Shifting the Way You Think

A shift in our thinking is not always as easy as you might imagine. Sometimes we are so entrenched and indoctrinated in the way we think and learn, that it’s difficult to change our way of thinking or perceptions. This is why listening to new ideas and opening our minds to new possibilities is so important and like Stephen Covey suggests, we need to regularly ‘sharpen the saw’. All of us from time to time, should step back from our work environment or home environment and consider other possibilities in our way of thinking. This came in a surprising way as I was returning recently from the Expanding Learning Horizons (ELH) conference in Victoria.

I was travelling on a bus to the airport and happened to be sitting next to a astrophysicist (and trainee teacher by the way) who was explaining to me that he was working on a new theory of gravity because the current way of thinking about gravity did not allow for the many anomalies that exist in space. He went into some detail about quantam mechanics and how mathematically the current theories just don’t add up. One of the areas that he believes requires a change of thinking was in relation to light. He and another professor are collaborating on a hypothesis to prove that light travels at different speeds when coming from opposite ends of the universe, because the movement is fluid and not linear.

To say that I was lacking in some scientific knowledge would be an understatement, but I found this concept quite intriguing. He explained that proving such scientific theories was an incredibly long and arduous process and as a scientist it was very difficult to get funding and research grants to investigate and prove any hypothesis. (This is a poor reflection on our current commitment to research in Australia.) Convincing the so called experts in the field of quantam mechanics was nigh on impossible and I was reminded of poor Charles Darwin and the initial ridicule he encountered with his Theory of Evolution.

It seems that it's human nature to always doubt and be suspicious of something new. Whole books have been written on human’s basic distrust of something new. Why should we change our way of thinking? Why should we change the way we do things? Isn’t it easier to stay with what we know? Well the answer is an emphatic ‘no’. Albert Einstein, one of the greatest thinkers and scientists of our time, once said that in developing his theory of relativity he use to imagine sitting on a moonbeam travelling through space. Divergent thinking is necessary, if we are to arrive at a new place, a new understanding and a new paradigm.

How do people come up with these new ideas? Observations maybe or perhaps through sheer speculation? Do people work alone or do they learn from others and build on the knowledge that already exists? Does new learning come from a quantam leap or from gradual changes in our perception? Or is collaboration the key? The wise ones amongst you will immediately surmise that new learning and new ideas come from all of these ways and there is no one method that accounts for new ideas and thinking.

Even in teaching and learning there are many new theories about how people learn. There is a growing body of research that points to the fact that learning is not passive. Gone are the days of students sitting in front of a teacher and learning simply by listening to the teacher. Collaboration among students and teachers is now seen as an important way for young people to learn, particularly when it is an active discussion in the class or even with students in other countries or experts in different parts of the country or the world. No more are we limited by the classroom. Technology at CCS allows us to bring the world into the classroom and collaboration is going to be one of the most powerful learning tools of the next generation.

In his recent authoritative book, "Grown Up Digital", Don Tapscott (2009)makes the point that the Net Generation has grown up collaborating, sharing and creating together online. Students start internalising what they've learned in class only once they start talking to each other. Tapscott goes on to say that collaborative learning to be the more effective learning to be more effective in increasing academic performance than individual or competitive learning.

Why is collaboration so important to the discovery of new understanding and new ideas? Isaac Newton hit it on the head (no pun intended) when he said:
“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”