Challenging students (Techlearning blog)

In my opinion, the single biggest challenge to teachers these days is getting students to think and to question. Without that, we might as well all go home.

During the recent blogobattle between Wikipedia and Britannica, I wrote that surely the most important thing is to get students to think for themselves? Stephen Downes agreed, and emailed me to say:

"But who in education is teaching students to "question everything" these days?"

It is my contention that you can have all the "cool tools" in the world, and debate things like Wikipedia vs Britannica till the cows come home (have you ever pondered what a curious expression that is?), but it will all be for naught unless you can train students how to *think*.

One of the ways in which I used to do this when I was a teacher was by shock tactics of one form or another. Students always seem to believe that the teacher is the fount of all knowledge in that particular subject -- maybe not so much in information technology, but certainly in other areas of the curriculum. So a healthy dose of realism was never a waste of time.

My original subject was economics, which is about the closest thing to astrology on the school curriculum that you can get. Economists may like to make themselves feel good by constructing econometric models consisting of equations several pages long, but whatever edifice they construct collapses like a house of cards as soon as you change the underlying assumptions. I think it may be useful to look at the kinds of ways I tried to get my students to think in my economics courses, and then explore whether there are lessons to be learnt and applied in the field of educational technology.

The first thing is to be absolutely honest. In one of my lessons, the following exchange took place:

Me: OK, folks, lets have a Q and A session. You ask me questions, and I'll answer them.

Student A: What's the current rate of inflation.

Me: I don't know. It should be on the news this evening.

Student B: What's the main rate of interest then?

Me: I don't know. Pop down to the library at lunchtime and look in the Financial Times.

Student C: You don't seem to know anything.

Me: Well, I'm not a walking encyclopedia. You can look up all those kind of facts for yourself. Ask me something interesting.

Student D: OK, how can we cure the economic problems we've got?

Me: Do you think if I knew the answer to that I'd be here teaching you lot? Still, let's explore the options....

I think two things come out of this. First, I have always believed that a teacher should be able to say "I don't know". To me, what makes education an exciting field to be in is the sense of exploration and discovery you can experience as you work with students (of any age) to learn and construct new knowledge. Secondly, I really am not interested in having a head full of so-called facts and figures: if you can look something up in the newspaper, why bother to memorise it? Especially something as changeable, even fictitious, as "the" interest rate or "the" rate of inflation (both vary according to the group affected).

The second thing is to challenge the idea of absolute truth. I can best illustrate this by relating another brief exchange.

Student: What's the current rate of employment?

Me: That depends.

Student: Huh? On what?

Me: On whether you vote Labour (= approximately Democrat) or Conservative (= approximately Republican).

Student: HOw can that be? You mean they lie?

Me: Of course not! Politicians are honest people. But different people make different assumptions and therefore count different things. So, as a public service, I am going to show you how you can argue either way. Next time you're in a bar and someone moans about how high unemployment is, you'll be able to prove that actually it's a lot lower than they think. On the other hand, if they're moaning about all these malingerers claiming unemployment benefit for no good reason, you'll be able to show them that unemployment is actually officially understated, and that it's really a lot higher than they would have believed.

Now, kids of all ages like to believe in absolute truth. Once you manage to show them that truth in the news depends on your assumptions and what you choose to include or exclude from the balance sheet, they will never take anything at face value again.

So how can we apply these sorts of ideas to the educational technology classroom?

Firstly, on a pretty basic level, it's fine to admit that you don't know all the ins and outs of a particular program. Applications like Microsoft's Excel took hundreds of person years to develop, so I doubt that there is any one person who knows every single nook and cranny of such behemoths.

Secondly, it's an obvious statement, but "truth" on the internet depends on who is publishing the information. For that reason we should welcome the existence of bigoted websites, not simply ban them outright. They make good teaching aides if used responsibly.

Thirdly, and ultimately most importantly, we need to get students to challenge everything and to learn how to ask the right questions. This has nothing to do with information technology, in fact, and I once proposed that the subject called "Information and Communication Technology" should be scrapped from the UK's curriculum and replaced by a subject called Thinking Skills. You will not be surprised to learn that it went down like a lead balloon. For a number of years I have liked Jamie McKenzie's "questioning toolkit", which identifies a number of different kinds of questions that students should be encouraged to ask.

Fourthly, the problem with "cool tools" like RSS, social bookmarking and all the rest, is that unless you teach students strategies for finding a needle in a haystack -- and not just any old needle, but the most appropriate needle at the time -- then all you are doing is increasing the size of the haystack. In fact, unless you take the time and trouble to make sure that they know how to ask the right questions, exposing them to blogs, wikis and all the rest of it is actually likely to disempower them by providing them with information overload. Presumably that's kind of the opposite to what you really want to achieve....

Students need to be constantly challenged. Not a lesson should go by in which the teacher does not say "Prove it", "Who says?" or "So what?"!

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