In April, BDC ran a Bespoke Sharing Expert Practice Session for practitioners who received Expert Practice in their Learning Walk. We asked them how they met the expectations of our Teaching, Learning and Assessment Framework introduced cross-college in March. This is some of what we found:
The Beauty of Chaos
The classroom is a vibrant ball of tangled, colourful wool. The threads crisscross and overlap or loop back on themselves, creating knots, twists, and a dynamic pattern representing unpredictable connections through time and space. In other words, it is a mess. Action researchers define messes as ‘complex, multi-dimensional, intractable, dynamic problems that can only be partially addressed and partially resolved.’ As Action researchers, we believe that messes are exciting and intriguing. Pain, joy, fear, bravery, love, rage – all are present in our action research lives.
Threads represent different elements: people, their thoughts, material objects, language and social structures. Examples include colourful posters, students, textbook pages, the click-clack of keyboards, anxiety, summer plans, an attendance policy, a learning walk, assessment outcomes, government legislation… Examining this colourful complexity means noticing how the threads come together and shape through their entanglement with one another. Expert practitioners are committed to social change and do not avoid messes; they feel compelled to follow the problems wherever they take them. The theories, methods, and processes propel them. They tolerate uncertainties because they are committed to positively altering the world.
Educators as Action researchers
Our lives in and outside the classroom consist of multilayered, multi-sensorial entangled narratives of similarities and differences: socioeconomic class, family structures, spectrums of bodily and cognitive capability, languages, ethnic and national identities, identities based on gender and sexual orientation, life history, religious or political affinities, personal attitudes…Getting to know our learners means constantly interacting, shaping each other’s existence, and creating a dynamic tapestry.
The differences we create may be internal, like a pond that creates changes within itself by staying still or external, like a stream that generates change beyond itself by remaining in motion. The pattern compels us to consider intricate and thought-provoking questions about the interconnectedness of academic and personal life where categories and distinctions depend on context.
Disentangling this multiplicity will reveal no knots per se but interlocked loops that can be loosened so they can unravel. Cutting will not miraculously untangle any knots or unloop any loops. We will still have a giant ball of thread, but it will also be cut. Cutting across socioeconomic lines or lines of assessment objectives may produce roughly predictable content. The concept of the Thinking Environment is a way to make ethical cuts while keeping together the threads of matter, meaning and affect that matter the most: the ability to think.
Expert practitioners are innate Action researchers. Action research is an unintentional consequence of Expert practice. Expert practitioners balance the contradictions and tensions of institutional life and embracing messes. They amplify the threads of trust in others, the willingness to be wrong and an ‘anti-hero’ model of social purpose leadership that amplifies students’ agency.
A shared commitment to democratic social change
Thinking Environment is a pro-social, dialogic process that co-creates knowledge. Imagine exchanging ideas as waves colliding, merging and intensifying rather than opposing and negating each other.
The ten lines or components of The Thinking Environment are:
- Attention: listening with respect and interest
- Incisive Questions: questions that remove limiting assumptions
- Equality: treating each other as thinking peers
- Appreciation: keeping a ratio of five appreciations for each criticism
- Ease: freedom from rush and urgency
- Encouragement: moving beyond the competition
- Feelings: allowing emotions to be expressed
- Diversity: welcome and celebrate the differences in ‘threads’ in the tangled complexity.
- Information: presenting complete and accurate information results in intellectual integrity.
- Place: creating a physical environment that says, ‘You matter.’
A practical example of a Thinking Environment in the classroom could be a starter activity requiring students to respond to an incisive question. Each student will have two minutes of uninterrupted time to speak or pause whilst thinking without interruption. Alternatively, the concept could be used during a one-to-one tutorial. Examples of incisive questions include: ‘What might you be assuming is stopping you from achieving your goal?’
The Thinking Environment extends critical reflection into diffractive thought. Diffraction happens when the white light strikes a prism and diffracts or splits into its component colours, causing it to appear differently and in multiple colours, creating a rainbow-like pattern. Prioritising and appreciating our differences in the tangled complexity beyond simplified explanations will transform the complex patterns from a tangled mess into a map of a rainbow symphony that encourages relationality and student belonging.
For more information about the Thinking Environment:
For managers and team leaders: https://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/content/etf2872
Petra Melville 