Teaching the Whole, Not Just the Parts

I was thinking about thinking while putting together a jigsaw puzzle over the recent long weekend. I reminded myself that the whole is its own thing.

Jigsaw puzzles get me to bounce between two thinking modes—the same two I alternate between less perceptibly in many thinking tasks.

At times I’m focused on the details of the pieces, or in sorting pieces according to visual similarity or relationship to regions of the puzzle. Yet for most of the actual piece placement decisions, I use a less focused process. I zoom back from the details of the pieces, and even whatever near-term objective I have, and let my brain pick wholistically.

I see a piece, and I know where it fits before I even pick it up. That’s especially true if I wasn’t looking for that piece, or even for one to fill a specific spot. If I focus in, then I look at the piece details and examine every candidate piece against those criteria (e.g., color, tab shape). That can take a while. If I focus less and let my mind wander, then it often jumps to the right answer.

Learning scientists would jump in and point to this being consistent with research. An inexperienced puzzler wouldn’t demonstrate much of this behavior. My ability seems related to all the research on chess playing. That research says experience has allowed me to chunk my knowledge into increasingly abstract, unconscious pattern recognitions. That took a lot of practice.

That truth obscures the detailed vs. wholistic divide because my learning journey was more than repetitive practice. Not that It was deliberate practice; I didn’t explicitly identify weakness and design practice to challenge those. It included wholistic reflection. Is this the right strategy to solve this puzzle? Where do I anticipate being hung up? When am I stuck and should move to another aspect?

Strong learners can keep the whole in mind even while learning new tasks where it seems there’s little big picture to draw from. They frequently bounce between the detailed parts and consideration of the whole.

There are only those two choices in examining any aspect of the world. Either you get more detail to reduce uncertainty, or you look at the consistency, completeness, and rationale of the whole. If you consider that all of this is happening on a giant associative web (neural and conceptual) in our brains, then it has similarities to navigating a tree. Movement from any point on the tree can lead toward the leaves, or toward the trunk and roots. There aren’t other choices.

Analyzing detail and the whole are different neurologically. We have a region of the brain that recognizes faces as a whole, without being able to recognize its parts. This dichotomy seems to extend to non-perceptual tasks too. There are hints that the most prominent distinction between the left and right brain hemispheres is their relative emphasis on detail (left brain) versus the whole (right brain).

Teaching About the Whole

The chunking explanation doesn’t entirely describe my mystical piece recognition ability. That theory is a bottom-up one. Chunking refers to the process by which increasing examples lead to more abstract pattern concepts, often unconscious ones.

But I know other top-down thoughts that also drive my puzzling behavior. I learned a lot about visual perception in my graduate studies, which affects the process I use to attack a puzzle (e.g., edges are especially informative). I know about statistics and that it’s going to be harder to find puzzle pieces at the beginning, so I leave the subtle discrimination tasks for when there are fewer pieces.

Those more wholistic notions mean that even when I think I’m defocused, I’m still applying filters to my puzzle scanning. Those filters are in between “find whatever”’ and “find something specific”. I am having “aha” piece placements because I'm subconsciously apply other filters, such as piece novelty or relative vs. absolute comparisons...two aspects our brains are most sensitive to.

Most schooling focuses on the detailed pieces, or on small integrations of those pieces. In analogy to my puzzling, the education system would start with a 100-piece puzzle and not a 1000 piece one. Perhaps the students wouldn't get to solve a puzzle at all until they master a series of piece recognition tasks. That makes sense if you’re following the bottom-up route.

However, you also need to feed wholistic thinking. That requires exposing students to complex problems and talking about the approaches to the problems, the conditions those approaches work best in, the types of problems that would be easiest and hardest, and how success might be defined. To use the jigsaw puzzle example, it doesn’t require students have developed great piece recognition skills yet. A student can be taught about how to approach a 1000-piece puzzle even if they would subsequently be incapable of solving it.

Teaching about the whole is as valuable as the detailed knowledge, and probably more so in the current era. It doesn’t happen by teaching all the parts and hoping for brains to coalesce them. It happens because learning also has a wholistic focus.

The whole is its own thing.