Category: Cognitive Science

Excerpts from Improving the Mind

I have finally received my copy of the following book, and spent an entirely enjoyable afternoon reading it from cover to cover. It is just as relevant now as it was in 1741, and the language use is sufficiently quaint to add an enticing quality to the text possibly above and beyond its original intent. I recommend the book highly.

Dr Isaac Watts, 1741, Improvement of the Mind
edited and abridged by Stephen B Helfant and J. David Coccoli, 1987,
Helfant Publishing House, Groton, Massachusetts
ISBN 0-942969-00-6

According to Dr Isaac Watts, there are five methods for “improving the mind”, each of which has its individual merits, but all of which should be integrated for best results. I have taken the liberty of transcribing a few paragraphs of the text to give a sense of the writing style, and to provide the basis for some further discussion and to provide the context for my further writings, since the book itself was hard to get hold of.

In this post, I’ve reproduced some basic content, and in future posts, I will comment further on what has been written.

1. Observation

“Observation is the notice we take of all occurrences … whether they are sensible or intellectual, whether relating to persons or things, to ourselves or others … All those things which we see, which we hear or feel, which we perceive by sense or consciousness, or which we know in a direct manner, with scarce any exercise of our reflecting faculties, or our reasoning powers, may be included under the general name of observation … When this observation relates to any thing that immediately concerns ourselves, and of which we are conscious, it may be called experience … When we are searching out the nature or properties of any being by various methods of trial … this sort of observation is called experiment … All these belong to the first method of knowledge: which I shall call observation”

2. Reading

“Reading is where we acquaint ourselves with what other men have written, or published to the world in their writings. These arts of reading and writing are of infinite advantage; for by them we are made partakers of the sentiments, observations, reasonings and improvements of all the learned world, in the most remote nations, and in former ages almost from the beginning of mankind.”

3. Lectures

“Public or private lectures are such verbal instructions as are given by a teacher while the learners attend in silence. This is the way of learning … philosophy … from the professor’s chair; or of mathematics, by a teacher shewing us various theorems or problems, i.e., speculations or practices by demonstration and operation, with all the instruments of that art necessary to those operations.”

4. Conversation

“Conversation is another method of improving our minds, wherein, by mutual discourse and inquiry, we learn the sentiments of others, as well as communicate our sentiments to others in the same manner … under this head of conversation we may also rank disputes of various kinds.”

5. Meditation

“Meditation or study includes all those exercises of the mind, whereby we render all the former methods useful for our increase in true knowledge and wisdom. It is by meditation we come to confirm our memory of things that pass through our thoughts in the occurrences of life, in our own experiences, and in the observations we make. It is by meditation that we draw various inferences, and establish in our minds general principles of knowledge. It is by meditation that we compare the various ideas which we derive from our senses, or from the operations of our souls, and join them in propositions. It is by meditation that we fix in our memory what we learn, and form our own judgement of the truth or falsehood, the strength or weakness, of what others speak and write. It is meditation … that draws out long chains of argument, and searches or finds deep and difficult truths which before lay concealed in darkness.”

Dr Watts goes on to compare and contrast the various methods of improving the mind, and some of his observations deserve re-examination in the modern context. His analysis is still very insightful today and I reproduce some snippets below.

“It would be a needless thing to prove, that our own solitary meditations, together with a few observations that the most part of mankind are capable of making, are not sufficient, of themselves, to lead us into the attainment of any considerable proportion of knowledge, at least in an age so much improved as ours is, without the assistance of conversation and reading, and other proper instructions that are to be attained in our days. Yet each of these methods have their peculiar advantages, whereby they assist each other, and their peculiar defects which have need to be supplied by the other’s assistance.”

Observation:

“(An) advantage of observation is, that we may gain knowledge all the day long … and every moment of our existences we may be adding something to our intellectual treasures. “

Reading:

“By reading, we acquaint ourselves, in a very extensive manner, with the affairs, actions, and thoughts of the living and the dead, in the most remote nations, and most distant ages, and that with as much ease as though they lived in our own age and nation. By reading books, we may learn something from all parts of mankind; whereas by observation we learn all from ourselves, and only what comes within our own direct cognizance. By conversation we can only enjoy the assistance of a few persons, viz., those who are near us, and live at the same time as we do, that is, our neighbours and contemporaries; but our knowledge is much more narrowed still, if we confine ourselves merely to our own solitary reasonings, without much observation or reading: for then all our improvement must arise only from our own inward powers and meditations … When we read good authors, we learn the best, the most laboured, the most refined sentiments, even of those wise and learned men; for they have studied hard, and have committed to writing their maturest thoughts, and the result of their long study and experience: whereas by conversation, and in some lectures, we obtain many times only the present thoughts of our tutors and friends, which (though they might be bright and useful) yet, at first perhaps, may be sudden and undigested, and are mere hints which have risen to no maturity … It is another advantage of reading, that we may review what we have read; we may consult the page again and again, and meditate on it, at successive seasons, in our serenest and retired hours, having the book always at hand: but what we obtain by conversation and in lectures, is oftentimes lost again as soon as the company breaks up, or at least when the day vanishes, unless we happen to have the talent of a good memory, or quickly retire and note down what remarkables we have found in those discourses. And for the same reason, for the want of retiring and writing, many a learned man has lost several useful meditations of his own, and could never recall them again.”

Lectures:

“There is something more sprightly, more delightful and entertaining in the living discourse of a wise, learned, and well-qualified teacher than there is in the silent and sedentary practice of reading … A tutor or instructor, when he paraphrases and explains other authors, can mark out the precise point of difficulty or controversy, and unfold it. He can shew you which paragraphs are of greatest importance, and which are of less moment … He can inform you what new doctrines or sentiments are arising in the world before they come to be public; as well as acquaint you with his own private thoughts, and his own experiments and observations, which never were, and perhaps never will be, published to the world, and yet may be very valuable and useful … A living instructor can convey to our senses those notions … which cannot so well be done by mere reading … He can describe figures and diagrams, point to lines and angles, and make out the demonstration in a more intelligible manner … even though we should have the same figures lying in a book before our eyes. A living teacher, therefore, is a most necessary help in these studies … When an instructor in his lectures delivers any matter of difficulty, or expresses himself in such a manner as seems obscure, so that you do not take up his ideas clearly or fully, you have opportunity at least when the lecture is finished, or at other proper seasons, to inquire how such a sentence should be understood, or how such a difficulty may be explained and removed. If there be permission given to free converse with the tutor, either in the midst of the lecture, or rather at the end of it, concerning any doubts or difficulties that occur to the hearer, this brings it nearer to conversation or discourse.”

Conversation:

“When we converse familiarly with a learned friend, we have his own help at hand to explain to us every word and sentiment that seems obscure in his discourse … we may propose our doubts and objections against his sentiments and have them solved and answered at once … difficulties we meet with in books, and in our private studies, may find relief by friendly conference … if we note down this difficulty when we read it, we may propose it to an ingenious correspondent when we see him; we may be relieved in a moment, and find the difficulty vanish: he beholds the object perhaps in a different view, sets it before us in quite another light, leads us at once to evidence and truth, and that with a delightful surprise …”

“Conversation calls out into light what has been lodged in all the recesses and secret chambers of the soul: by occasional hints and incidents it brings old useful notions into remembrance; it unfolds and displays the hidden treasures of knowledge with which reading, observation, and study had before furnished the mind. By mutual discourse, the soul is awakened and allured to bring forth its hoards of knowledge, and it learns how to render them most useful to mankind. A man of vast reading without conversation, is like a miser, who lives only to himself. In free and friendly conversation, our intellectual powers are more animated, and our spirits act with superior vigour in the quest and pursuit of unknown truths. There is a sharpness and sagacity of thought that attends conversation, beyond what we find when we are shut up reading and musing in our retirements. Our souls may be serene in solitude, but not sparkling, though perhaps we are employed in reading the works of the brightest writers. Often has it happened in free discourse, that new thoughts are strangely struck out, and the seeds of truth sparkle and blaze through the company, which in calm and silent reading would never have been excited. By conversation you will both give and receive this benefit; as flints when put into motion, and striking against each other, produce living fire on both sides which would never have arisen from the same hard materials in a state of rest.”

“A man who dwells all his days among books, may have amassed together a vast heap of notions; but he may be a mere scholar, which is a contemptible sort of character in the world. A hermit who has been shut up in his cell in a college, has contracted a sort of mould and rust upon his soul, and all his airs of behaviour have a certain awkwardness in them; but these awkward airs are worn away by degrees in company … The scholar now becomes a citizen or a gentlemen, a neighbour and a friend; he learns how to dress his sentiments in the fairest colours, as well as to set them in the strongest light. Thus he brings out his notions with honour; he makes some use of them in the world, and improves the theory by practice.”

“Mere observation, lectures, reading and conversation, without thinking, are not sufficient to make a man of knowledge and wisdom. It is our thought and reflection, study and meditation, that must attend all the other methods of improvement, and perfect them.“

Balance

“By a survey of these things we may justly conclude,

  • that he who spends all his time in hearing lectures, or poring upon books, without observation, meditation or … conversation, will have but a mere historical knowledge of learning, and be able only to tell what others have known or said on the subject
  • he that lets all his time flow away in conversation, without due observation, reading or study, will gain but a slight and superficial knowledge, which will be in danger of vanishing with the voice of the speaker
  • and he that confines himself merely to his closet, and his own narrow observation of things, and is taught only by his own solitary thoughts, without instruction by lectures, reading, or free conversation, will be in danger of a narrow spirit, a vain conceit of himself, and an unreasonable contempt of others

and after all, he will obtain but a limited and imperfect view and knowledge of things, and he will seldom learn how to make that knowledge useful.”

Conclusion

“These five methods of improvement should be pursued jointly, and go hand in hand, where our circumstances are so happy as to find opportunity and conveniency to enjoy them all: though I must give my opinion that two of them, viz., reading and meditation, should employ much more of our time than public lectures, or conversation and discourse. As for observation, we may always be acquiring knowledge that way, whether we are alone or be in company.”

Virtual environments and simulations

In order to understand appropriate use of technology in teaching, we need to understand which aspects of our curriculum are critical for which aspects of our future learning. For example, if general hand / eye coordination is transferable across tasks, do we need to agonise over detailed task-specific simulations for each task we want to learn? And if hand / eye coordination is transferable, do we need a few authentic, high fidelity simulations, or a broader range of generic simulations.

Let’s take a specific example of a visuo-motor task simulation using stereoscopic 3D vision and haptic (active touch) feedback from a hand-held probe. If haptic feedback is only helpful with the level of fidelity provided by a stereoscopic visual display, this implies that it is critical for the visuo-haptic feedback to be ecologically valid and temporally faithful, and for the task model to be authentic. If ecological validity and authenticity are not critical, the question must be asked as to which specific aspects of the simulation are important (rather than just “cool”)?

If active exploration of visuo-haptic-motor space versus passive presentation of sensory information is critical, then would it be enough to provide a 2D visual display and allow active exploration through joystick control? Does it depend on whether you are learning how to perform the specific task (where differential haptic feedback might be important) versus learning how to conceptualise the specific task (where joystick-controlled exploration might be enough)? Does the “analogue” continuous control provided by the joystick teach something different from the digital discrete-step control provided by keyboard controls? Would haptic feedback through specific sequences of pre-determined tasks (selected for cue salience) provide better learning outcomes than free exploration of the model space (which may not result in the student exposing themselves to relevant comparisons from which they can extract salient task cues)?

Research into haptic feedback is a perfectly reasonable undertaking, but is there enough evidence to suggest that one should invest in 3D VR models and haptic probes for real training and education situations? Not only does the haptic feedback need to have a demonstratable impact on learning outcomes, but the learning outcomes must be critical to the goals of teaching and financially supportable compared with other teaching strategies. For high fidelity visuo-haptic simulations to be financially viable, new task models would need to be able to be developed more cheaply and quickly than the active life of the simulation hardware, the haptic feedback itself would need to have made a significant contribution to the specific task learning outcomes, and the learning outcomes would have to be achieved more cheaply than by other available methods.

How do you test the learning outcomes? Is it in terms of specific skill acquisition? Should task-specific training also be generalisable to other similar tasks? In order to address these questions, there needs to be some theoretical understanding of the nature of the task and a clear articulation of task-critical features. Some differential learning situations (in presumed order of ecological validity) to think about for example in a surgical scenario are:

1) training on cadavers / animal models

2) training on 3D models with haptic feedback

3) training on 2D models with interactive exploration (joystick / keyboard control)

4) “yoked control” observation of surgery (real and simulated)

In considering differential learning outcomes, what framework of learning do we assume? Do we have measures which can provide critical data to distinguish between hypotheses? What would we consider to be evidence for improved outcomes between, for example, task 2 and task 3? Is task 1 the appropriate control condition, is it a test condition, and / or is actual surgical performance the only valid “test” of learning? Without a strong model for how haptic feedback enhances skill acquisition, it is difficult to provide a strong justification for the significant financial outlay in introducing VR + haptic feedback training solutions.

How do the issues raised for this specific simulation example pan out for other teaching paradigms? I contend that we need to be able to identify specific teaching and / or learning objectives and to take a position about how our practice brings about the achievement of those objectives. This necessarily entails a conceptualisation of what occurs during teaching and learning. It also requires some position on short-term versus long-term learning, specific skills versus task-specific knowledge versus discipline-area knowledge, and the metacognitive processing around these things.

Do we take a position that declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge are acquired differently? If so, what primary learning outcomes are desired – skill based or discipline based? How do we conceptualise the relationship between theoretical knowledge and practical skills deriving from that technical knowledge? I contend that without taking a position on these questions, we cannot make informed decisions about educational design. Furthermore, for practical skills, we can break down requirements with respect to domain knowledge about a domain versus metaknowledge and insight around aquiring domain-specific practical skills. Does evidence from the perceptual-motor learning area suggest different approaches to teaching dependent on the requirement for repetitive accuracy of well-defined motor skills in a well-defined environment, versus creative perceptuomotor response and adaptability for a defined outcome in a changeable environment? Do we need to incorporate redundancy in simulations to ensure exposure to multiple cues to increase the potential for adaptability in changeable environments or are we aiming to extract the essential, minimal cue set to perform a task to become extremely efficient? What are the implications for robustness, pattern recognition (synthesis / generalisation …) and rule extraction (analysis / abstraction …) of different forms of simulations?

(now also posted on my OLU blog)

Theory in educational technology

I have become increasingly frustrated with the literature on educational technology and online learning, in part because so often the connection between theory and practice in applied / action research seems to be entirely absent. I am not quite satisfied with research which claims to be situated within a “framework” rather than to be testing any specific hypothesis deriving from a theory or theoretical perspective. In research on how we use technology to enhance learning, I believe we need to have a plausible model of learning, a plausible model of teaching, and a clear articulation of the desired outcomes from our teaching practice. I would actually go further, and question whether we should be focussing more on teaching than learning, since it is the teaching side of the equation that we engage in, and over which we have some level of control. It does not seem appropriate especially in a university, to answer basic questions about the nature of teaching and learning with motherhood statements about “student-centered learning” and terminology which seems to derive more from political correctness than scholarly investigation.

The choice of whether we focus on teaching or learning alone seems to me to have theoretical implications which should follow through into our practice. For example, with a focus on (social constructivist / student-centred) learning, we are implicitly favouring inductive models through which students build on what they already know and follow their interests and strengths. With a focus on teaching, we are externalising domains of knowledge, setting learning objectives, and defining the things to be learned at the end of a course of study irrespective of the student’s individual knowledge base or interests. We need to be clear about our purpose and intent, because there are strong implications for practice, depending on which position we adopt.

So here are some questions that I believe deserve due consideration. When we engage in educational / instructional design, is it appropriate to consider teaching and learning without having a position on the nature of knowledge representation and epistemology? Is it appropriate to consider the effect of “learning styles” or interface design on learning without a good understanding of cognitive processing, perceptual processing, memory and attention? In taking account of learning styles, are we aiming to build all modes of learning for each individual (work on areas of weakness as well as, or in preference to areas of strength) or are we focussed on relative fairness in terms of assessment (allowing everyone to focus on their areas of strength and hide their weaknesses)?

In designing simulations or replacing practical classes with virtual projects, can you really consider or measure learning outcomes without a fairly comprehensive understanding of the whole process of learning? Which learning outcomes are relevant indicators of good teaching? Which learning outcomes are indicators of inherent student ability / skill? Are short-term learning outcomes or long-term learning outcomes the ones to focus on? Do our educational theories speak to which outcomes are relevant? Does our rhetoric on desired graduate attributes speak to what indicators should be important?

Convenience measures do not make for good science if they do not measure things relevant to a theoretical position. The fact that something has been measured does not substitute for a theory. Quantitative analyses and statistical differences between groups do not by themselves constitute good research if they are not theoretically grounded and do not form critical tests of specific hypotheses. The fact that a data set is compatible with a theoretical position is no great contribution to science if the same data set is compatible with a range of other theoretical positions, and a different data set from the same study would not have allowed rejection of any competing theories.

In thinking about theory in this area, I am repeatedly drawn to the position that educational technology research is not a discipline area by itself, but provides a potential context for data which speak to theoretical questions from core discipline areas such as cognitive science, social psychology and computer science. It is important for us to ensure that any research questions relate back to core discipline areas rather than building an entirely self-referential data set around a single piece of technology or learning design.

Leadership crisis

I don’t know of any research off the top of my head that would relate the changing age profile in our society to failure of leadership and I haven’t really looked very hard, but
here’s my line of thought:

– population demographics are such that we have an ageing population
– political / social leaders are now reaching leadership positions when they are older (cf age of famous political / military leaders in history …)
– because people are living longer (and because of the loss of a reasonable percentage the world war 2 generation of males ?), baby boomers reached leadership positions sooner, with less basis, and occupied them for longer

There is now a mismatch between peak of intellectual / motivational / creative force so that potential energy for leadership is lost and people develop wisdom and / or cynicism before they get an opportunity to practice energetic leadership.

In the emerging model in my head, the peak of focussed, driven intellectual energy maybe around the age of 30 to 35 … when potentially great people know enough to lead, but don’t know enough to have doubts.

Internet users quick to judge. 16/01/2006. ABC News Online

Internet users quick to judge. 16/01/2006. ABC News Online
“Visual appeal can be assessed within 50 milliseconds, suggesting that web designers have about 50 milliseconds to make a good impression,” the Canadians report in the journal Behaviour & Information Technology.

Given that users continue to view the large number of visually unappealing sites out there, maybe this research suggests that visual appeal can be assessed, but is not actually all that important to people accessing a site for information.

Using Blogs to Teach Philosophy

NOTES & IDEAS: Using Blogs to Teach Philosophy | Academic Commons
via Stephen Downes

Students taking their first philosophy course often express surprise when encouraged to use “I” in their papers. Unlike academic writing in most other disciplines, philosophical writing frequently and strongly states the “I” because philosophers have to develop and defend their own positions. They cannot weasel out of taking responsibility for their views, and thus the assertion of the “I” means that they are willing to stand or fall with their expressed position.

This is an interesting perspective – I always understood that the third person / passive voice of scientific writing was to indicate that the concept being expressed could stand alone by itself without the need for a personal appeal by me as its proponent. But the mood has drifted such that it has become more like parliamentary privilege – I am sufficiently removed from the concept that I don’t need to identify with it or suffer any discomfort or guilt-by-association if it is flawed.

Sinewave and coordination

Wow – I think I’m finally beginning to understand a bit about sine wave. Sure, I’ve got the basic bit about down-up-down and I’ve understood that sinewave is part of coordinated action so that within a technique, everything ends at the same time, but I hadn’t really considered the role of sinewave in coordinating with other people or coordinating sequences of movement.

Wow – I think I’m finally beginning to understand a bit about sine wave. Sure, I’ve got the basic bit about down-up-down and I’ve understood that sinewave is part of coordinated action so that within a technique, everything ends at the same time, but I hadn’t really considered the role of sinewave in coordinating with other people or coordinating sequences of movement.

When we spar, we are always encouraged to keep moving, to keep bouncing on the balls of our feet, and all good fighters in all forms of fighting keep moving even when they aren’t actually punching or kicking. Maybe it is obvious to everyone else, but I have only just realised that the bouncing is part of sinewave, and the rhythm provides an internal beat for planning and coordinating sequences of movements. More importantly, you can speed up or slow down the beat and still execute the same sequence of movements. When you are watching your opponent, you’re not only watching them with your eyes, but you are entraining the rhythm of your bouncing to the rhythm of their movements (ie you are mirroring their timing so that you know when they will be able to execute a technique). You can then set an appropriate phase lag between your sinewave and theirs so as to time your own techniques for when your opponent is unable to respond.

So when are they unable to respond? If you know by understanding your opponent’s rhythm when they are capable of executing a technique, whether or not they do, you can adjust your sinewave (bouncing) so that your techniques will only show themselves when your opponent is already committed to whatever they were going to execute (they have already selected a ballistic movement to a specific target) or they are not yet ready to attack (they have missed that wave of their own sinewave). You will have so much more time in “planning” because you have already encoded the relative timing information between their actions and yours into your own sinewave or bouncing rhythm.

Adjusting the frequency of your bouncing (your sinewave) to encode your opponent’s movement, and adjusting your own movements to fit into that rhythm also cuts down on planning. A jumping kick is no longer different in its premotor planning to the same technique on the ground – the jump is part of the sinewave, but the wave just goes a bit higher 🙂

So – the bit that started to fall into place was that bouncing (keeping moving) in sparring is not just random moving, and not just keeping a rhythm for yourself, but it is a part of a “conversation” with your opponent to keep the appropriate timing and phase relationship between your movements and theirs, so that you always have the advantage. If you are sparring with someone who understands this conversation, the trick is to be able to change the tempo to keep the advantage.

The reason that skipping is the preferred endurance training for fighters is also an obvious correlate of sinewave. The circular motion (sine wave is a circular function in mathematical terms) of the rope powered by your arms ensures that you have to entrain your arm movements to you leg movements and you have to jump. The cyclical visual cues of the rope are also being entrained so that you can start to associate visual information with motor information. The “conversational” aspect of skipping – the entrainment to the visual cue – can be seen when someone else turns the rope. If you watch kids run in to skip in an already turning skipping rope, they move their arms or bodies up and down for a few cycles to get the rhythm of the motion. There is an easy side and a hard side to run into because on one side, there is room for error (the rope is coming down so you can duck) whereas on the other side, the rope is going up so there is no room for error.

Continuous Partial Attention

We suffer from the illusion, says Stone, that we can expand our personal bandwidth, connecting to ever more. Instead, we end up overstimulated, overwhelmed and unfulfilled. Continuous partial attention inevitably feels like a lack of full attention.”

These concepts of “continuous partial attention” and of expanding personal bandwidth are good ones to explore in the learning domain – but it might also be instructive to look back at parallels in earlier times …

cited in Meanwhile: A tale of snail mail – Editorials & Commentary – International Herald Tribune

“Linda Stone, a former Microsoft techie, characterizes ours as an era of “continuous partial attention.” At the extreme end are teenagers instant-messaging while they talk on the cellphone, download music and do homework. But adults too live with all systems go, interrupted and distracted, scanning everything, multi-technological-tasking everywhere.

We suffer from the illusion, says Stone, that we can expand our personal bandwidth, connecting to ever more. Instead, we end up overstimulated, overwhelmed and unfulfilled. Continuous partial attention inevitably feels like a lack of full attention.”

These concepts of “continuous partial attention” and of expanding personal bandwidth are good ones to explore in the learning domain – but it might also be instructive to look back at parallels in earlier times – surely the multi-tasking capabilities of a traditional housewife (simultaeously cooking, washing, child-minding, talking to the neighbours etc) is at least at the same level of attentional complexity, as is the cognitive load of driving a carload of passengers, or of playing / coaching many team sports. I wonder whether the initially compelling idea of a problem with increased attentional load from new communications technology is an artefact of the shift in attentional focus required by adults using such technology. Adults are so used to applying continuous partial attention in other domains that they only become aware of attentional load when they have to retrain their attentional habits to different cues.

The notion of “expand(ing) personal bandwidth” is also one that is initially compelling but in the end as Stone asserts, probably illusory. I suspect that personal bandwidth is a limited capacity and that while communications technology may expand the pool of connections available to us in both temporal and spatial domains, it does not expand the communications bandwidth for sustaining meaningful communication. Our communications horizons may be expanded, but our attentional capacity is still limited in focus.

Manuals and Curriculum

Hmmm – I’m getting to wonder whether I should be writing this in my taekwon-do blog or my work-related edublog but since the thought processes and content have come directly from interactions with my taekwon-do Instructor and fellow students, it really should go here.

Because my background is in academia, particularly in cognitive neuroscience and, for want of a better term, “educational design / pedagogy”, I have been encouraging my Instructor to provide more written materials for students to “study” at home to reinforce what they learn in class. Being an older student and academic by nature, I needed to see most things written down in order to understand them and practice them, and I found many interesting resources on the web. Fairly early on, I bought the Condensed Encyclopedia, and it was an excellent investment. Also, being a parent of a child learning taekwon-do, I wanted to be able to “help” my child practice and study correctly, on the assumption that my child would not be concentrating and therefore would miss half of what was said in class, and would practise the wrong things if he practised at all.

We have a pretty clearly set out grading manual, which explains what we need to know for each belt level, but it doesn’t have the intimate details of each pattern, nor does it have details on each technique. For that level of detail, we are encouraged to buy the Encyclopedia. When I think back to how I dealt with the lack of detailed written information that I felt I needed to help my son get the best out of taekwon-do classes, I had two approaches.

1) I attended the classes too so I could listen and learn and know what he had to practise.

2) Before I bought the encyclopedia, I put together my own set of notes from the web to support what I was learning in class, and to break down the higher level things into the level of detail I thought I needed.

What I am beginning to see more clearly now that I am assisting with classes for young children in a school environment, and my own child is older and self-directed in his learning and practice, is the bigger picture with respect to listening, learning and practice. These are things I know theoretically, but have not really carried through to the practical stage. (If you don’t want to read the longer version, the bottom line is that the kids need to want to learn themselves, not because their parents want them to. And if they want to learn, they need to know to listen and practice themselves, not have their parents do it by proxy. If they don’t want to learn, perhaps we need to look at what we model for them as parents, rather than what we actually tell them to do.)

1) The parents of some of the children want to have notes from the classes so they can help their kids practise at home. This is a good motive.

2) They want their kids to practise because they see their kids “falling behind” their classmates. This is where it becomes interesting … the kids don’t like other kids getting better than them, especially when some of the other kids are physically less naturally talented. Parents also don’t want their kid to “fall behind” even though they want them to learn “at their own pace”. Everyone wants to be the best at everything (good – although maybe I mean “do their best” rather than “be the best” …) without necessarily wanting to do the work that goes with it (bad).

3) If the kids do extra practice at home, they will perform better in class and they will “do better” and move up the line and then feel better about themselves. We probably all agree they will perform their movements better, but they will only feel better about themselves if they care about their taekwon-do movements (good) or if position in the line is important to them (bad if they don’t care about taekwon-do per se).

So although we agree that as a general rule practice is good, we probably also agree that the way to learn is to listen carefully to the Instructor in class. And we want them to learn to listen and concentrate. And we want them to do it at their own pace and not to feel pressure to keep up with anyone else, but to always try to better themselves. At least that’s what we say …

But when they are not ready to do it themselves, we want to take the short-cuts on their behalf and do it for them so they never have to feel the frustration of not knowing something when some of their peers do know it. We are very concerned that if our kids “fall behind” everyone else, that they will feel bad and not want to keep going. And undoubtedly, our kids are perfectly aware of our anxiety and disappointment on their behalf and it is actually us as parents that reinforce the idea that, if “their own pace” is a bit slower than that of their age-group peers in something, they are duds.

If we have notes on what the kids need to learn, there is another risk that I am only just understanding in this different domain although it is one of my major hobby horses in academia. When we list the things for assessment, or some specific things people “need to know”, they become focussed on learning those things, rather than seeing them as representative of the type of knowledge expected of someone at a particular level in a discipline. And we then fixate on specific things that “prove” our achievement rather than on being rounded martial artists.

And sometimes we focus on special tricks that will let us perform better on specific tasks but will not improve us in the discipline itself. And from outside of the discipline, we might see better ways of teaching the things that will be assessed to improve test performance, without understanding the bigger picture of how to learn the whole martial art. We become instant experts in how to do something despite only have the limited view of the children we know trying to learn something we don’t know ourselves.

So where am I going with this?

I have realised a few things.

1) I started taekwon-do to help my son make the most of it, and to make sure it was the sort of martial arts environment I was happy for him to be in.

2) I immersed myself in taekwon-do because after listening to my Instructor and reading the web and the Encyclopedia, I was hooked and *I* wanted to learn it myself.

When I practised (myself because I wanted to practise), quite often my son would practise too. When I left taekwon-do related material lying around on the coffee table, my son would read it and study it. Yet if I ever asked him to practise or to study something for a grading, he would point-blank refuse – kids don’t like being told to do stuff especially if thtey are told it is “good for them”. But they are naturally curious and competitive.

3) I advanced more quickly through the belts than my son because I listened to the Instructor and I practised a lot. My son would have stopped lessons mid way through (around blue belt) if I had let him – our deal was he would do it for three years if he started it at all, and I held him to that. Towards the end of the three years, he was starting to enjoy it again for himself, not for me.

His practice and study are now unrelated to what I do, except that he knows that if he tries, he can do anything that I can do better than I can do it. But I’ve done some things that he is yet to do … which bugs him, in a good way 🙂 The presence of a free standing punching bag means that he practises as often as he wants and the encyclopedia and internet means he can access as much info as he requires to understand what he is doing.

4) We can train together not because I am a parent who can make him study and make him want to do better and be proud of himself, but because I am a fellow taekwon-do student with him.

I have helped him most by being living proof that practice leads to improvement, and that you can learn to do things over time that you couldn’t do at the beginning, that it’s okay to learn more slowly than other people, that there are many different components to being a martial artist, etc etc

I have also demonstrated (not deliberately !!) the various phases one goes through in learning something, especially the inevitable frustration with the Instructor. At some point where you can almost do something, but not quite, you often feel like the Instructor is just not telling you something for their own amusement … and then when finally everything clicks into place, you realise they had told you all you needed and you just weren’t doing it properly … d’oh!!!

This frustration phase of wanting to murder your Instructor is probably the best phase for a parent to model to their kids (again, not intentionally – you can’t fake it, because it is the real depth emotion that matters !!). How often have we seen our kids frustrated about something, and sat in the seat of parenthood, pontificating about “phases” and “listen to your teacher / parent” and “just do as they / I say and stop thinking you know everything”

It can be good for a child to see their own parent being humbled by something they can’t do, being frustrated by the Instructor, seeing both sides of the story (but Mum, you’re not doing it properly …)

It is very important for them to see the reaction (and it’s important that the reaction eventually be constructive !!) If they see their parent working hard enough to master something difficult (at least to a certain degree) and then feel a sense of pride in their parent because they know how hard their parents worked to learn something … it’s a great lesson all round.

Where does that leave me?

As parents, we want to ensure that our kids have an opportunity to try everything. We want them to be good at everything. We want them to learn as much as possible and so long as they are happy, so are we.

But mastering new things involves an inevitable phase of frustration when new ideas or new movements are still taking shape.

I contend that that phase has to happen for true mastery of something difficult.

Being tired and frustrated and not wanting to continue is an important phase of learning and when the new thing is learnt, there is an exhilaration of achievement that matches the level of effort that went into that phase. So if you don’t struggle to learn something, you don’t appreciate achievement in that domain in the same way. And you don’t “own” the knowledge.

And if you never learn how to deal with the frustration because you never have to take responsibility for it and someone always steps in and gets you over it, you will not be well-equipped to cope with adult life.

So this is a critical part of the learning process, and a critical part of the mental discipline side of a martial art.

Does that mean there is no place for written teaching material in teaching taekwon-do? I don’t think so. I think that all it means is that I’ve begun to understand the real problem with written material aimed at allowing the parents to “help” their kids.

Parents can help their kids best by watching them in the classes and listening to what their kids have been told and shown. If they don’t have time for that, they can help their kids research what they need to know, or have their kids explain what they remember. The kids need to know that they are learning things that their parents *don’t* know (how cool is that for some kids?!), and parents need to remember that the act of explaining things is an act of building that knowledge into their own picture of the world.

This has been written in response to one of the teenage students wanting my help to put together some stuff for the parents so they can help the younger kids practise. I’ve realised that the major learning here is for the student putting together the material (learning by having to think about how to teach) rather than in producing materials for the parents themselves. And at some level it is not helpful to the kids to have their parents helping them – taekwon-do expertise does not derive from age, but from belt-level – ie from the amount of training and learning in taekwon-do itself.

Our Instructor is trying to instil into the kids the ability to think for themselves, to ask questions, to find answers within themselves as well as around them and to be self-motivated in what they do. It is one of those wonderful paradoxes of parenting and teaching that you can’t *teach* self-motivation. You can only encourage it, and I contend that you can only encourage it by being passionate about what you do, and inspiring others by your passion.

I have had the privilege to have been inspired by an excellent and passionate Instructor who understands the essence of teaching and is a master of what he teaches at a time when I am trying to understand in an academic framework what is special about teaching and learning and what constitutes “best practice” in that area.

The research suggests quality in teaching and learning is about the teacher-student interaction and communication rather than about disembodied content but of course “quality audits” focus on what is easily measured and disembodied content (the “curriculum”) is easy to examine “objectively”. For me, the introspection as a student and trainee-teacher in the context of an expert Instructor teaching all ages and abilities has been invaluable.