dancing, nor does
anyone need my opinion about anyone else's break dancing expertise. But the question
gets asked, we feel the need to respond. What are my values is the question you have to
ask. Are my values about defending the purity of break dancing? Well, no, I'm okay if that's
someone else's value. Like if that's your value, you're like a break dancer and you're
trying to defend the purity of the sport or art form. Great, but it's not me. So for me
to engage in that conversation, I need to ask what my values are. My values are about
joy and creativity and about care. And so when I engage in that conversation, what I
have to remind myself, cause I'm, I was an athlete and I feel like I need to somehow
the world needs my opinion about this, but then the values thing kicks in and I go, is
defending break dancing my value? Well, no. I defend that incredibly courageous woman
for going out and working on this. She must've known that she was going to get some kind
of response. I'm assuming she knew what she was getting into. I'm assuming she knew she
was in an Eddie the Eagle situation for those of us who are old enough to remember, but
those are my values. And that's what the students need to learn, to apply to problem situations,
learn to think about what theirs are and how they apply to situations. And when you can
get to that point, we can get out of the sort of programming we have for right answers.
We can embrace that uncertainty creates room for values to come in and to have important
conversations about why we would do something, not what the right answer is for us to do.
So Taylor saying students taking off into wild directions with their responses. Most
of the time still shows they're engaging with the content discussion. It can, it just depends
on the educational structure you're in and whether or not you can get away with that.
And it can also like, it's a really great article called, I think it's the myth of the
teenage learner that I use all the time in my, in my classes with faculty. It talks about
how you change a classroom to try to be creative and student focused and engaged and embrace
uncertainty in that way. And students hate it, hate it and rebel, right. And sort of
become recalcitrant because that breaks their expectations. Right. So some, I think in a
class where students have already unlearned their game of school approaches, them going
off with wild directions and their responses is definitely a sign of engagement. I think
in that class, in my class, I see that that way. And what I see with my 22 year old world
weary students is I'll walk into class and one of them who's done it is sitting there
looking at me waiting for me to say something. And that's engagement, right? Even if they
did it in there to irritate me, still, that's the engagement I want. Look, I wrote something
last night. I want you, I want to hear what you're going to say about it. That's what
I want. Right. I want you to care enough about the engagement we're having that. And then
I want other people to see that. And I want that to be part of the infection that happens
inside the class where your values put on display in our engagement about it. Not me
telling you whether or not you did it right or whatever else, but that sort of flushing
out of the process is something we can strive towards. This makes me think of McSweeney's
opinions about opinions. Oh, well, there you go. Apparently I'm stealing the McSweeney
position. I'm okay with that. Thanks for sharing your unsolicited negative opinion on the internet.
No kidding. Turn breakdancing on its head. Good for Reagan. I've been enjoying these
thought provoking conversations all afternoon so much for the syllabi for the fall. Well,
I hope, I wish you good luck with your syllabus. Yeah, I think that's the thing, Christina.
That's where I'm at. I want us to confront that uncertainty together. When it comes to
me teaching education students, which is sadly not this fall, but what I've been doing the
last few years, I want those students to gain the benefit of all the mistakes that I've
made, right? I want them not to gain the benefit of my remembering of some fricking theory
somewhere, though I love talking to them about learning styles and different people's opinions
about it and like how some people hate it and some people love it. I love those contentious
issues. What I really want though in one of the activities that we do, and maybe I'll
close with this example. One of the activities I ask my students to do is when they're planning
and again, they're education, they're BD students, they're going to go into the K-12 school system.
When you're planning for, I want you to sort of tell me what you're going to teach given
something and there's structures around that and some kind of lesson plan or whatever.
It's not really a lesson plan, but the steps that you might take, but I don't care about
any of that. All I care about is the section that comes underneath. The ones above are
just effort based, like do them fine. I don't care. What are you going to be thinking about
in your head while you're doing this? What's the narrative that you're going to run, right?
So if your activity involves handing out laptops, for instance, just use a random example from
one of the student activities I got. Are you remembering that little Jimmy doesn't have
a computer at his house and is going to be uncomfortable with this and that's what makes
him act out? So you're getting ahead of that. Are you remembering that you're going to,
like those are the, that's the, that's the narrative that I'm looking for. That's the
thing I care about. What's happening in your head and how are you sifting your values to
apply it to one of the more complex situations I can think of a classroom full of 10 year
olds. How are you constantly applying your values to this situation? And that allows
them to think through their values, to ask themselves, like hopefully three years from
now they'll be sitting in a classroom looking at kid wanting to strangle them and thinking,
what are my values in this situation? I hope my voice sits in one of their heads and goes,
okay, okay, okay, okay. Let me just think my way through what I care about in this situation.
That's what I want. That's what I'm hoping for. That's what I think all this embracing
uncertainty does is allows you at the point of crisis to not give up because there's no
answer observable to not just choose something at random and hold onto it really tightly.
In my career, I've, I've noticed that people who are uninformed to come up with opinions
tend to be more attached to their opinions than people who are informed, but to not take
that approach, but to look at it, ask yourself what you care about and then do what you can.
Right. That's it for me, friends for 59. I need this as a browser plugin for reply.
I missed something. Oh yeah. Thanks friends. Thanks for following along. I appreciate you
all. I hope you have a great rest of the week at the camp and take care of yourselves.