Eleanor Duckworth's vision of learning—
experienced, not explained.
What follows is not a summary. It's a set of small experiments. Each one embodies an idea from the book. Don't rush. The understanding sneaks in while you play.
Begin exploringHere are some straws. Nobody's asking you to do anything with them. But you might notice something.
Tap straws to place them in order. Tap again to remove.
Your arrangement:
Kevin wasn't asked to order the straws. He wanted to. The idea was his. That's what made it wonderful—not that it was original to the world, but that it was original to him.
Wonderful ideas build on other ideas. Without previous experience, Kevin couldn't have had this one. The more you know, the more you can think of to do.
Inside this box is a hidden circuit. You can test it—but not open it. What's inside?
What do you think is inside?
Hank, a fifth grader, figured out what was in his mystery box by burning out the component inside—an act of creative destruction his teacher had to accept. The courage to try, even destructively, matters more than knowing in advance.
A ball rolls down a ramp, leaving ink dots as it goes. What do you think the dots look like?
The ball picks up speed. As it goes faster, the dots it leaves will be:
It's going faster, so more dots per inch
It's going faster, so more distance between dots
The rotation stays consistent
I'd need to see it to know
The dots get farther apart. The ball rotates at the same rate, but covers more ground between each rotation as it speeds up.
About half of adults predict the dots get closer together. One teacher, seeing the result, took a string to measure the gaps, saying: "They don't get closer together as noticeably as I thought they would!" She was still seeing what she expected, even after the evidence was right in front of her.
That confusion is the point. When your prediction is wrong, something interesting is happening in your mind. Don't rush past it.
Four children. Four seats at the movies. How many ways can they sit? Some students say "twenty-four" immediately—they know a formula. But what are the arrangements?
Drag the letters to arrange them. Find as many unique arrangements as you can.
"Twenty-four" is to these arrangements as "forty-two" is to the meaning of life. The formula gives you a number. The exploration gives you understanding.
Every person who does this exercise finds a different system. Some make diagonals. Some fix one letter and rotate the rest. A nine-year-old invented a system of "reversing pairs" that was entirely new to Duckworth. The variety of paths is the point.
What does 24 ÷ 8 really mean? Pick the one that feels right to you:
Count how many in each pile
Count how many groups
Both are completely correct. They're two different mental operations that arrive at the same answer.
In a group discussion Duckworth observed, people were astonished that the other interpretation existed. Each was convinced their way was the only way division could work.
Now imagine a teacher who holds one view, trying to explain division to a child who thinks the other way. The teacher wouldn't even notice the difference. Both would walk away thinking the child can't do math.
"We must find ways to present subject matter that will enable learners to get at their own thoughts about it."
Schools focus almost entirely on facts. But Duckworth identified four equally important kinds of learning. Which matters most to you?
In one science study, children who took their magnifiers home every night and ran back if they forgot them—but couldn't state the physics of magnification—scored 95/100 in Duckworth's view. Children who knew the formula but never looked unless told: 5/100.
Teaching "I can figure this out" is not less rigorous than teaching facts. It is more.
This is Duckworth's core teaching method. Read this short poem. Don't look for "the meaning." Just notice things.
Tap each line to see what others have noticed. In Duckworth's classes, a group can discuss this poem for over an hour with increasing interest.
"I have always been frightened by being asked: 'What is the meaning of this poem?'" Duckworth writes. "But it is easy for me to point out something I notice."
Look back at what just happened. You ordered straws without being told to. You tested a mystery box. You sat with a wrong prediction. You found arrangements. You noticed things in a poem nobody pointed out to you.
None of these insights came from being told.
That is Duckworth's thesis. And you just experienced it.
The more ideas you have at your disposal,
the more new ideas occur.
Eleanor Duckworth, The Having of Wonderful Ideas and Other Essays on Teaching and Learning, 3rd edition, Teachers College Press, 2006.