Don't ask a fish about water

There is an old Japanese saying that fish are the least able to describe water.  They live in the stuff, but that’s the problem.  It’s always there.

In a sense this phrase is similar to the “woods and trees” saying – when you are in the middle of the forest all you see is trees – you get no concept of forest.

The point is simple but nonetheless valid: if we are to understand something we experience every day, we have to step outside of our normal lives. 

If you work in a school that has established a feeling of calm, quiet order, you will might find it something of a shock to enter a school where such day to day rules are not established and obeyed.

Once the shock element has passed however you have the chance to consider why one school is quiet and calm and the other not. 

It’s at this point that the fish gets stuck.   For the fish water is water and it can’t survive outside the water.  We humans are more versatile, but we still have a problem. 

Our problem is that we don’t just experience the world, we also represent the world through our language.  If I go home at night and complain to my partner about a student, about a colleague, and about the guy who cut me up at the traffic lights by the supermarket, I am attempting to express my world in a new restricted form – a linear form of language.  I have words to express the emotions I feel, but the words are mere representations in a linear form.

My partner then interprets and decodes my comments.   This might come down to, “Oh for goodness sake couldn’t you just come home once in your life without moaning,” through to, “That must have been a rotten day – you normally come home so happy.”   Either way reality gets simplified as we try to express complex issues just as emotion.

Pupils and students work in the same way.  To create meaning from what the teacher says the young person in the class has to decode what is said in order to fathom the many connections hidden in the delivery. It’s a highly abstract process.

Now all this may well seem a bit disconnected – trees and forests, fish out of water and my problems on getting home of an evening.   But there is a link – because they all pose the same problem.  And that raises the issue: what can we do for people who find decoding more difficult?

Just providing more of the same doesn’t really work, neither for the fish, my partner nor the pupils in the school.   To overcome the difficulties we need to look at the issue of decoding meaning from a totally different perspective.

Now I won’t take up your time trying to resolve this in terms of the fish, and I think we have had enough about what happens to me at home.  But there is a solution for pupils and students.  They can be shown a different way of looking at the world of knowledge and information – and that means using Graphic Organisers.   These work because they show the connections between facts, people, places and ideas in a spatial arrangement that is obvious and direct.

As one of my colleagues recently put it - Graphic Organisers are an open-sesame for the mind.

Comments

[Paul Shakesby]

They also break through the greatest hurdle known to teachers (and no it isn't behaviour, but it contributes highly to it!)
that of syntax!

We are a wordy bunch, part of the qualifications for teaching is to tell a good story. Sometimes teachers (i know i am one!) get lost in teacher talk, organisers break past this hurdle of wordiness, allowing our students to see the forest for the trees (sorry more metaphors)

[oliver caviglioli]

This problem has always been known but as Language Across the Curriculum. While that is accurate, it's insufficiently precise. It's syntax, as you say, that is the real problem. Syntax is about one of the most abstract set of rules humans have invented. If it is the predominant mode of teaching and learning, everything is therefore limited by your level of competence in syntax.

But as many people find out on leaving school, they are far more intelligent than schools gave them credit for. They were, essentially, judge on their level of syntax.

So what's the solution? Well in schools, it's simply a question of giving them more syntax! The insight to real improvement may come from teaching English as a second language. There's something called The Lexical Approach where the emphasis is on vocabulary and meaning. In this approach, Graphic Organisers are used to develop this meaning-making. And the result? Better syntax.

If you go to www.modellearning.com/ideas/articles-and-documents.aspx you can download a White Paper on Lexical Mapping. It's a one side of A4 summary.