Monk's wisdom

Here is a terrific, witty, but also slightly scary image of one of the most creative and innovative musicians of the last century, together with some handwritten advice aimed at musicians he's playing with.  I think some of these guidelines have relevance in much more general contexts too.

For me they have great resonance, as I am a very amateur and inexperienced keyboard player in a rather good pub band, which for me is an intense context of rather feverish learning!  The next step up for me is for a one verse solo in the middle of a standard Bluenote number such as Horace Silver's 'Song for my Father' to become something I can attempt without feeling I am doing a slalom without ski-poles down the steepest run at Val d'Isere.

The assumption in Thelonius's notes that everyone is learning, even if they are good enough to play in his band, and that this is a collaborative process taking place as a result of doing the job itself, is very encouraging for novices like me....

At the last gig I managed to survive at the bottom of two solos, hot, breathless and excited - and as Marcus encouragingly pointed out, that's more than the number of goals scored by Rooney in the World Cup!

 

Thanks to Perse for these gems, and for his excellent and formative leadership!

Cultivating and developing intuitive decision-making in teaching

I have to admit that throughout most of my career my ideas about, and practice in, effective teaching have been relatively incoherent and intuitively arrived at, rather than the products of careful and analytical thought. According to Yvonne Hillier (1998) this is common even amongst the most experienced and well-trained of teachers.


At the same time, I don't subscribe to the view that deliberate reflective practice is at the opposite end of the spectrum from intuition: I firmly believe that valuable insights can be gained from both rational thinking and from inspiration, and that in principle it is valuable for professionals in any practice to be receptive to insights that come unexpectedly, unplanned, and from unlikely sources, as much as those that are the product of rational processes of deliberation and analysis. I posted a couple of months ago about the value of deliberately going off piste and 'seeing what happens', and this view connects closely with the idea that effective teaching is not necessarily a neat and tidy business (Derrick 2010).


The tension between these different modes of apprehension has often been polarised into antagonistic and supposedly irreconcilable approaches to the practice of teaching (and indeed practice in other domains): I believe rather that these modes of thought should be seen as complementary, and that teachers need to be able to negotiate a balanced track between the two to be really effective.

Highly relevant to this suggestion is Daniel Kahneman's brilliant survey (2011) of psychological research studies into the way we make decisions: It is as if, he argues, that there are two ways in which we make decisions, which he calls Systems 1 and 2.



System 1 is very quick, in fact more or less involuntary. It utilises what might be called ‘intuition’:


We have all heard….stories of expert intuition: the chess master who walks past a street game and announces “White mates in three” without stopping, or the physician who makes a complex diagnosis after a single glance at a patient. Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day.... Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvellous that the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician – only more common. The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic….Valid intuitions develop when experts have learned to recognise familiar elements in a new situation and to act in a manner that is appropriate to it. (Kahneman p11)


System 2 thinking, on the other hand is slow, requires motivation and effort, and uses what we might call ‘rationality’. We use these different systems in different circumstances, confronted with different types of problem. We prefer to use System 1, which evolved as a survival mechanism, and with which we make very quick decisions based on the continually developing capacity for correct intuitive judgements which we have developed throughout the whole of our past lives. Of course these decisions may sometimes be wrong, but in familiar situations System 1 decision-making has evolved to be accurate most of the time, and as a result it takes a great deal of conscious effort to go against what it tells us.


System 2 is used for problems that clearly do not require an immediate solution, and/or which demand that we follow a procedural algorithm in order to solve them, such as a complicated long-multiplication sum. Kahneman argues that we only use System 2 reluctantly, when we have to, because it takes effort and energy, whereas System 1 thinking is effortless and easy. System 1 decision-making is more likely to be accurate the more familiar we are with the situation we are in; it can work astonishingly well in such familiar situations, even if the problems involved are very complex, indeed too complex to be easily solved by the use of System 2 heuristics and algorithms.




This research-based psychological typology of our decision-making capacity is strikingly reminiscent of Donald Schön’s well-known theoretical distinction between reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action (1983). The key issue for practitioner learning, therefore, given the need for expertise in tackling both well-defined ‘high ground’ problems and complex, ill-defined, ‘swampy’ problems, is how best to develop and improve ‘reflection-in-action’ or System 1. For a new idea to contribute to changed System 1 decision-making, according to Kahneman, and in different terminology, to Schön, the practitioner has to 'practice' using it, reflect on this practice consciously and probably collaboratively (System 2 activity), and repeat this many times over a long period. 'The accurate intuitions of experts are better explained by the effects of prolonged practice than by heuristics' (Kahneman 2011, p 11): there are no short cuts, no quick intellectual fixes or magic bullets, in shaping our intuitive capacities.



This System 2 work of developing System 1, essential to practitioner learning, is difficult, both to carry out and to reflect on: it takes a great deal of conscious effort because it involves a decision to engage in practice in a different way from that informed by our System 1 thinking. This demanding process is one way to imagine that practitioners might strive to enhance their intuitive capacity for ‘divergent thinking’, cited by Schön as an essential capacity for tackling ‘swampy’ problems. Such careful, effortful, disciplined and probably repetitive practice over time does lead to changes in patterning and routines in relation to our work, which gradually influence changes in our intuitive responses to it, and so to our intuitive judgements and actions. What is needed as part of practitioner learning, therefore, is to support a deliberate process of learning that mimics the way our intuitive decision-making capacities have unconsciously and continuously developed and evolved, since we used them to save ourselves from being eaten by lions on the plains of Africa millennia ago.


Derrick J (2010): ‘The messiness of real teaching and learning’, in J. Derrick, U. Howard, J. Field, P. Lavender, S. Meyer, E.N. von Rein, and T. Schuller (Eds), Remaking Adult Learning: Essays on adult education in honour of Alan Tuckett. London: Institute of Education.
Hillier Y (1998): Informal practitioner theory: eliciting the implicit.  Studies in the Education of Adults, 30 (1) 35-52
Kahneman D (2011): Thinking, fast and slow. London: Allen Lane
Schon D (1983): The reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action.  Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd

Creativity and leadership: Jerry Dammers' Spatial AKA Orchestra

I went to see this wonderful band last week.  It was an absolutely brilliant concert: surprising, stimulating, awe-inspiring, tender, funny, and above all musical: it made me think again about tunes I thought I knew, and introduced me to wonderful songs new to me (in particular Blue Pepper by Duke Ellington, and I'll wait for you by Sun Ra).  The band consists of...wait for it....27 musicians (or thereabouts - there were also a number of mannequins positioned in and around the band, some of them apparently playing instruments, which made counting people difficult!): 9 brass and woodwind, 5 strings, 3 guitars, 2 keyboards, 4 drums, percussion and vibes, and 4 singers.  The music was eclectic (an overused word I know but absolutely precise in this case), encompassing Captain Beefheart, 'Library Music' (not sure what this is), Ellington, Coltrane, a reworked and even more doom-laden Ghost Town by the original Specials, cheerful ska classics, Edgar Broughton, Johnny Clarke, Dvorak, In the Bleak Midwinter, and especially the music of Sun Ra, pioneer and promoter of black consciousness and interplanetary travel, spiritual mentor and forerunner of George Clinton and Funkadelic.  Spatial AKA, like the Sun Ra orchestra, were kitted out in glittery and vaguely Egyptian robes, hairpieces, sunglasses and/or masks, arrived on stage piecemeal from amongst the audience, while making a collective sound like a gathering storm of didgeridoos (one instrument unaccountably absent from the proceedings).  They played continuously for three hours, and then for another half an hour out in the lobby as everyone was leaving!

Visually, the movements of the band members and their costumes were augmented by a strange set involving already mentioned mannequins, three of which were painted silver and suspended above the band as if flying, along with what I gradually realised was a small lunar module about to crash to earth.  Behind the band was a continuously changing and layered projection of slides, videos, and psychedelic lightshow, the like of which I haven't seen for years: it took me happily back to New Riders of the Purple Sage at Surrey University in about 1972!  But this backdrop wasn't just for decoration, it imparted a powerful cultural and political flavour to the music, so that even though there were almost no overt political statements or references during the set, the whole experiene was flavoured with a clear enough set of political messages and affiliations.

There were so many terrific musical and visual moments: Alcyona Mick playing whirlwind piano solos while apparently motionless, a kettle drum solo involving continuous de-tuning and retuning of the drums during the solo, wonderful ensemble arrangements and solos amongst the brass, woodwind and strings sections, complex textures added by percussion and vibes, and poetry and scat singing as well as a joyous impersonation of the late great Captain Beefheart by Edgar Broughton, himself something of a legend in his own lunchtime for those of us of a certain age, singing Frownland from Trout Mask Replica.  Johnny Clarke, the great Jamaican reggae singer, came on like a cheerful psychedelic Santa Claus, all in yellow and with locks reaching down to his calves!  For me the single best moment was Francine Luce singing Sun Ra's I'll wait for you, in memory of her father.  The band's website has a few short clips of music, and there are more on Youtube, but don't let anything stop you from seeing them live if you can.

Why am I writing about the Spatial AKA Orchestra here, in a blog focussed mainly on education?  Well, the sheer size of the band got me thinking about the kind of organisation needed to put a concert like this together, and this led on to a perennial topic of thought and conversation with me: the qualities needed by the people who run such enterprises.  I'd love to talk to Jerry Dammers about this: his must be an incredibly complex and difficult job.  He is thought of as a song-writer and arranger, but he's obviously much more than that.  The economics of big bands can't be easy: many, if not all, of the individual members of the Spatial AKA are absolutely at the top of the tree in their various specialisms, and they all need to make a living.  I read somewhere that Miles Davis's legendary Birth of the Cool septet only existed long enough to make a  single record, and didn't play any gigs, because even with only seven they couldn't earn enough in New York in the late 40s.  Ellington and Basie managed it somehow, but for them it may have been easier because popular musical taste demanded large dance bands, at least during some periods; that is hardly the situation in 2011.  Captain Beefheart's uncompromising vision led him, allegedly, to shut his band up for a year to practice, hardly feeding them anything, let alone paying them, until they were note-perfect on Trout Mask Replica.   The band-leader's job, apart from choosing and arranging songs (for 27 parts!), includes all the organisational issues of publicity and marketing, negotiating and agreeing contracts with concert halls and promoters, travel and accommodation (for 27!), and then, most interestingly of all, the people-management issues within the band itself.  There must be so many potential headaches among such a large group of creative people!  Is Jerry an Arsene Wenger, an Alex Ferguson, or an ashen-faced Ron Knee?  His musical arrangements depend for their success on the skills of all the individuals playing them: suppose some of them aren't so enthusiastic about them?  This is analogous to footballers having to play within the tactical system designed by their manager: we know all too well how easily confidence of the manager in the player's capability, or of the player in the manager's system, can be broken down - similar issues must arise in big bands too.

All of this points to the fact that an enterprise like the Spatial AKA Orchestra is no trivial project, and this makes me marvel all the more at last week's gig: it was a triumph not just of musical creation and re-creation, but of leadership and organisation too.  Each depends on the other.  Thanks to everyone involved!

Professional learning by deliberately cultivating the unexpected

“He that confines himself to one book at a time, may be amused, but is no student.  In order to study, I must sit in some measure in the middle of a library.”

William Godwin, The Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany, Vol 81, 1818

I take this to suggest that 'students' need to do more than focus on and work directly at the subject of their studies; they must enrich this direct approach with other ideas, stimuli, experiences, so as to allow and encourage surprises, unexpected insights; in short, serendipity.  This might be boringly described as 'reading around your subject', but I think Godwin means something much more than that: something more like Rimbaud's 'systematic derangement of the senses', so as to try to be jolted out of one's preconceptions. 

I am pleased with this idea, as it aligns well with something I wrote recently about the messiness of real teaching and learning (Derrick 2010):

In the dominant model of public sector professionalism today, accidents are seen as prima facie evidence of failure: if unexpected events do occur, it must be due to inadequate preparation or human error. This view of practice assumes that in principle the job and skills of a teacher, social worker, parent, etc, can be defined in detail, without ambiguity, and therefore codified precisely. Regulation and quality assurance of these roles, it follows, is a straightforward process of checking that there is no variation from the code. The training of such professionals is also seen as straightforward, based on a well-defined, unproblematic body of knowledge and an accompanying skill-set that hardly changes over time. This positivist view of practice derives from a positivist view of learning, in some versions almost identical to behaviourism, in which the individual learner is seen as a passive recipient of pre-defined knowledge and skills, which are acquired usually through processes of memorisation and repetitive practice....

There is little room in the positivist view of practice for the idea of teaching as an art, or as a craft, something honed and fashioned over time in the context of a ‘community of practice’, and which takes for granted that changing circumstances and new learners will produce new problems for the teacher, who therefore needs the capacity to respond to new and unexpected situations.  Recent research shows clearly that teachers need to be ready at times to abandon their detailed plans and ‘go with the teachable moment’, not just as a response to difficult situations, but as an optimal strategy when things are anyway going well. Nor can the positivist view encompass the idea of the learning process as active, combining research, creation and re-creation by groups as well as by individuals, with a range of possible outcomes and wider benefits at the level of the individual learner, the group, the community and society in general . It does emphasise the role of the learner in choosing programmes of learning to enrol on, just as a shopper chooses products from the shelves of a supermarket, but this can only be equated with active learning from a reductionist, behaviourist viewpoint....[This] echoes Donald Schön’s famous distinction between different types of professional problem:
In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is the swampy lowland where situations are confusing ‘messes’ incapable of technical solution. The difficulty is that problems of high ground, however great their technical interest, are often relatively unimportant to clients or the larger society, while in the swamp are the problems of the greatest human concern.  (Schön 1983)
This view suggests that a crudely positivist philosophy and policy of learning, teaching, and teacher development, whatever its intentions, will be damaging both to society and to individuals. In particular, it will lead to deskilling: it nurtures in professionals a passive, bureaucratic and parochial version of their work, which over time leads to diminishing interest in, curiosity about, and capacity to deal with unexpected situations, or even to imagine crisis scenarios so as to prepare for them. Specifically it leads to diminution in preparedness and of the capacity to make judgements about the best course of action in the difficult, complex situations to be found in classrooms everywhere.
Richard Sennett (1970) argues that everyone needs to experience living and coping with the uncertain and the unfamiliar, of managing and dealing with life in complex and unpredictable situations without being in control of them, in order to reach full psychological maturity. If state-supported education seeks to eliminate the uncertain, the debatable, the unexpected, he suggests that it is condemning people to a kind of passive and frustrating adolescence, whatever their biological age.
Avoiding these problems, and harvesting the full potential of learners and teachers to enrich their practice for the economic, social and cultural benefit of society in general, will mean taking a quite different approach to learning in general, and following its implications through in terms of curriculum, the organisation, funding and accountability systems for state-supported learning, and of course to the formation and ongoing development of teachers.
References:

Derrick J (2010) The messiness of real teaching and learning, in Derrick J, Howard U, Field J, Lavender P, Meyer S, von Rein EN, and Schuller T (eds, 2010) Remaking Adult Learning: Essays on adult education in honour of Alan Tuckett.  London: Institute of Education

Schön D (1983) The reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action. London: Maurice Temple Smith
Sennett R (1970 - 2008 edition) The uses of disorder – personal identity and city life. New Haven and London: Yale University Press

Improvisation

'There are days when no one should rely unduly on his 'competence'. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.'
Walter Benjamin, in One Way Street.