The Coral Effect

Fundamental Change

There is no other way to capture the learning from ‘T440: The Having of Wonderful Ideas’ than to say that it has brought about a fundamental change in me, specifically in the way I think about teaching, both formal and informal, and in the way I interact with others on an everyday basis. I find myself now being more curious as well as more trusting in my interactions with others every day, and the reason I term it a fundamental change is that those behaviors are not prompted by the memory of a reading or a conversation but are now natural and reflexive.

The Coral Effect

The term ‘The Coral Effect’ became a part of my inner vocabulary early on in the semester, sparked by two sentences, each in a different reading that we were assigned. The first was from the book “The Having of Wonderful Ideas” and Other Essays on Teaching and Learning (Duckworth, 2006), which said, “Wonderful ideas do not spring out of nothing. They build on a foundation of other ideas” (p. 6). The other was from the paper “Social Interaction and Invented Spelling” (Kamii & Randazzo, 1985), which said that “children construct knowledge by modifying their previous ideas, rather than by accumulating new bits transmitted from the outside, and the exchange of ideas among peers stimulates such modification” (p. 124). Both these sentences created in my mind the image of a coral reef—diverse, complex, spectacular.

A coral reef begins to form when a single coral larva attaches itself to a solid surface, and from there it grows and diversifies and flourishes. Wonderful ideas can similarly grow and flourish in the minds of learners, but it is important to acknowledge and respect the foundation of ideas that they bring in; to give them the freedom to decide which rock or other surface they want as their foundation; and to provide enough nourishment in the form of resources to let the reef of ideas nurture and strengthen itself. I have seen the coral effect in play in short bursts, as we tried to figure out a poem or a reflection, and over long spans of time, as we struggled with the moon, and after all the doubts and frustrations and moments of revelation and understanding, I believe that this way of teaching and learning is truly empowering.    

  Attaching to a Surface

Attaching itself to a surface may be a delicate process for a larva. In many of my own experiences over the semester, as well as in observing and listening to my classmates and learners for various fieldworks, I saw that finding that idea, or that piece of prior knowledge, or feeling or experience in your mind, and attaching it to a new idea or question that you have just encountered can sometimes be an internal, almost wobbly process—like trying to balance a drop of water on the tip of your finger. It is critical to recognize this stage, as a teacher and especially as a learner; and it is critical to give or take the space to let that connection be made. At this point, I think it is important to elaborate with examples:

The very first class of ‘T440: The Having of Wonderful Ideas’ had us play with little, colored objects in an activity called ‘Going to the Movies’. Each of us was given a collection of four types of objects and asked to come up with all the different possible ways in which they could be arranged in rows of four without repeating a pattern in any row. While it was not posed as a Math problem, I remember thinking about pattern problems in Math exams, but refused to actively dwell on that. I also actively refused to look at what others were doing. There was something in those objects that I could work with—and I knew that somewhere in my mind, but needed some space to reach it. A minute or so of quietly looking at the objects later, I reached it—it was the colors. The objects were of different colors, and I simply had to focus on making the rows look visually different.

Towards the end of the semester, as I stood in the Harvard Museum of Natural History with my project partner and learner for the final fieldwork, I saw the same “wobbliness” in play. The overall objective of the fieldwork was to help the learner get a holistic understanding of features of birds in order to identify them. We had just spent over thirty minutes identifying two water birds from Africa, and we were now looking at a display of the Secretary Bird from Africa (though my partner didn’t know its name at that point), and one of the first things she said was that it didn’t seem to be a water bird. When I asked her what about the bird told her that, she said it was “something about those feathers” and her reply was softer and trailed off into a mumble at the end. In my report (Lamba, 2017 – FFW2T) about this session, I wrote about this moment:

“I wasn’t still sure what connection she was making between the feathers and its habits/habitat, but hadn’t wanted to interrupt her flow of thoughts earlier. Moreover, when she said, “something about those feathers,” I felt it may not have been a fully-formed connection in her mind, and she may have been thinking of birds of prey she had seen earlier and making a subconscious connection” (p. 13).

Nourishment for Growth

Once the coral larva has attached itself to a solid surface, it needs nourishment, sustained and abundant, to grow into a reef; and once an idea has found a prior piece of knowledge to build on, learners need resources to reach newer understandings. My own experiences over this course have shown me that it is impossible to know beforehand what resources are best suited to a learner or to individual learners in a group; however, I also found that the most essential and most indispensable resource is the expertise of the person assuming the position of the teacher, and thoughtfully-timed prompts based on his/her understanding of where the learner is. As Chiu (2009) puts it:

“…teaching through critical exploration does not entail staying in the background and granting students total freedom to do whatever they like. Facilitating learning was more demanding for me as the teacher than dictating what students had to do to learn. Teaching in this manner requires not only mastery of the subject matter, but also the skill to explore exactly what students do and do not understand, in order to help them build their knowledge and skills in the context of what they have already learned and understood” (p. 244).

At the core of this form of learning, therefore, are resources—resources that take various forms: objects, other learners, prompts, silence, conversations, curiosity, and respect.

Objects: In formal educational settings, the value of objects apart from books is often overlooked, except in the teaching of Science and Math, which frequently make use of tangible objects. However, the presence of objects, even in other subject areas, creates a story in our minds of our own journey of understanding. In trying to figure out all the possible patterns in ‘Going to the Movies’, I remember starting with random patterns, realizing that I needed a system, and then, as I went along, deciding my own system of arranging colors to come up with different patterns. Had I done this on paper, without tangible objects to play with, the process would not have still been clear in my head a good three months later.

In a prototype of a reading program that I have been working on, I felt the need of giving the readers an object to have with them. As the story used in this very early-stage prototype was about a boy and his dragon that hatched out of an egg that he found, I gave each reader a cut-out of a brightly-colored dragon egg at the beginning of the story. It is important to mention here that the readers were not kids—they were co-students in a course at Harvard; and at the end of the presentation, one of the pieces of feedback was that having a dragon egg of their own increased their emotional investment in the story.

Other Learners: In our final section meeting, as a few co-students dived into a discussion about the earth’s revolution around the sun in conjunction with the earth’s tilt leading to different seasons, a few others were quiet. As the conversation came to a close (but not a conclusion), a couple among those who were quiet expressed that they had not been able to keep up with the discussion, and that had led them to feeling not only frustrated but also unintelligent.

In large groups and in classrooms, some learners may not be able to keep up with a conversation, not because of a lack of intelligence, but simply because in their minds, they are working on a different aspect of the question. An example of this is my own experience with moon discussions in class. After many weeks of observing the moon and discussing what we had seen, we were given a bulb and balls to work with. While most of my co-students spent most of the class time with the objects, I, simply put, felt stuck. I was overwhelmed in my mind with the sheer variety of variables involved in how the sun, moon, and earth interact, and a simple bulb and ball, I felt, could not represent what was actually going on with these celestial bodies. However, I didn’t feel unintelligent.

A couple of weeks later, in working with the bulb and balls again, I felt the same feeling of being stuck. I listened to what others were saying and tried to make sense of it. When I still couldn’t, I tried to solve a question of my own about the moon, and one different from what the others were discussing. When I felt satisfied with what I had found, I chose the option of going out to the balcony and using a pair of binoculars to look at the actual moon. Again, I didn’t experience any guilt or feeling of inadequacy in working on a different part of the puzzle than my co-students.

In thinking hard about why my co-student may have felt unintelligent on not being able to follow the discussion about seasons, I felt that the reason may have been that she was comparing herself and her own thoughts to those of others—and learners in such a form of teaching and learning may compare themselves to others often, but this is unnecessary. To help learners respect their own process and not compare themselves with others, I feel it is crucial to build a culture where learners know that they are free to explore the questions that they need answers to.

Furthermore, instead of comparing themselves to others, they must be encouraged to view the words and actions of others as resources that they can access if they feel the need to. As a learner for my project partner in the final fieldwork sessions, I was trying to figure out how to represent a spherical object as three-dimensional on paper. In the first two sessions, instead of looking at the plethora of objects, like pumpkins and lemons, that my partner had displayed for me, I used a roll of tape to draw a circle and shade it in. Just as one would not spare a second thought in using one tangible resource over another, one should also feel no inadequacy if the words and actions of another learner are not useful resources at a given point of time, and simply choose another resource that is more useful.

Prompts and Silence: As Chiu (2009) said, knowing when to prompt students and when to give them the space to think is one of the hardest parts of this form of teaching, and as a learner, one of the most wonderful resources that the teacher can provide you with.

As a learner in the first fieldwork session that was part of our final project for the course, I spent a large chunk of the time drawing squiggly shapes on a sheet of paper, wondering how I could ever figure out what would make them look three-dimensional. For the most part of this session, my project partner, who was in the role of the teacher, observed me closely and also had many resources in the form of objects placed near me. However, either out of nervousness or in order to determine what my foundations for this topic were, she didn’t ask me too many questions. As noted in my write-up of that session (Lamba, 2017 – FFW1L), I felt “quite frustrated” and wished she would “just tell me how the 3D effect is done on paper” (p.3). However, during the next session, I felt that time flew by. On re-reading my reports from that second session, I realize that it was because of the questions I was asked. For example, in trying to draw a standing roll of tape on paper, I initially drew something that I described as “somewhat like looking into an open cooking pot from the top” (Lamba, 2017 – FFW2L, p. 2). At this point, my project partner asked me how the view of looking at it as an open pot from above was different from looking at it as an upright roll of tape. To “explain that, I stood the roll of tape up on the table … I explained that if I were looking at a bangle from this angle, there are some parts of it that I shouldn’t be able to see” (Lamba, 2017 – FFW2L. p. 2). The question was simple enough, and the answer was obvious enough. Yet, had my partner remained silent and not asked me that question, I wouldn’t have thought about the parts I could and could not see. Her well-timed question based on what she knew was a gap in my thinking formed one of the many crucial turning points for the session, leading to me feeling quite ecstatic with what I was able to draw by the end of it.

Conversations: According to Kamii and Randazzo (1985):

“The pedagogical principles that can be drawn from the importance of social interaction are: 1. Encourage children to exchange points of view critically among themselves and 2. Reduce adult power and omniscience as much as possible, in order to encourage the exchange of viewpoints among children” (p. 125).

This applies not only to children and adults but to any setting in which one person is an expert in the subject matter and others are learners. The power of conversation among learners in pushing each other’s thinking, in solidifying ideas and questioning assumptions, and in revealing points of view that a learner may not even know he/she holds is undeniable.

           As our fifth fieldwork session for the course, we were to discuss the poem Progress Report by Audre Lorde with an outside learner. The poem is a rich, many-layered one that needs several readings to begin to make sense of. Unsure of how much one learner alone would be able to get out of the poem in the thirty-minute session, and based off how useful I had found it to hear others’ thoughts and interpretations of the poem when we discussed it in class, I decided to conduct the session with two learners. My write-up of that session (Lamba, 2017 – FW5) ended with the following:

“There was silence again, and then P1 said to P2 that it was almost like they had negotiated and come to an understanding of the poem. She said that if they hadn’t talked, she would have had a completely different interpretation of the poem. P2 agreed, saying he definitely would not have “gotten the poem” this much if he had read it alone” (p. 9).

           Apart from pushing one’s thinking, I have also had experiences within this course where I observed how talking about what we are thinking helps us see the connections we are making or the assumptions we are basing our thoughts on more clearly. It is almost like we are drawing a picture by connecting dots in our mind, but we are so close to it that we can’t really see the whole picture. It is only when we take a step back from those thoughts and say them out loud once more that we can see that some dots don’t quite connect too well, and we rethink our assumptions or ideas.

           In my final fieldwork session as a teacher, my project partner had been looking at an eagle on display at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, comparing it with illustrations and descriptions in a field guide on birds, trying to decide whether it was a Golden Eagle or a juvenile Bald Eagle. Throughout, she had been oscillating between the two choices, getting closer and closer to confirming that it was probably not a juvenile Bald Eagle, but never saying that it might be a Golden Eagle. She finally decided that it was a juvenile Bald Eagle, at which point I asked her what she could see on the bird that told her that. As I noted in my write-up (Lamba, 2017 – FFW3T), “At this point, she hesitated, thought for a few seconds, and said maybe it wasn’t so” (p. 6). Stepping back for just a few seconds and thinking about the assumptions she had made helped her see that she had missed out on several key differences between the bird on display and a Bald Eagle.

Curiosity:

“And I found that the more interest I took in what they were saying, the more interest the children themselves took. I saw that they were willing—even eager—to keep thinking about the question, and to work on developing a degree of understanding that they found increasingly more satisfactory” (Duckworth, 2009. p. 186).

If curiosity as a resource is not available in abundance, the reef of ideas will not flourish in spite of all other resources. Curiosity here refers to the curiosity of the learner to figure something out which, it is crucial to note, stems largely from the curiosity of the teacher to understand the path the learner is taking in his/her own mind. 

I have always held that in a classroom, students are able to simply know if the teacher loves the subject matter she is teaching, and they also simply know if the teacher is really interested in what they, as students, have to say. I can safely amend this now by saying that a learner simply knows if the expert loves what he/she knows and if the expert wants to know what the learner thinks.

In an informal discussion with my project partner about the final fieldwork sessions around bird identification, she mentioned that what worked best for her was how willingly and patiently I listened to her ideas as she compared the features of the birds in front of us to those of the birds on display. She added that this patience made her feel safe in taking risks, because she knew she wasn’t being judged or hurried to come to an answer. From my point of view, however, it wasn’t willingness or patience but sheer amazement at how she approached the topic. On being introduced to bird identification in the traditional manner, learners are first told about what to look for when seeing a new bird—size in comparison to common birds, overall color, unique patterning or features like crests or fanning tail feathers, shape of beak, and length of tail. However, free to explore the topic in the manner she was most comfortable with, my project partner focused on intricate details of each bird as well as their scientific names, while also drawing on her vast pool of knowledge of words to make connections. I had never seen such an approach, and it was my innate curiosity in wanting to follow her down the path that she was taking that came across as patience. In my last write-up (Lamba, 2017 – FFW3T) for these sessions, I noted, “I feel like I probably learnt a lot more about birds and about identifying birds than she did” (p. 13).

A teacher’s curiosity will lead to the learner feeling comfortable to explore, but it may also so happen that after exploring for a while and not feeling like any progress is being made, the learner will lapse into frustration. It takes one small moment of success in the middle of the exploration to spark curiosity, but without the teacher or the expert asking prompting questions, actively following the learner’s thought process, anticipating gaps ahead of time, and providing timely and appropriate resources to keep the learner exploring, frustration may be inevitable.

Respect: At the basis of all the patience and curiosity is respect—respect for the learner’s mind, respect for the learner’s experiences, and respect for the path that the learner may choose to take.

This respect will be reflected largely in the resources that the teacher provides the learner. As Rose (1995) wrote:

“Teachers will say either ‘We can’t lower our standards’ or ‘This poor child is reading below grade level, so I’ll need a third- or fourth-grade book.’ But what you need to do is find a way to make that eighth-grade book accessible. You have to respect the child…”

This respect will also be reflected in words and actions of the teacher—a subtle movement of the hand to fix an arrangement of objects the learner has made; an untimely question that is far away from where the learner is on his/her path of understanding; or a tone of impatience or judgment—all show lack of respect and trust. As Eleanor Duckworth said, “Trust the content and trust the minds of the learners” (Duckworth, personal communication, December 4, 2017).

What I have seen as well as experienced is that people will rise to expectations set, to respect shown. They might not do that at the pace, which may be faster or slower than expected, or in the manner expected, but they will.

Conclusion

The Coral Reef

DiSchino (1987) wrote, “For thirty-one years of my life, I walked about totally unaware of my potential to think” (p. 15). It is not only the learner but also the teacher who benefits immensely from this form of teaching and learning that Duckworth (2006) refers to as critical exploration. It is my experience as both during this course that has now brought me to a stage where I can say that mind-blocks against certain topics or skill areas are just that—mind-blocks. They aren’t real or insurmountable. With the freedom to explore and a patient, curious teacher, there is nothing that cannot be learned.

Hawkins (2007) summarized the process of critical exploration beautifully when he wrote:

“He does his exploration in the twentieth century, with access to books and conversations, with traps laid for him, to catch his imagination and evoke his understanding. He takes giant strides by the measure of history. But he takes them in the manner that history took them” (p. 186).

Questions

School systems around the world require vast amounts of concepts and skills to be taught to children at particular ages—not before, and not after. What they fail to take into consideration is that each child comes with his/her unique background experiences that form the foundations of their inner coral reefs. They also, more often than not, fail to respect the abundance of ideas that each child is capable of creating if given the right environment. Time constraints in school systems are very real—with standardized tests or national examinations that determine, in literal terms, the future of the child, teachers are forced to “follow the curriculum”.

However, if there is one thing that this course has taught me, it is that no problem is unsolvable. If we are true critical explorers, we will find a way to have each child build his own coral reef.

References

Chiu, S. M. (2009). The ancient master painted like me. The New Educator, 5(3), 229-248.

DiSchino, M. (1987). The many phases of growth. Journal of Teaching and Learning, 1(3), 12-28.

Duckworth, E. (2006). The having of wonderful ideas and other essays on teaching and learning. Teachers College Press.

Duckworth, E. (2009). Helping students get to where ideas can find them. The New Educator, 5(3), 185-188.

Hawkins, D. (2007). The informed vision: Essays on learning and human nature. Algora Publishing.

Kamii, C., & Randazzo, M. (1985). Social interaction and invented spelling. Language Arts, 62(2), 124-133.

Lamba, R. (2017). [Final Fieldwork as a Learner, Report 1]. Unpublished.

Lamba, R. (2017). [Final Fieldwork as a Learner, Report 2]. Unpublished.

Lamba, R. (2017). [Final Fieldwork as a Teacher, Report 2]. Unpublished.

Lamba, R. (2017). [Final Fieldwork as a Teacher, Report 3]. Unpublished.

Lamba, R. (2017). [Fieldwork 5 Report]. Unpublished.

Rose, M. (1995). Possible lives: The promise of public education in America. Houghton Mifflin.

Schwartz, E. (1986). An over-repeating story. C. Traugh, R. Kanevsky, A. Martin, A, Seletsky, K. Woolf & L. Strieb (Eds), Speaking out: Teachers on teaching. Grand Forks, North Dakota: North Dakota Study Group on Evaluation.