Mind Mapping Mistakes

Back in the early 1970s, the language of mind maps was full of New Age optimism about the then recent brain research. Marilyn Ferguson’s book The Brain Revolution (1973) heralded a new era of so called brain–based learning.

Sadly, nothing has changed much. In schools up and down the country you still hear talk of hemispheres, synapses, intelligences and so forth. All jolly inspirational no doubt to those who don’t know any better. But severely lacking in any practical advice on how to build knowledge and understanding in students.
Take this example from the renowned Kagan company. Rightly respected for their work on cooperative learning, here they veer into the mindless banter of accelerated learning.

Their three action steps are:

1.    Create the central image
2.    Brainstorm main ideas
3.    Add details

None of which even mentions —let alone explains—the act of organising thoughts through categorisation. Remarkably, the main feature and function of mind maps is entirely missing! Well, to be fair, not quite missing. Under the banner Helpful Hints it recommends students “redraw their maps to organise them”. It’s a bit late by then. And nowhere is there any advice on how exactly to do that.
Categorising is central to the power of mind mapping but it is rarely mentioned or taught. As a result it remains a brainstorming tool.

That’s not bad in itself but real thinking —thinking that is a effective for understanding and writing — is based on organising thoughts. Not merely dumping them onto paper and decorating them with coloured pencils!

If you’re interested in the rigour of our approach at Model Learning, see our booklet WiseGuide to Model Mapping available from our shop:

http://modellearningshop.com/books/wiseguide-to-model-mapping.html  

Why do we call it Model Mapping and not mind mapping?  Simple. To distance ourselves from the sloppy and ineffectual approach typical of the world of mind mapping.


Compare and categorise

Back in the 1980s I managed to corner Mike Lake, educational psychologist and thinking skills author, and ask him to give me the bottom line on what lay behind all the various thinking skills programmes.

Back then, the big three and very different approaches were Reuven Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment, Edward de Bono’s CoRT, and Matthew Lipman’s Philosophy for Children.

After a bit of a pause, he kindly let me into a secret. I say a secret because at the time there were lengthy and complex debates about the uniqueness of these three different strategies.
With his thorough knowledge of the field and generous turn of mind, he said: “Well first you have to have language to describe the features of what you’re describing. That then allows you to compare them. And that finally equips you to achieve the major goal of thinking, categorisation.”

I probed him to check I had understood clearly. But each time he repeated the same phrase back to me. “Yes, Oliver, it’s that simple” he reassured me.

“But what about Bloom’s taxonomy and all that?”  I stammered back, stunned by the directness of his summary.

“Oh, in essence that’s just a compilation of comparing and categorising”.

And from that day on, I have approached thinking skills with a clarity that has stood the test during my participation in the above three courses.

In Mike’s book Top Ten Thinking Tactics, he went on to write that Feuerstein considered comparative behaviour to be an elementary building block of his programme and that Lipman thought connection–making (sameness) and distinction–making (differences) were the foundation for all subsequent reasoning (p.68).

Yet most thinking skills taxonomies, including the National Curriculum thinking skills (in whatever format it currently lives) still downgrade categorization to a lowly information handling.

But ask any teacher how to execute the so–called higher–order skill of evaluation and they would have to drill down to the act of comparing. Mike Lake would be smiling.

References:
Lake, M. & Needham. M, (1990), Top Ten Thinking Tactics, Questions Publishing

What do categories reveal about the mind?

Quite a lot thinks George Lakoff, author of Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind.

That very title, for example, is a grouping of items in an Australian aboriginal language that has coherence and meaning only in that culture.  To us, of course, such a collection is pretty meaningless. But to this particular aboriginal tribe the category is a reality.

More than that Lakoff argues, categories create our reality.

So when did humans first learn to categorize? Aristotle is reckoned to be the first categorizer but Alex Wright in his book Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages argues that primitive taxonomies of the natural world pre–dated Aristotle by thousands of years. And determined his intellectual innovation.
But how did humans get to a position to be able to do this early classification? Just how did they learn to develop this skill?

It’s here that it gets very interesting. Pioneering sociologist Emile Durkheim thought that tribal societies had a deep unconscious need to project their family and kinship structures onto the world. Genealogy, you see, provides the perfect tool for classification.

Durkheim found, also in Australia, that aboriginal tribes categorized their natural world with a mirror system of their own tribal organization. They simply overlaid the family tree structure.

Over time this framework became the mental tool humans used to organise information about the word in order to make sense of it. Categorising was, and is, our foremost meaning–making tool.
Interesting, you might think, but what has this to do with Graphic Organisers and visual thinking?

In a future article I’ll outline what Model Learning has found in schools regarding the lack of insight teachers have of this central role of categorisation in children’s understanding. And how this accounts for the very limited impact of mind mapping in raising achievement in literacy and thinking skills.  Oh, and what to do about it.

References:
Durkheim, E. & Mauss, (1963) Primitive Classification, University of Chicago Press
Lakoff, G. (1987), Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, University of Chicago Press
Wright, A. (2007),  Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, Joseph Henry Press

How to get students to build meaning

There’s plenty of talk about constructivist learning but very little about the tools to make it happen. Well, here’s one that’s perfect for the job. It’s called the Inductive Tower.

As its title states, this Graphic Organiser catapults students into inductive learning. Most learning is deductive: the teacher tells the students the principles or rules, and they work from that to identify the details. That’s a very effective way to both teach and learn but it isn’t the only way.

Inductive learning is where students start with the details and, through experimentation and hypothesis, discover the principles and rules. 

The Inductive Tower works through categorisation, step–by–step from the bottom, right up towards the top, over–arching principles.

I’ll talk you through the stages by referring to the example on global warming. As you can see at the bottom are a series of objective measures on certain aspects of the environment.

Now comes the inductive thinking. Connect some of these items together if they have something in common. Experiment, as there may well be several alternative ways in which they are similar.

Then find a word or phrase that captures these shared characteristics. This establishes level 2.

In the example you can see that the Larsen Ice Shelf and the Ward Ice Shelf (level 1) both had chunks of ice breaking off (level 2).  

This process continues upward until the primary characteristic is identified.

This process helps students: 

• Slows down impulsive responses
• Exposes jumping to conclusions
• Demonstrates and records the group’s thinking
• Demands reasons and explanations for assertions
• Scaffolds logic thinking in graduated steps
• Encourages curiosity and hypothesising

References:

Joyce, B et al (2000) Models of Learning—Tools for Teaching, Buckingham: Open University Press

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