From the Head of School

 

Thinking about Thinking

I thought I had left jigsaws behind in the sick days of my childhood, but, options narrowed by lockdown, I bought a 1000 piece ‘Sherlock Holmes’ London’ puzzle for the February holiday. 

My wife offered to help me, but she did not grow up with jigsaws and immediately started to pick up random pieces, carefully comparing them to the picture on the box, and then rooting around for other pieces in the hopes they would match.

She lasted 10 minutes before giving up.  For the good of our marriage, I recommended an interesting novel instead.

There is a method to jigsaws.  If you don’t know it, the thousand pieces are a chaotic jumble of colours and random shapes, which, however intelligent you are, would take a month of Sundays to put together in the right order.  If you do know it, you can apply it to any jigsaw whatever the picture.  It is a transferable skill.

Just as jigsaws have infinite possibilities, the problems we face in the real word are unpredictable and fast changing. It is no good learning to solve one set of problems, only to graduate and find circumstances throwing entirely new ones at you.  There are lots of useful things to learn at school, but learning how to learn - that is how to approach novel situations, is easily the most useful of them all.  

Last month, Isabelle Wolfe, our French teacher, published this article about how computational thinking can be used in language learning. She points out that a method used to teach programming languages, can be used for human languages, as well as other subjects.  In fact, she is part of a group of ISA teachers who put out a monthly podcast to colleagues on how to apply these thinking skills to their subjects.  

International education has always been at the forefront of teaching ‘metacognition’ (thinking about thinking) - we have had to cope with our students returning to many different contexts.  In the IB Diploma, metacognition is formally recognised through the compulsory subject of Theory of Knowledge, in which students are encouraged to go beyond asking what scientists, linguists, historians, artists and mathematicians think to how they think; how they approach problems and how they express ideas.  But it is something we encourage right through the school. 

We have all had to adapt during the pandemic, but the need to adapt won’t end with the last vaccine, and the upcoming generation will have bigger problems to solve than jigsaws, a more infinite jumble. I am sure ISA graduates will be at the forefront.