Thinking frames

Thinking frames

In this article I want to share with you a major thinking frame, that has been of great use to me in my teaching and that comes from the work of Antoine de la Garanderie, a major French pedagogical thinker.

• What is a thinking frame?
• Way 1
• Way 2
• Way 3
• Way 4
• How does this help me as a language learner?
• How does this help me as a teacher?
• Conclusion

What is a thinking frame?
Euclidean geometry is an example of a thinking frame: When I realise that there is a fixed proportional relationship between a circle's radius and its circumference, I begin to look for other proportionalities in other shapes. This state of mind both enriches and impoverishes me.

• It enriches me by giving me tools for reflection and yet reduces my thinking by rendering what it outside the frame less worthy of interest. So, Euclid's brilliance might hinder me from thinking about shapes in terms of their weight.

De la Garanderie suggests that there are four main ways in which people learn.

Way 1
When you learn in this way you receive the new information auditorily or visually and you store it together with other similar information in your mind.

• An analogy would be going to the market and buying honey; when you get home you store the honey in the jam and honey section of your larder. The analogy, though, is a weak one, as the new jar of honey will not change and rearrange the other pots of sweet stuff. New information, added to old, will often cause the old to modify, change and re-organise.
• If I go to a teacher training workshop as a participant, I will often find myself working in this way: I listen to what is being said and insert it into my ready-made, internal schemata.
• If I were learning a new language and came across a linguistic feature I already knew in another language I would have that warm feeling of recognition that is typical of Way 1 thinking.

Way 2
This is the way of learning deemed normal by many of the great, traditional, educational systems of the world.

• When working in this mode you take in the new information though your ear or your eye and you try to memorise it just as it is.
• If you are studying ground-plans you attempt to mentally photograph what you have on the page in front of you.
• In Way 2 you try to retain the form of what you receive and store it in your mind as a complete text. Most readers will have learnt the Latin alphabet in Way 2 and, possibly, as an oral chant when at primary school.
• Way 2 is clearly central in the life of any actor and is a must in the life Chinese schoolchildren as they learn the 10,000 characters that bring literacy to one quarter of the world's population.

Way 3
In this way you receive the new information and you immediately start questioning it. Your mind swarms with queries like:

"Does what the teacher said at the outset fit with this ending?"
"Do I agree with that middle bit?"
"I wonder where the teacher got all this from. What are her sources?"

• In Way 3, typically, you are in an intellectually aggressive and questioning state of mind.You enter into mental dialogue with the new information and its implications.
• Classical Western scientific method draws majorly on this way of working: The central concept of striving to falsify a hypothesis is typical of Way 3.
• In my own training at a UK secondary school and then at university I was praised by my teachers for staying as much as possible in this mode. I was praised for intellectual challenging, insubordination, refusing to take 'That's the way it is' for an answer.

Was I taught to value gentle learning, absorbing new ideas, was I made aware that my conscious mind can only think so far, and that the unconscious cognitive processes are vaster, deeper and more potent than that which can fit onto the narrow workbench of conscious mind? I think I was not introduced to such realisations.

Way 4
This is the most difficult of the thinking modes to accurately describe. In this frame of mind the person makes no conscious effort to "learn" anything and yet, maybe the next day, they realise that they have new knowledge in their heads.

• Let me give you an example: I arrive in a new city and go to my hotel. I take a 40 minute walk around the neighbourhood, with the conscious intention of thinking through the steps of my next three hour teacher training workshop. Next morning, as I emerge from sleep, I sense that I "know" the layout of the streets surrounding the hotel. I have taken information on board without realising that I was doing it and I have done it completely, excellently, accurately and cognitively, and all this below the level of consciousness.
• My guess is that nearly everything that I learnt between conception and the out-of-the-womb age of five was acquired in Way 4. My extraordinary mastery of my mother tongue was achieved 100% through a huge, effortless computational process in the unconscious part of my mind.
• Way 4 is too "dreamy" to sit well with most educational systems, though, in language teaching, we have the work of Lozanov, father of Suggestopaedia and of Urbain and Dufeu, who have created Language Pscyhodramaturgy . Both these methods consciously try to reach the cognitve and affective power of what lies below the surface of the consciousness in the language learner.
• It is fascinating how well learners in these two methods, even hoary, inflexible adults, produce the sound system of the target language, which suggests that privileging Way 4 may be an extremely efficient way of giving people back their L1 learning ability later in life when working with an L2 , 4 or 6.

How does this help me as a language learner?
I am seriously considering learning Polish. In constructing my one-to-one program I want to offer myself the chance of all four modes of learning.

• In part of each lesson I want to learn some tiny, rhythmical chunk of Polish by heart. At first these texts will be just 2-4 lines long. I want to learn in Way 2 and stock my head with some auditorily memorable strings of sounds. I want to build myself a small auditory library, which gradually will give me memorable examples of many areas of Polish grammar.
• I will happily use parallel Polish-English text so that I can associate what is new with what I already know. I will joyfully indulge in comparison of Polish patterns in sounds, in graphemes, in syntax and in collocational behaviours with the same in other languages I know. I want each lesson to have space for me to work in Way 1, were I weave the newness of Polish into the safe, lazy, conservative structures already in my head.
• Yes, and Way 3, I definitily want to ask my Polish teacher questions she finds hard to answer about her language. I want to give the wobbly rules the grammar books will teach me a hard time. I will have fun being a linguistic terrier worrying the bone of inadequate descriptions of Polish, (assuming they are as goofy as some to the mad " rules" we shove at students in teaching EFL.)
• Perhaps Way 4 will be the most important mode for me in my learning of this language. Since I am able to safely and easily go into light trance, I feel that it is in this condition that I will take in most Polish and at the deepest level. It is from this level that I will come to speak the language most effectively.

How does this help me as a teacher?

• I reckon that some of my students may well be happy in Way 1. In this case I need to give them plenty of opportunity to compare the target language with the way their mother tongues work in the same area. I need to respect and foster their natural recourse to their mother tongue as their reference point.
• Why do I use the Way 2 mode so little in my classes? How often, in the past ten years, have I asked students to enjoy the committing of striking text to memory? When did I last ask a class to learn a blackboard diagram of the English tense system by heart? If my students come from almost anywhere in the World beyond Western Europe I am denying them exercise of a skill that they have deeply ingrained in them from their previous education.
• Knowing that some students live mainly in Way 3, I realise that apparent aggressiveness in their reception of new knowledge is to do with their preferred learning style and does not constitute an attack on me as a person. This awareness has frequently stood me in good stead in the heat of the moment in class, and allowed me to behave reasonably rather than with defensive aggression.
• Have you noticed that some students seem to spend part of the lesson in a sort of distant mood, as if they were not paying attention? They seem fascinated by what is beyond the frames of the windows. They seem like they are partly not there. Knowing that Way 4 is a powerful way of absorbing new ideas and skills I have become circumspect about jumping to the conclusion that such students are "doing nothing". I monitor such folk carefully and check what they have acquired by the next day after a lesson spent apparently suspended from a cloud. Some apparent wool-gatherers are doing just that, while others are genuinely learning in their own, powerful Way 4 mode.

Conclusion
If you have read this article mainly in Way 3, objecting and mis-matching like hell, that's fine. De la Garanderie's theory of the four ways of learning does not have to be true to be useful to us as both learners and teachers. This goes, too, for the further" thinking frames" I hope to introduce you to in subsequent articles.

Thinking frames 2: Logical Levels

In this series of articles I want to explore with you a number of different filters you can fix onto the lens of your thinking camera. I have selected those "filters" that I have found most useful in my active reflection on my own teaching and training work.
This article is slightly different from the last one in that I want to present this filter, this thinking frame via an exercise for you to do in class with your lower intermediate students.

• An exercise in Logical Levels
• Logical Levels rationale
• An example of Logical Levels in practice
• Logical Levels and teacher training
• Conclusion

An exercise in Logical Levels
So here is the exercise:

• Ask your students to notice how they are feeling right now and then to choose an animal/bird/fish/reptile/insect that symbolises or represents their mood. Ask them to think of themselves becoming this animal.
• Now ask them, using the first person, to write three sentences that
  describe the place where they live, move, and sleep as their animal.
• Next ask them to write three sentences detailing three things they often do, three behaviours that are typical of them.
  
  During these short writing phases you act act as a walking dictionary, helping people with the animal vocabulary they may need. There is no better time to teach a person a word than the moment they need and and want it.
  
  There are things, that as the animal of their choice, they are superbly good at. They write three sentences about these major abilities of theirs.
• Tell them that now they are to think about their strongly held opinions,
  their convictions in role as the animal. Encourage students who feel this
  leap into the moral realm is too much for them. " What are you beliefs
  and values as the animal? "
  Ask each student, as their animal, to give three different answers to the
  question "Who are you?". In other words, what is the core identity of
  the animal?
• Group the students in fours to read out what they have written to their
  classmates. They tell the others straight out which animal they are- to
  turn this activity into a guessing game is not useful Why is the EFL
  culture so enamoured of guessing games? Information gap gone wild?

Logical Levels rationale
In the above exercise, using the metaphor of an animal, the students have been working with the thinking frame of Gregory Bateson's 'Logical Levels', a frame now well integrated into the area of Neuro-Linguistic-Programming . One way of portraying the logical levels is to see them as a hierarchical pyramid, thus:

Beyond/ higher
Who?
Identity
Why?
Convictions, beliefs
How?
Abilities, talents, can-do
What?
Behaviours, habits , frequent doings
Where?
Everything and everybody that is around, environment

Let me apply the Bateson model to you as a teacher by asking you the following questions that start at the bottom of the pyramid and work their way up to the top:

• What sort of areas/s do you teach in? And the school buildings?
• What is the colleague group like? And the students?
• What sort of classrooms do you have, and equipment?
• Are you silent in your classes or do you talk a lot?
• When do you do marking? How about tests?
• What aspects of your teaching are really good and how do you achieve this excellence?
• Your main talents as a teacher?
• What is your implicit teaching philosophy?What are your beliefs about your subject/s and what sort of opinions do you have about students today?
• Who are you as a teacher? In class what is your core identity?
• As a teacher and as a human is there anything that you feel is higher than you, above you, beyond you?

In mentally answering the above questions you have created a pretty comprehensive picture of yourself as a teacher. It is evident that factors to do with your identity and your beliefs will govern what happens lower down the pyramid. Your behaviour is shaped by your belief system and not the other way around.

People with a knowledge of Marxism will perhaps object that the so-called bottom level, environment, will massively affect the "upper" levels. So thirty years in jail may well affect a person at the levels of belief and even identity. Perhaps Bateson would counter-argue that , in the case of a Nelson Mandela, the negative environment of prison was powerless against a a powerful sense of identity and a socially supported web of beliefs.

An example of Logical Levels in practice
The Logical Levels are a powerful tool for analysing any human situation and I would like to offer you some an example of how they have helped me professionally.

• I had a French student, Robert. His language level in English was upper intermediate. He had a good command of grammar as well as a wide-ranging vocabulary. His obvious problem was his non-concessionary French accent. In the needs analysis on the first day he made clear that he wanted to improve his pronunciation.
• All week, on this very intensive course, I took him at his word and spent quite a lot of classtime attempting to help him improve his sound patterns in English. The audible practical results of this effort on his part and mine were zero.
• He had presented his problem as a behavioural one and I had failed to apply Bateson thinking to the case. The question I had failed to ask was this:
  "Does Robert's problem with English sounds lie only at the level of linguistic behaviour or does he lack ability as a language learner?"
• To check this out I talked to Robert privately in Italian. In this language he did have a faint French accent but on the whole he respected the throat, mouth, lips and tongue rules of Italian. So his problems did not reside at the level of capability. If he was able to push off mother tongue influenced pronunciation in one foreign language he could do it in another.
• As we talked it became clear to me that Robert was unconsciously using his amazingly distorting pronunciation in English to protect his rather delicate personality from his rich Dutch, US and UK clients ( He was a lawyer). He used his distortion of English phonology to to keep these ego-threatening folk at a decent distance from him, emotionally.

I had spent a week trying to deal with a language problem at behaviour level when, in reality, it lay at the level of Robert's identity. When I realised this I agreed with him that we should leave his pronunciation errors in peace because to deal with the problem at identity level is the job of a therapist and not of a language teacher.

Logical level thinking showed me where the limits of my competence were and allowed me, Robert and the rest of the class to abandon a wild goose chase and get on with some useful language work.

Logical Levels and teacher training
When I am training teachers I have the Bateson thinking filter firmly fixed onto my mental lens. If I get a group of primary school colleagues to experience a story telling technique as if they were students, some of them may well be reluctant to use the technique in class. This could be because they feel safer playing stories to their classes because they have not yet developed the skill of oral telling. ( The level of capability)

• Their reluctance to try the technique may be at belief level: "I believe my English is too weak to tell a story orally. I prefer the kids to listen to a native voice on the course book tape or CD-ROM."
  Their 'resistance' to using the technique may lie at identity level:
  "I am not an actor. I am a teacher not a performer"

If I want to train people effectively I need to to be aware of the internal logical level they are speaking to me from. It is this realisation that has led me, as a trainer, to do an increasing amount of one-to-one work.

Conclusion
I have moved on as a teacher from the days when it took me a week to get round to applying the Logical Levels filter to Robert's case. I now think through any human problem carefully and check out the level at which the kernel of the problem really lies. This quick procedure saves me time, confusion and anguish. I like to have tools like this in my toolbox. Thank you, Gregory Bateson.