1.0 Introduction
This book shares a range of excellent lesson ideas to help you guide your students through the ālearning pit.ā Here you will find guidance for setting up and running lessons around topics as thought provoking as exploration, language, fairness, time, and friendship. Each lesson has a set of resources to use with your students as well as recommended activities to make progress from first thoughts to deep understanding. The resources for each activity can be found on our companion website: http://resources.corwin.com/learningchallengelessons.
To make the most of each lesson idea in this book, we recommend that you also read the following books:
The Learning Challenge
The Learning Challenge (Nottingham, 2017) describes the theory and practice of guiding students through the learning pit. It covers everything from background to rationale, from establishing a learning culture to techniques for challenging, motivating, and guiding students from surface level knowledge to deeper understanding. It shows how contradictions and uncertainties can be used to think more deeply and how being āin the pitā makes learning more rigorous and engaging.
Challenging Learning Through Dialogue
Challenging Learning Through Dialogue (Nottingham, Nottingham, & Renton, 2017) shares some of the best strategies for using dialogue to enhance learning. It includes examples of the strategies used in the lessons within this book and Philosophy for Children (P4C) techniques to help students learn how to think, how to be reasonable, how to make moral decisions, and how to understand another personās point of view.
These two books will give you a deeper insight into how to use the lesson ideas in this book more effectively. The main sections to read before trying out any of the lesson ideas in this book include the following:
The Learning Challenge
- An introduction to the Learning Challenge: Chapter 1
- Values and ground rules for engaging students: Sections 3.1, 3.2, and 3.4
- Identifying concepts: Sections 4.2, 4.2.1, and 4.3
- Creating and selecting questions: Sections 4.4 and 4.5
- Generating cognitive conflict: Chapter 5
- Constructing answers and the eureka moment: Sections 6.1, 6.4, and 6.5
- Reviewing and metacognition techniques: Sections 7.1 and 7.2
Challenging Learning Through Dialogue
- The difference between dialogue and discussion: Sections 2.0 and 2.6
- Creating the right environment for dialogue: Sections 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3
- Using dialogue to develop reasoning and reasonableness: Chapter 4
- Groupings and ground rules: Chapter 5
- Opinion Lines and Opinion Corners: Sections 7.2 and 7.3
- How to run a Mystery: Sections 8.1, 8.2, 8.4, and 8.6
- Philosophy for Children (P4C): Sections 11.1, 11.2, and 11.4
Once you have read these sections, you will be in a much better position to make the most of the lesson ideas in this book. For now, though, here are some brief notes to get you started.
1.1 The Learning Challenge
James Nottingham created the Learning Challenge in 2003 as a way to help his students think and talk about learning. It is rather like a child-friendly representation of Lev Vygotskyās (1978) zone of proximal development, which describes the move from actual to potential understanding. Since its inception, the Learning Challenge has captured the imagination of educators, students, and their parents. It has been featured in many periodicals, articles, and books, and it now appears on classroom walls around the world.
The Learning Challenge promotes challenge, dialogue, and a growth mindset. It offers participants the opportunity to think and talk about their own learning. It encourages a depth of inquiry that moves learners from surface level knowledge to deep understanding. It encourages an exploration of causation and impact; an interpretation and comparison of meaning; a classification and sequencing of detail; and a recognition and analysis of pattern. It builds learnersā resilience, determination, and curiosity. And it nurtures a love of learning.
At the heart of the Learning Challenge is the pit. A person could be said to be in the pit when they are in a state of cognitive conflictāthat is to say when a person has two or more ideas that make sense to them but when compared side by side they appear to be in conflict with each other. Each of the lesson plans in this book is designed to create that exact situation so that your students need to think more deeply about the topic.
Here are some examples of the sort of cognitive conflicts you will find in this book:
- We are all responsible for our own actions, but sometimes we act because we are following orders or instructions from others (Lesson 3: Who Was Responsible for Sam Ending Up in the Hospital?).
- You canāt stop the clock or change time, but you can make time for things (Lesson 7: Got the Time?).
- If we throw something away it is garbage, but if someone else reuses it then it is not garbage (Lesson 9: What Is Garbage?).
- Social media builds my self-esteem because I feel good when people like my posts, but social media can damage your self-esteem because it can make you feel bad when people do not like your posts or make negative comments about them (Lesson 11: Should Theon Post That?).
- Fairness is about following the rules, but sometimes the rules arenāt fair (Lesson 12: Was Willy Wonka Fair?).
When your students think through these or other examples of cognitive conflict then they will find themselves in the pit.
It is important to note that learners are not in the pit when they have no idea. The pit represents moving beyond a single, basic idea into the situation of having multiple ideas that are as yet unsorted. This happens when a learner purposefully explores inconsistencies, exceptions, and contradictions in their own or othersā thinking so as to discover a richer, more complex understanding. That is why each of the lesson ideas aims to get participants out of their comfort zone. This is a deliberate and strategic objective. It is neither incidental nor casual. It is not something that happens parenthetically. The very purpose of the lessons is to get your students into the pit (and back out again)!
To achieve this, we recommend that you use the four steps of the Learning Challenge. You donāt have to include all of these steps in just one lesson and, indeed, you may not be able to because of time. We have included recommendations for each stage, but we have not said how you might time each step. For example, you might wish to set the scene and cover Stage 1 before the lesson, and you might like to invite your students to complete Stage 4 at a later dateāperhaps for homework or within informal small-group extension activities. It really is up to you! Nothing is set in stoneāwhich is why we have put them forward as lesson ideas rather than lesson plans.
The four steps of the Learning Challenge are as follows (see Figure 1.1):
Figure 1.1: The Learning Challenge
Stage 1: Concept
The lesson activities begin by familiarizing your students with the underlying concepts. It is not necessary for all participants to understand all the concepts. So long as some of your students have some understanding of one or more of the concepts, and then the lesson activities should work well.
Stage 2: Conflict
The next stage is to create some cognitive conflict around one or more of the concepts. The recommended questions associated with each lesson plan should help you achieve thisāas should the structured activities. Remember that the key to the Learning Challenge is to get your students into the pit by creating cognitive conflict in their minds. This deliberate creation of a dilemma is what makes the Learning Challenge such a good model for challenge and inquiry as well as reasoning and reasonableness; it is also precisely what each of the lesson ideas is designed to achieve.
Stage 3: Construct
After exploring the concepts for a while (and weāre being purposefully ambiguous by saying āfor a whileā because it depends on context), your students will begin to make links and construct meaning. They will do this by examining options, connecting ideas together, and explaining cause and effect. Often (though not always) this leads them to a sense of āeurekaā in which they find new clarity. Each lesson idea includes some recommended activities to help them reach this eureka moment by āclimbing out of the pit.ā
Stage 4: Consider
After achieving a sense of eureka, your students should reflect on their learning journey. They can do this by considering how they progressed from simplistic ideas (Stage 1), to the identification of more complex and conflicting ideas (Stage 2), to a deeper understanding of how all these ideas interrelate to each other (Stage 3). Now at Stage 4, they can think about the best ways to relate and apply their new understanding to different contexts.
1.2 Learning Intentions
The intended outcomes of the lesson ideas in this book are to help your students develop the following personal habits, abilities, and attitudes:
- An inquiring outlook coupled with an ability to articulate problems
- A tendency to be intellectually proactive and persistent
- A capacity for imaginative and adventurous thinking
- A habit of exploring alternative possibilities
- An ability to critically examine issues
- A capacity for sound, independent judgment
The lesson ideas also aim to help your students develop social habits and dispositions such as the following:
- Actively listening to others and trying to understand their viewpoints
- Giving reasons for what you say and expecting the same of others
- Exploring disagreements reasonably
- Being generally cooperative and constructive
- Being socially communicative and inclusive
- Taking other peopleās feelings and concerns into account
Each of these can be achieved through the type of high-quality dialogue that the lesson ideas in this book are intended to generate.
