Wiring and Firing

One of my biggest challenges is getting students to overcome a "plug and chug" method for learning that was usually sufficient in high school. By plug and chug I mean simply plugging in a right answer and chugging through the course without doing any real thinking. For years now I've been using a first-week activity to illustrate what I want to see in their work for the class.

I start by explaining the concept of neuro-plasticity, or the cortical remapping we do whenever we connect two things together in our thinking. The Backwards Bike video above is a useful and fun way to introduce them to this idea. Then I project a Power Point of five or six randomly selected images and ask them to come up with as many organizational schemes for these images as they can.

 

A scheme might be organizing the images from big to small, or in categories of living versus non-living, or natural versus human-made. You could even just say these are six images.  There is no right or wrong answer and it's permissible to include all, some or none of the images in a framework. The only test is whether the organizing concept can be understood by someone else.  For three minutes the students individually brainstorm. Some list 8-9 organizing concepts; others struggle to come up with two or three. Then I have them relate their ideas to one another and we list any interesting or novel conceptual frameworks on the board. The exercise is actually a test of something called concept differentia, or how adept people are in seeing multiple ways to organize or see patterns in information.  People who do this really well tend to have high levels of critical ability (and, I tell the students, they often makes pots of money). 

Interestingly, young children do this much easier than adults. Their brains simply have more neuro-plasticity. They wire and fire neurons with ease. Indeed, I showed my six images to my son when he was about five and he came up with 23 schemes in three minutes (including the following: I was out driving in my car one day. The sun was bright, but I had left my sunglasses at home. Suddenly my tire had a blow out and I swerved into a tree. And these were the flowers at my funeral.

Even though kids do better than adults, everyone can get better with some conscious effort and practice. After all, the images are just a data set that can be manipulated into varying patterns. And that's essentially what I want students doing in my classes. The texts and authors we read, the ideas we discuss and the arguments we encounter are just data sets loaded with identifiable patterns, connections and contrasts. They may be more complex data sets than my random images, but we can do the same kind of intellectual work with them.

A few weeks into a course (after we have read multiple authors) I start requiring that all answers include inter-textual connections. It isn't enough that students write about lying and deception in King Lear. I now want them to bring Machiavelli's ideas about deception to bear on the play and, hey, while we're at it, what do we make of the fact that the rational horses in Swift's Gulliver's Travels have no word for lying? That's interesting. 

This first-week exercise becomes the concrete reference point that I can go to in making requests for a higher level of engagement with the material. "Remember that exercise we did the first week with the photos?" I'll say. "Let's do that with these four texts. See any interesting patterns or connections?"

Last fall I beta-tested an assignment that asked students to take a concept beyond what was in our course.  They had to explain a concept they learned in one of their other courses and apply it to something we were reading in Humanities. One kid explained the idea of an "opportunity cost," which he learned about in Econ.  Then he applied it to Achilles' choice in Book 9 of the Iliad.  Achilles could stay and fight, but he'll lose out on a long life. Also, he could leave Troy and have a long life, but he'll miss out the chance to be the greatest warrior. Investing in one choice means a cost in the other. Another young woman used Asch's conformity experiments  from her Cognitive Psych class to illuminate Socrates' insistence on the value and importance of thinking for oneself.

Last year this was an extra credit, but I've decided to make it an assignment for everybody this year. What I like best is that these are connections they are making on their own. Here's my bet, too.  If I had casually pointed out these connections in class, they probably wouldn't stick.  But I'll bet they will remember their connections 10 years from now because they made them themselves.