Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind

by Guy Claxton

  A creative workplace needs to encourage people to engage with their work mindfully and to think about what they are doing. The development of such a working environment is stimulated by giving individuals, and especially teams, genuine responsibility for planning and carrying out meaningful pieces of work, and for deciding how their goals are to be best achieved. A recent official report on Fostering Innovation by the British Psychological Society, having surveyed all the relevant research, concludes that: ‘Individuals are more likely to innovate where they have sufficient autonomy and control over their work to be able to try out new and improved ways of doing things’ and where ‘team members participate in the setting of objectives’.21 The more people feel that they have some stake in their work, the more likely they are to be interested in spontaneously looking for improvements, and in keeping their thoughts, impressions and ideas simmering quietly on the back burners of their minds, both when they are ‘on the job’ and off it.

  We saw in Chapter 5 that some daily routines and physical surroundings are more conducive to the germination of ideas than others. Giving workers some control over the work environment may be helpful – though individuals vary considerably in what works best for them, and many conducive conditions do not fit easily within the structure of conventional employment. I work best by the sea. Some people sink into the right frame of mind with the help of certain pieces of music. Often people are at their most receptive when they are able to spend a great deal of time in silence. Some people jog; some swim; some meditate. Descartes, it is said, did much of his best thinking lying in bed till late in the day. Encouraging people to note what works best for them is a practical first step. In a corporate setting it is not out of the question that – with a modicum of ingenuity – some of these conditions could be created, at least for some of the time.

  People are obviously more inclined to be innovative and intuitive when they feel safe being so. Fostering Innovation suggests:

  One of the major threats to innovation is a sense of job insecurity and lack of safety at work . . . Where individuals are threatened they are likely to react defensively and unimaginatively . . . They will tend to stick to tried and tested routines rather than attempt new ways of dealing with their environments . . . People [are] generally more likely to take risks and try out new ways of doing things in circumstances where they feel relatively safe from threat as a consequence. It is the thrust of this document that the revolution in management practices in the 80s has now to be paralleled by a new revolution in the 90s and into the next century, which emphasises . . . psychological safety at work and practical support for the development and implementation of new and improved ways of doing things.

  It is not just that people are bolder about trying things out when they feel relaxed and secure; threat creates a mindset of anxiety and entrenchment in which awareness is constricted and focused on the avoidance of the threat, rather than the spacious, open attitude that the slow ways of knowing require to work. People need to feel that they can say ‘This may sound silly, but . . .’; or ‘Can I just think aloud for a moment . . .’ Where half-baked ideas are immediately torn to shreds, people rapidly learn to wait until d-mode has delivered a position that is polished and watertight (but quite possibly over-cautious and already out of date) – or not to contribute at all.

  Finally there is time itself. The slow ways of knowing will not deliver their delicate produce when the mind is in a hurry. In a state of continual urgency and harassment, the brain-mind’s activity is condemned to follow its familiar channels. Only when it is meandering can it spread and puddle, gently finding out such uncharted fissures and runnels as may exist. Yet thinking slowly, paradoxically, does not have to take a long time. It is a knack that can be acquired and practised. The mind needs to be given time; but its ingenuity also depends on the cultivation of a disposition to take one’s time, as much as there is. One can learn to access and use these other ways of knowing more fluently. One might even suggest that managers – and their workforces – might try meditation; though, as a preliminary, they would need to understand what that means, and how it helps.

  However, those who try to manage nations and corporations – ministers and executives of all persuasions – may be panicked by the escalating complexity of the situations they are attempting to control into assuming that time is the one thing they have not got. Their fallacy is to suppose that the faster things are changing, the faster and more earnestly one has to think. Under this kind of pressure, d-mode may be driven to adopt one shallow nostrum, one fashionable idea after another, each turning out to have promised more than it was capable of delivering. Businesses are re-engineered, hierarchies are flattened, organisations try to turn themselves into learning organisations, companies become ‘virtual’. Meetings proliferate; the working day expands; time gets shorter. So much time is spent processing information, solving problems and meeting deadlines that there is none left in which to think. Even ‘intuitive thinking’ itself can easily become yet another fad that fails – because the underlying mindset hasn’t changed.

  Although it is important to think about how to encourage the appearance of slow knowing, it is even more important to think about the conditions that equip people with the longer-term dispositions, the personal qualities and the capabilities to make full use of their varied ways of knowing, regardless of the messages of the particular setting they happen to find themselves in. Even when the culture is implicitly directing them to use d-mode, people need to know how to make use of slow knowing, and when it is appropriate. This, at the current point in history, must surely be the true function of education.

  In any school or college, there is not one curriculum but two. The first we might call the content curriculum: it is the body of knowledge and know-how that people are there to learn – sums, French, philosophy, dentistry, whatever. Both students and teachers are, all being well, clear about what the subject is and how progress is to be gauged. If this were the only curriculum, teachers would be free to use whatever means they could to make learning easier, quicker, more pleasant and more successful. But it isn’t. Underneath every concern with content lies another curriculum, less visible but just as vital – the learning curriculum – which is teaching students about learning itself: what it is; how to do it; what counts as effective or appropriate ways to learn; what they, the students, are like as learners; what they are good at and what they are not. And if US Labor Secretary Doug Ross and ‘Campaign for Learning’ chairman Sir Christopher Ball are right, and the future of both social and personal wellbeing depends on people’s confidence and competence as learners, then this second curriculum simply cannot be ignored. The learning society requires, above all, an educational system which equips all young people – not just the academically inclined – to deal well with uncertainty.

  People come to any learning experience with a set of learning-related abilities and attitudes which will determine – in conjunction with the learning task and the learning culture which surrounds it – how learning goes. These learning skills and dispositions are themselves changed by experience: people’s capabilities as learners, their fortitude in the face of difficulty, their implicit understanding of what learning entails, and their images of themselves as learners will all have been altered somewhat (even if only confirmed or consolidated) by any learning event. It is with the cumulative nature of such changes that the learning curriculum is concerned. It asks: how can this succession of learning challenges and encounters be designed and presented so that, over the long term, people’s learning power changes in a positive direction?

  The learning curriculum does not compete, or alternate, with the content curriculum: it follows it like a shadow. To be concerned with the education of young people as learners, generically, does not mean that we give up teaching them specific subjects. Like all human qualities, those of the ‘good learner’ develop in the course of engaging in appropriate activities. There has to be some content, something to learn a
bout. Questions about the content curriculum remain to be answered. But the criteria which are used to determine the selection of subject matter, the methods of teaching and learning that are encouraged, and the focus of assessment: these are altered by the acknowledgement of the second curriculum. Whatever the topic, part of educators’ attention remains on the mastery of the specific skills and materials; but another part now has to rest on the long-term residue of learning dispositions and capabilities which is accruing from those encounters.

  We cannot simply assume that what is good in terms of one curriculum is necessarily good in terms of the other. If we wanted a swimmer to improve on her personal best time, we could threaten her with dire consequences if she did not. We could even, if all else failed, tow her rapidly up and down the pool. Neither of these ploys, however, would do much for her long-term performance. The fear of failure would probably make her tense and hostile. The towing, if we persisted with it, would succeed only in weakening her muscles. There is direct evidence that the two curricula do sometimes shear apart in just this way.

  Carol Dweck of the University of Illinois has explored in a detailed series of experiments the quality of ‘good learning’ that we might call resilience: the ability to tolerate the frustrations and difficulties that inevitably occur in the course of learning, without getting upset and withdrawing prematurely. Dweck found that people’s resilience varies enormously, right across the whole educational age spectrum from pre-school to graduate-level study. Some people, when they hit difficulty, would quickly start to become distressed, and instead of persisting with the task would have to find ways of shoring up their self-esteem. For them, the experience of finding learning hard was aversive. Her results showed that, of all the students she tested, it was the ‘bright girls’, those who were doing relatively well on the content curriculum, who were most likely to show this lack of resilience: to be ‘failing’, in other words, on the learning curriculum. Dweck speculated that the bright girls are the group with the most fragile grasp on learning precisely because they are the students with the least experience of sticking with difficulty, and (sometimes) succeeding. Being ‘bright’, they find learning relatively easy, so they encounter difficulty more rarely than a less ‘able’ child. And being girls, they are likely, when they do get stuck – especially when they are young – to be comforted or offered an alternative activity by a teacher, whereas a boy is more likely, so the research shows, to be encouraged to ‘stick with it’. Thus the bright girls are the students who have had the fewest opportunities to build up their ‘learning muscles’, and their stamina consequently remains weak.22

  Any learners who lack resilience will be fine while learning is going smoothly, but will be prone to fall apart when it gets rocky, and this vulnerability leads them, Dweck discovered, to make conservative learning choices. Those lacking resilience will choose tasks that they know how to handle, and become anxious when a teacher changes the rules, or offers a different, less familiar kind of learning experience. They will, as a result, tend to develop only a narrow range of learning skills, those that offer the highest probability of success. If doing well in a school is defined in terms of the ability to articulate and explain, then only d-mode will be exercised and developed. The risk is that without resilience, some young people, the ‘successes’, will overdevelop one side of their learning potential and neglect the other; while a different set of young people, the relative ‘failures’, may hardly develop as learners at all, or even go backwards. At worst, there is an unenviable choice between stunting and lopsidedness.

  The learning curriculum, therefore, must first and foremost be committed to the strengthening of resilience, and this requires conveying to young people an accurate view of the many faces of learning, of the mind, and of themselves. Learning sometimes involves confusion, for example, so it makes no sense to create a content curriculum which systematically deprives young people of the opportunity of getting used to being confused and of learning how to deal with it productively; nor to create, or allow to be created, a learning culture which implicitly construes confusion as aversive or presumes that learning can and/or should happen without confusion; nor one in which learners come to feel that their sense of self-worth is contingent on clarity, and subverted by ignorance. If children learn to feel threatened by ignorance, their resilience will be weakened; and likewise if they learn to feel threatened by failure or frustration.

  Carol Dweck has shown that resilience is also undermined by a false view of ‘intelligence’. She distinguished between two general views of intelligence or ‘ability’. In one view – the more accurate one which I am using here – ability is seen as a kind of expandable toolkit of ways of learning and knowing. As one learns, so one can also be learning how to learn; becoming a better learner. The other, which unfortunately tends to permeate educational discourse, sees ‘ability’ as an innately determined endowment of general-purpose brainpower which places a ceiling on what you can expect, or be expected, to achieve. To say of a child ‘Sally is tall, has brown eyes, and is very bright’ is implicitly to be subscribing – and encouraging Sally to subscribe – to the latter view. In such a view, no amount of effort on Sally’s part will change her height, her eye colour or her ‘ability’.

  Dweck’s dramatic discovery is that a lack of learning resilience is frequently underpinned by this latter, deterministic view of the mind. A child who agrees with the idea that ‘it is possible to get smarter’ is likely to be persistent and adventurous in her learning. A child who disagrees, who thinks that ability is fixed, is more likely to get upset when she fails. Why? Because the fluid ‘theory’ of intelligence encourages a child to stretch herself: by doing so she might become cleverer. That is a possibility for her. For her less fortunate classmate, it is not. She feels herself to be possessed of a certain immutable amount of cleverness, so that failure or confusion, for her, can only be construed as evidence that her ability is inadequate. And the more discomfited she is by this, the more impelled she is to withdraw, hide, defend or attack. The practical lesson of this research for the learning curriculum is that teachers themselves must understand the fluid and variegated nature of learning ability, and use language that conveys this view to children.

  Once this view of the mind as expandable is established in principle, the next demand of the learning curriculum is that it should offer the opportunity to practise the whole gamut of ways of knowing and learning. On the foundation of resilience can be built greater resourcefulness. D-mode must be developed and refined, but so must the powers of intuition and imagination, of careful, non-verbal observation, of listening to the body, of detecting (without harvesting them too quickly) small seeds of insight, of basking in the mythic world of dream and reverie, of being moved without knowing why. If they were more aware of both the possibility and the value of doing so, teachers would be able to find a host of opportunities to vary more widely the learning modes which their lessons encouraged or demanded, and this is especially true of teachers in secondary, further and higher education. Many of the ways of knowing which we have been exploring are familiar to the primary school child and her teacher. But conventional content curricula tend to make the mistake of seeing them as ‘childish’, to be supplanted, as quickly as possible, by more explicit, more articulate forms of cognition. This attitude is profoundly misguided. The slower ways of knowing do not need to be replaced. They need to be cultivated and nurtured, right on into adulthood; and they need to be supplemented, not overshadowed, by the more formal ways of knowing that start later.

  Intuition, for example, can readily be honed by including it explicitly within the learning context. Recent research on the learning of science shows that children develop a much richer understanding of how to do science, a much firmer, more flexible grasp of scientific thinking, if they are encouraged to bring their intuitions about how the world works into the laboratory with them: to share them, explore them and test them out. As we saw in Chapter 4, intuition is a vi
tal way of knowing in scientific research. By working with their intuitions rather than ignoring them, children are learning not just science as a body of knowledge, but to think like scientists.23

  Cultivating a relaxed attitude of mind, in which one can ‘let things come’, is also something that education could address. Some young people have picked up the knack for themselves; others may need a little coaching. Archbishop William Temple was clearly one of the former.

  When I was a boy at school I used to be set the task of composing poetry in Latin, which was, as you know, rather difficult. However, I was working by candle-light, and whenever I got ‘stuck’ and couldn’t find the right phrase, I would pull off a stick of wax from the side of the candle and push it back, gently, into the flame. And then the phrase would simply come to me.24

  Likewise there is good evidence for the value of imagination as a learning tool throughout the lifespan. Whether it be in learning physical skills such as sports, in preparing oneself for difficult encounters, or in sorting out one’s own values and beliefs, active imagination and visualisation can often prove much more effective than rational self-talk.25 Imagination and fantasy are areas in which young children are naturally expert, and in which their learning power can easily be refined and developed as they grow up. Conversely, if their imaginative birthright is allowed to atrophy through progressive neglect, learning power will be narrowed and reduced.

  What about mindfulness? If we want young people to become successful on the content curriculum, we can afford to teach them as if knowledge were certain. In this kind of teaching, it may well be more efficient to adopt the ‘textbook’ approach: to act as if knowledge, and the appropriate methods for dealing with it, were (for the most part) agreed and secure. ‘Why risk unsettling children with fancy talk about the “social construction of knowledge”?’ is a perfectly fair question. But on the learning curriculum students must be helped to develop a greater sense of ownership of knowledge and the knowledge-making process, and this means presenting knowledge as more equivocal; a human product that is always open to question and revision. If we want to start children out on a journey that heads, however remote the destination, in the direction of wisdom, then we may need to run the risk of creating some epistemological insecurity. In fact it turns out that the risk is not so great.