Modelling the ICHK StudentIntroducing the 5 Strands + 1 Model

Neil Gershenfeld, Physicist, MITTaken from This will make you smarter ed. John Brockman, New York 2012

“The most common misunderstanding about science is that scientists seek and find truth. They don’t – they make and test models.

Building models is very different from proclaiming truths. It’s a never ending process of discovery and refinement, not a war to win or a destination to reach.

Making sense of anything means making models that can predict outcomes and accommodate observations. Truth is a model.”

Modelling the ICHK Student

Depth & Complexity

Depth & Complexity

Carol Dweck: Mindsets

• Fixed Mindset: Intelligence/ability is a fixed or stable trait, and unevenly distributed among individuals

• You-either-have-it-or-you-don’t and “it” can be accurately judged by others and “it” can’t be improved or increased much

• Student’s goal: to perform well and look smart, even if sacrificing learning (since negative evaluations are signs that I am not smart enough to succeed and there’s only a fixed amount of smartness).

Carol Dweck: Mindsets

• Growth Mindset: Belief is that intelligence/ability consists of an ever expanding repertoire of skills and knowledge that can be increased through effort and figuring out successful strategies

• Ability is time and task specific and is developed through study and practice — effort is all

• Student goal: not to look smart but to be smart by increasing their skill/knowledge levels.

Vygotsky: Learning Zone

• Comfort Zone vs. Zone of Proximal Development

Vygotsky: Learning Zone

Erickson: Psychosocial stage• Erikson’s theory describes

eight stages through which a person will pass from infancy to late adulthood. In each stage, she will confront new challenges: a choice between two ‘existential’ orientations.

• For better or worse, each successive stage builds on the experiences of those that have gone before. Unsuccessful responses to challenges at each stage may be expected to reappear as problems in the future.

Erickson: Psychosocial stage

• Children will tend to join secondary school deep into the 4th of Erikson’s stages: Competence – concerned with industry and inferiority. It is a dilemma summed up by the question: can I make it in the world of people and things?

• By year 9 or 10, we can expect students to be entering the 5th stage of their developmental journey: Fidelity – concerned with identity and role confusion. Here, the critical question is: who am I and what can I be?

Egan: Cognitive dispositions

• We can think of a child’s journey to adulthood as a slow climb through five different ecological zones.

• In each zone, children come to understand the world in different ways, each building on the kinds of understanding they have previously achieved.

Egan: Cognitive dispositions• Romantic Understanding helps us organize our

experience through an exploration of the extremes of experience and the limits of reality. It is the personifying or humanizing tendency. Allied to it is children’s growing realization of the complexity and strangeness of the world, and their own marginality within it.

• Philosophic Understanding coalesces with the investment in written language as a means of developing a systematic understanding of the world. The Philosophic mind focuses on the connections among things, seeing laws, theories, and larger purpose as tying together the previously disconnected phenomena and experiences. Generalization is central to Philosophic understanding: the search for new organizing principles to make sense of the multitude of experiences in the adolescent’s expanding horizons.

Berne: Interpersonal relations

• PAC model

• Scripts

• OK vs. Not OK

Berne: Interpersonal relations

Fixed mindset – I am this smart and can be no smarter, why bother to

try?

I am content to cruise and stay in my comfort zone

I have a sense of inferiority. I am confused about my identity

Work at school feels irrelevant and dull

All this leaves me feeling bad about myself and doubting others

Growth mindset – I will be as smart as I allow myself to be, so applying

myself is the critical factor

I enjoy being challenged and stretched

I value the the work I do. I know who I am and what I stand for

Work at school seems vital and appealing

All this leaves me feeling that life and other people are OK

Continuum of Adjustment